Emma Dhesi is my guest this week to talk about Launch Pad: The Countdown to Writing Your Book. It’s a collaborative craft book between Emma Dhesi and Grace Sammon to help writers write their best book. Grace and Emma chose 11 other writers to write one chapter each to create this book plus a 10 Countdown PDF for writers to use to put into practice everything in each chapter. I was asked to write about Character Development and you can download here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/6bpe78uj52
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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:
Kat
Hello, Emma. How are you doing today?
Emma
Hello, my dear. I’m very well. It’s lovely to be here with you.
Kat
Yes, thanks for coming on again. In case anyone is new to the podcast, would you introduce yourself?
Emma
Yeah, sure. I’m Emma Dhesi. I am an author and a book coach, and I’m based in Edinburgh in the UK. In my own writing, I write domestic suspense and thriller. Then in my coaching, I work with debut novelist, with first time novelist, which is a real thrill and a joy to be part of. Yeah, that’s who I work with and what I do. You’ll find me most places hanging about.
Kat
Yes. We were talking about last names. You have a great last name and that no one else has that last name, as far as I know. So if you want to look up Emma Dhesi, you will find it. Sometimes though the spelling, as we were talking about before, sometimes there’s an H in it.
Emma
It’s definitely a tricky name for people to get. It’s D-H-E-S-I. And not many people have it. And in fact, in Scotland, we are the only ones. My family, we are unique.
Kat
Nice. It feels good to be unique. I thought that I was unique because in Wisconsin, I knew no other Caldwells. And then you get out into the real world and Facebook becomes a thing and you realize there are like a million. Maybe if I’d grown up in English. I think so. It sounds English, right?
Emma
It does.
Kat
Somewhere around there. So maybe they even put something together, but it’s not unique. So there’s even more Kats out there, Kat Caldwells, anyway.
Emma
Like you, I did a Facebook search and a Google search, and I’ve come across seven. So there’s at least seven of us.
Kat
Really? That’s interesting.
Emma
Okay. It must be related somehow as well.
Kat
Yeah. All right. Well, we’ll leave it aside, the family DNA. We’ll do that on another show. But as we’re recording this tomorrow, Launch Pad: the Countdown to Writing Your Book is coming out. I guess it will be out by the time this goes out. So I wanted to talk to you about this book Launch Pad: the Countdown to Writing Your Book. I’m going to just say Launch Pad from now on. Tell me a little bit about how this book came to be because it’s a really interesting and I think unique concept.
Emma
I think so too. Yeah, I do. So a mutual friend of ours, Grace Sammon, she came to me and said, I’ve got this idea for a trilogy of books, and I want you to be the lead author on the first one. So Launch Pad: the Countdown to Writing Your Book is the first in a trilogy. So then there will be Launch Pad: the Countdown to Publishing Your Book, which is going to be coming out soon. And then a few months after that will be Launch Pad: the Countdown to Publishing Your Book. So it really is a one-stop shop, really, for anyone who’s wanting to write, publish and market their book.
Kat
Which we all do. Very few of us want to stop at some point in that line.
Emma
I know. Once you get sucked in, that’s it. You’ve got to keep going through to the end. But the reason she wanted to put this together is, Grace is one of these amazing women. She has so many wonderful ideas. And not only does she have the ideas, but she makes them happen. And so Launch Pad is the name of one of her… she calls it a radio show. And it’s an opportunity for writers to come in and talk about and let people know about their, I don’t think it’s specifically debut novels, but their new novels coming out. And if I remember rightly, this came about because through COVID, so many things for authors, the opportunity to go and market their new books that were coming out, it was completely put a stop to because everything was shut, of course. And in fact, I’ve got a friend who’s only now, she published her book at the end of 2019, I think it was, and is only now doing her marketing tour. So it was just an opportunity for writers to come in and talk about their books and try and reach a new audience. And through the course of that and the conversations that Grace was having with her guests, she realized, Let’s take this, take what we’re learning here on this show and put it into a book so we can reach more people and help more people. So that’s when she reached out to me to do the writing one, and she reached out to a lady called Stephanie, who is the owner of Red Penguin Books, and a lady called Mary Helen Sheriff to do the marketing as well. So it’s been lovely working with all of these women. It’s been really great. But for me, two of the things that were the most interesting for me and why I thought this was really something special was this was going to be an anthology. And I had just finished reading an anthology on how to write called Swallowing the Whale. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful book. And the contributors come from many, many different backgrounds, whether it be novel writing, poetry, art, graphic novel, a whole mix. And one of the things that I really loved about that was that you got different people’s experiences, different people’s approach to writing, and how they explained things was different from one person to the next. And I really appreciated that. And of course, there are some that you resonate with a little bit more than you do others, but you’re getting a really rich, diverse approach and level of experience from all of these different writers who come together and share what they’ve got. So it was just serendipity that I just finished reading that book and it really seemed to me.
Kat
Were they writing about the same thing in Swallowing the Whale?
Emma
It was different topics, different areas. Some of it was more about the writing life, i. e. how do you tap into your creativity? Some of it was about how do you do the actual writing? Some of it was, which I love. I think you love too, Kat, the mindset stuff, the confidence issues.
Kat
Yes, that’s half of it.
Emma
Because it’s so important, isn’t it? Managing your mind is half the battle to finishing the book.
Kat
Oh, yes. And marketing.
Emma
Yes. So I really appreciated that. So that was serendipitous and just worked in perfectly. But the other thing that I really loved about what she said is I want this to be really actionable for our readers because as you and I know, it’s all very well to read a book and go, oh, that’s really interesting. Oh, yeah, I like what they’ve said there. But actually, you don’t take it in. You don’t absorb that knowledge fully until you put it into action.
Emma
And when you start implementing what you’ve been learning, that’s when you really get to make it a part of your body. You make it a part of your writing process, and it starts to become second nature to you. So you stop thinking about it, you just do it automatically. And so at the end of every chapter in this book, there is a top 10 countdown, keeping with that Launch Pad theme. There’s a top 10 countdown of things that each contributor of the chapter thinks are the most important that you need to and would recommend that you really put into action. Those are the things to do if you want to see progress in your writing, progress in your publishing, progress in your marketing. So for us, and I’m delighted as well because you very kindly agreed to be part of this project and have written a fabulous chapter on how to develop characters. We cover all sorts of things. And if someone reads your chapter and they do the things and go through the top 10 that you have recommended, they’ll make real leaps and bounds in how they think about their characters, create their characters and as you say in the chapter, that’s what keeps someone reading. It’s what that person is experiencing, feeling, going through how believable they are, how flawed they are. And that’s what really a reader is invested in. If they love that character. They’ll follow them anywhere.
Kat
Yeah, it’s true. That’s what we’re all trying to do, right? We want to create a world, too, a lot of genres, but the world can be great. And if you don’t like the character, you won’t continue watching, reading, whatever. But I really like this countdown idea because I don’t know about you, but I will read craft books and I’ll get really antsy about wanting to put into practice what I just read. I actually get annoyed when the craft books are like, don’t pick up the pencil yet. And you think, okay, I’m a writer and you’re telling me not to pick up the pencil yet. And I don’t particularly have time to finish a book in one sitting or even five sitting. It can take me quite a while to finish, especially a nonfiction book. So I’m just like, I want to pick up my pencil. I don’t understand why. So I love that there’s different themes for each and adding more suspense, there’s a chapter on that. And that’s really conflict, right? And making that cliff hanging feeling that you have to keep turning the page. Well, I want to learn more about that. I want to read this chapter and then put it into practice, okay, think about my characters or the book ideas I have and how can I really do these exercises so that when I sit down, maybe it’ll just flow, or maybe I’m just learning how to add more suspense. I cannot wait to read that chapter, pretty much every chapter in this book because I haven’t been able to read them yet either. Maybe by the time this goes out, I’ll have my copy. But I think that that is one of the key components to this book is those ten countdowns.
Emma
And I think that’s a brilliant point that you make that we don’t want to read the whole how to book before we start delving in. We want to be able to apply things straight away. And I think it’s in my introduction that I do say to people, read each chapter, read it again, do the countdown, and you can delve. And what I love about it, too, is you can delve in and out. So each of you listening knows what stage you’re at with your book and where you’re needing the most help with right at this moment in time. So you can go straight to that chapter and read what the contributor is saying, say about scene structure. I love scene structure. And it’s Joe Bunting from The Write Practice who has contributed that one.
Kat
He’s one of the best.
Emma
Yes. He really knows his stuff that way, doesn’t he? So I was thrilled when he said, yes, he’d be part of this. And that structuring your scene is so fundamental to that cause and effect trajectory path that you want to be leading your readers down. And when you understand how it works and how you can break a chapter down or a scene down into small bits that one naturally leads to the next to the next, which then the magic of it then naturally leads into the next scene. Not only will you have an ‘aha’ moment now, I see how I get to make sure my readers turn the page, but it makes your life so much easier you should hear.
Kat
Wow. I was just going to say, as the writer, you’re not like, Wait a minute. How do I get them there? And why are they not there yet? Because somehow, all right, we can have tons of ideas, vague ideas, and you sit down to write and you think, okay, I guess I don’t really… you can put a lot of words on the page that say, and not really know where you’re going. And scene structure is one of those things that you and I started writing at the same time and not in the States. So we didn’t have access to writing workshops that were local or community colleges or even, you weren’t in the UK. And so we were just stuck with whatever internet there was in 2010. And there wasn’t that much. I don’t know about you, but it felt very not close at hand. I couldn’t really grasp the hold of why I needed scene structure. I had a story in my head, and it was just a mental job just to get it on the page. But if I had been able to not pay $600 for a class that didn’t work with my timezone, maybe, or whatever it was, I think even at the time I talked to my husband about traveling to California, and he was like, That’s going to be $5,000 in the end for a class. If I had had this book where I could just at least grasp the concept as a new writer. And then even now, I consider myself not a new writer, but I’m going to be reading that chapter because it’s just putting it inside of us. And if I had just had a little grasp, I wouldn’t have gotten to 140,000 words and had an editor tell me to cut 50. That’s what I was trying to get to. As the new writer, there are different mistakes we make as we go along, or there’s more to learn as we go along. But that, especially if you’re new, that’s what I’m talking about, that you don’t overwrite, that your scenes really are concise and they’re moving to the next one that’s relevant, not just that’s beautiful in your head. And then even as one I’m working on, I’ve finished, it’s now in the drawer, the fifth one, and I’m working on the sixth one, I’m still thinking about what I’ve learned, and now I still want to learn more. How do I go into this scene? What needs to happen? Because I don’t know about you, sometimes I have the grasp of the scene, but I still have to think that question, what are they going to do and what happens next? That and so, or so what? What decision are they making? And it’s great to read 3,000 words and be like that’s right, okay, let’s go.
Emma
Yeah, because it simplifies. It’s like anything. It’s like we have story structure. It’s so that we have that skeleton to hang it on. And it just makes our life so much easier rather than scrambling around in the dark. And so when we have that, somebody once said to me, Oh, isn’t it a bit formulaic to have a structure for your scene? And I was like, I don’t know. I thought about it. Then I was like, no. I was thinking to myself later, it’s not formulaic, it’s the guidelines, it’s the rules, it’s the boundaries that we need to make us more creative. And it’s the boundaries that we need to know that we’re doing the right thing and we’re on the right path and we’re learning our craft in the right way.
Kat
Yeah. I think there’s rules to every art. And for some reason, writers think that they don’t need to learn their rules. But I think you need to know the rules in order to break the rules.
Emma
100%. And it can feel frustrating when you just want to go with whatever is in your head and just be creative and let it all hang loose. And you can do that, of course, but no one is going to want to read that. They want to read something they can follow and that makes sense to them. So that’s when we have to bring either start with the structure in the first place or we can bring it in in revision, which is off the mind.
Kat
Thank goodness. We have options.
Emma
We have options. But talking about doing planning ahead, in the book, we’ve also got the wonderful Lewis Jorstad, who has contributed a chapter on outlining. I know we’re both a big fan of Lewis, he’s fantastic. And he introduced all of us to a new phrase. So of course, we all know pantsers and we all know plotters. But he introduced us all to puzzlers. And maybe someone’s listening and there’s something that drops, a penny that drops and goes, ah, that’s what I am. I’m a puzzler.
Kat
I think we all raise our hands at that point. We’re like, Wait a minute, I’m not a pantser or a plotter. So when Lewis said, what is a puzzler? We were all like, what is this? Tell us, what did he say a puzzler is?
Emma
So a puzzler is somebody who they have… they don’t write linearly. So I write, I don’t know about you, Kat, I write very linearly. I don’t plan it ahead, the discovery writing, and I started at the beginning, and I worked my way through. But a lot of people, more than we thought, it seems, certainly in the meeting we had the other week, most people were puzzlers whereby you have a very, very strong image in your head, a very, very clear picture of a scene or a moment in your story, and you get to writing it and you get it all down. And then you have another very clear image or idea for another moment in the book, and you get taken away in the moment and you write it down. And then there’s another one, a third one. Now, all of these scenes, they’re all taking place at different parts in the book and the storyline. They might be one scene from the second act, then one scene from the third act, and then one scene from the first act. And that is how the book for puzzlers comes together by piecing all those jigsaw piece puzzles together little bit by little bit until eventually you get the whole picture. And when we were doing a call the other week, and it turned out that the majority of people on that call considered themselves a puzzler.
Kat
You might be the only suspense author that’s not a puzzler, honestly. We’ll have to poll people. It makes sense, though, right? Especially if you’re busy. This makes sense on so many different levels. If you have an idea for a scene, you’re going to want to write it out because you’re a writer. You need to get it out. So I can see why. And when he said that, I have suggested this to some people when they’re stuck in one spot to actually… And they say, I know where they need to go to be at the climax. And I have told writers, write out the climax, because then maybe you’ll see, maybe they’re not that far away, or maybe you’re going in the wrong direction. You’ve just written scenes that are out. And last year, when I had to toss my manuscript, I actually took my own advice, which is funny enough, many times we don’t take our own advice. We claim it’s for the but not for me. So I took my own advice and wrote the the climax, and it didn’t end up being the same. But I did realize there were certain things that I was stuck on because I had written the scene. And then I thought, well, it just doesn’t go. He doesn’t really need to do this anymore because what he needs to do is this, this, this, and this. So it did help. And then I went back to linear. I was like, I need to bring him through because I like holding the hands of the character. But I think it’s a great thing to have another name for people that they don’t feel like they have to be plotters or discovery, writers.
Emma
Yeah. And I think just back off the back of what you’ve just said there about your own experience, I think that’s wonderful for people to hear so that they realize there is no formula way of doing this. There’s no one set way. Even when you find your process, you might take two, three, four books for you to really understand your own process. And you most of the time you write in the way that your process has evolved. But there are times when there’s exceptions. And just like you, I’ve had that moment when one of my books, I got to the halfway point, and then I had no idea what happened next. I couldn’t figure out how am I going to get to the end of the second half. So very similarly to you, I went to the end and I wrote the end, but then I just wrote backwards and joined it up in the middle. I don’t know why, but for that particular story, that was the method that worked best in that. So nothing is absolutely set in stone. And that’s why it’s great to know about how other people write and ideas might come to you when you’re feeling stuck. And then you can go, oh, yeah. I remember Kat said that she’d go to the climax and write that, and that can unlock a lot of the steps in between. I think it’s important for people to know that you find your own process, but within that process, because you’re an artist, there will be variations within that as well.
Kat
Yeah. There’s so many things, like going back to scene structure or outline. Lewis is awesome about outlining, and I’ve read his books. They’re really great. And I’m trying to be more of a putting my ideas down. I’m not sure you can call them outlines, but still. I’m not very conscientious. If you read my chapter on characters, I go into the personality, so I’m not very conscientious, I’m very disorganized. My world, I know where everything is. I’m one of those people. I know where it is, but no one else knows where it is. It doesn’t make sense to anyone else. So that’s low consciousness. I’m not very organized.
Emma
Let’s talk about that because your chapter is great. A few of us commented on how you brought a new perspective into that and a new way of looking at your character development and how you, even at the very beginning, how you approach who this person is going to be.
Kat
Well, and you know that all came out of that book I was trying to write last year, which I’m pretty sure I will be calling Bended Loyalty. But as anyone’s listening to the podcast, it’s changed like five times. So we’ll see. But it was trying to find that character because I had taken him out of another book, which I was going to write a pretty straightforward romance, her, his perspective, and decided he needed a whole book and thought that would be easy. So let’s just get that out of the way it’s not easy. How much we fool ourselves. And realizing at one point that he had no personality, and that’s a killer. No one’s going to read a book with… I started seeing him as very victimish and whiny, and that’s like, no good. So throw it out.
Emma
We don’t want to read that.
Kat
Nobody wants to read that.
Emma
No, they don’t. But how intuitive of you to notice that. Because it’s hard to… the characters that we create, it’s hard for us to be objective about them and admit that if they’re not working, or something’s got to change or we scrap them. So I think it’s credit to you that you are professional enough to say, I don’t feel this is working. I feel I need to change things up.
Kat
Well, I feel it’s been enough books that he’s looking at me. Him as a person hasn’t changed in my head. But he’s like, just come on, you make me a little bit more. And I think that goes, I mean, I really struggled with the needs and the wants and the desires last year of getting that right with him because creating a male character who doesn’t understand himself and is a bit lost and needs to learn to make full decisions for himself, I found really difficult because of not making him tip into the victimhood whiny person. And I definitely don’t want readers to be like, Oh, gosh. I don’t want that. For some reason, I think we’re still with the sexes. We have less patience for that in a male character. We want to have these inward expectations of what they should be doing.
Emma
Yeah. And we want them to have agency, don’t we? Even if they can be whiny and they can be, but they’ve got to be doing something about it. Even if it’s to act in a victim way. Just amplify it.
Kat
Yeah. And so I think taking those, which we know our characters should have a want, they should have a goal in which the plot interrupts, they should have a desire, they should have a moral need. They’re not within their own world and their own moral structure. They’re not quite hitting the mark there. Otherwise, there’s no story. We’re all living our lives. Our characters live on in our heads a lot of times, but we’re only writing the story about one particular event in their life. A memoir is not a biography. A memoir is about a particular point. That’s why they’re a little more fun to read. Biographies are only for famous people because the rest of us are like, And I made breakfast again. So I looked into personalities because I love personalities. It helped me understand myself and my husband because we are opposites. And I thought, okay, here’s the problem. He’s this and this and this personality, and therefore he would only make this decision. What he wants is this father figure in his life. So what is he going to choose then? He’s going to think he has agency.
Emma
Is this your husband or your character?
Kat
My character. He’s like, What? My husband. But my character, he thinks he’s making decisions, but what he’s really doing is accommodating everyone else by like, he’s a people pleaser. And he doesn’t know it, but I know that because I did personality test for him and made sure that he would make the correct decisions and then made sure that he would grow that way. And so I wanted to write the chapter to give another tool to writers because there is a little bit more sometimes to creating that personality because you’re creating them out of thin air. It’s just a person that doesn’t exist and they have to be a certain way. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve read a couple of books and my mother, especially ever since she retired, she reads a lot and she’ll come to me and be like, why did this author do this? And why did this author do that? And she came to me quite a few times and I’m like, The characters didn’t make the decisions they would have made. And so she was very adamant about it. And so I looked into these books and I am convinced now that what happened is the author didn’t really look into how human personality is and how we might become more balanced in our personality, no longer freak out at our kid coming home five minutes later, whatever it is, and we’ll be more balanced about things. But really, we don’t change that much. We just become more balanced. And so when we’re talking about change, we’ll have our characters just have a 180 degree change on us, and it just doesn’t feel right. And the reader doesn’t know why because they’re not a geek like me and study mythology and human anthropology. But you get it. I’m sure you’ve read a book where you’re just like, I just don’t think they would do that. I don’t see why they would. It’s not satisfying. And it’s that feeling. But I want to give writers the ability to do the best of their ability because even I don’t do it 100% of the time, perfectly, right. But to the best of our ability, not have the reader leave unsatisfied. We want a satisfied reader.
Emma
Yeah. It’s such a strange choice of words, isn’t it? Satisfied. We do use the jargons used, but your reader is satisfied. It makes it sound so unexciting.
Kat
Doesn’t it? Well, David Gawker makes it exciting. It’s like they shut the book and they light their cigarette as though it’s like a post-orgasm.
Emma
That’s much better. That’s much better.
Kat
It’s a nicer view. But yeah, you don’t want them shutting the book halfway through because the person did something else. So this book of the Launch Pad: the Countdown to Writing Your Book is really trying to help the writer write the book or edit the book, I guess. I’ll be using it for editing as well. So that the reader leaves satisfied, right? That’s really the whole point that we’re trying to help people with.
Emma
Yeah. So you find the way to best put the story on the page. So what do I mean when I say that? I mean that often as writers, we have this vision in our head, we picture it in our mind, and we have that curse of knowledge. We know it so, so well that we forget that the person reading the book doesn’t know what’s going on in our brain, and we tend to skim over things. And I see this time and again, especially with scenes that are difficult, that we speed through them. And then actual fact, the bit that’s missing is the bit that we want to read. That’s where all the juicy stuff happens, that difficult conversation or that moment of doubt that your character has. And then that’s where they get to think through the change that they are going to be making over the course of the novel. And we see that that happen on the page, not just that one day they do something different. And as you were saying, Kat, then we go, huh, wait a minute, why have they done that? But rather that we see that slowly evolve over the course of the story. And one of the ways that we’re helping people do that is with the chapter of Show and Tell by the amazing Heather Davis. I just love this was just eyeopening for me in so many ways. We all hear that phrase, Show, Don’t Tell, and we have it drilled into us. We’ve seen it everywhere. There’s memes everywhere, but none of us actually know what it means. And we’re hazarding a guess. And we think, well, what does… if I’m showing, then I’m showing the entire room that this person is in, every detail of the room. But actually, what Heather helps us realize is that we do get to show key moments, key things that are in that room, but we also need to tell the reader what’s going on and predominantly tell them what’s happening inside your character. So the show element of it is the external stuff of what’s going on in the outside world, but the telling element of it is what is the internal dialog going in within your character’s head? And that’s what we put on the page. We tell our reader what the character is thinking so that the reader can keep up with the thought process. Why are they making the decisions that they’re making? What’s running through their head to make them decide this is the action I’m going to take next. And that is something I see again and again and again in new writers. And I hold my hand up here that this absolutely, definitely me in those early days. When I work with my coach and she reads my pages, she says to me, you haven’t put it on the page Emma, you’ve got to put it on the page. So it’s something that we still do even further down the line, even when we’ve got more experience, we’ve got to be vigilant for that. And Heather gives us some great ways of doing that for ourselves, of catching ourselves not putting it on the page.
Kat
Right. I mean, it’s one of those catchphrases that we hear a lot. And then we have to scramble to figure out what everyone else is talking about, especially as new writers, like, I feel like I should know this. And the truth is, nobody knows what they’re talking about. Because Heather is not the first person I’ve heard frustrated with this and saying, actually, you do have to tell. And if you pick up a book that’s well written that you love, there’s telling in it because it’s impossible for a reader to just intuitively know everything. And a lot of times what we’ll do is show what everyone’s doing. But I was talking to EditElle, and she was… I say EditElle because that’s what her Instagram handle is, I’m sorry. But she was talking about, then she gets a lot of new writers, especially, but even seasoned writers, telling what the body language and movement of the person is. But that can mean different things, too. Eyes widening can be in surprise, it can be in fear. A grimace or a half smile could be mocking, it could be pain. Now you’re getting into this weird thing where you’re trying to show, but the reader could be receiving that information in such a different way. And so there are times in which you do have to tell the reader what these movements or things mean to the character. So yeah, we can go way off balance on that, right? I won’t tell anything. It’s like, well, then nobody understands what your book is about, or only tell and not show. So it’s all about balance, isn’t it?
Emma
Yeah, totally. All about balance. You need both in order to paint that full picture for your reader. Yeah, I think that’s beautifully put. I’m thinking about a manuscript that I’ve been looking at recently and some lovely description in there, but it’s all description. And so I don’t know what the character is thinking, why they’re doing… yeah, the author needs to tell me, or the character needs to tell me, why they’re going to go and throw someone out the house, or why they’re going to lock the door, or what makes them think that action will help them and get them where they want to be in that scene.
Kat
Yeah. And I think it goes back to what we said in the beginning, we need to understand the rules. We need to understand what this means. And really, who was the Russian writer that we all claim said this? He didn’t actually say it, Chekhov. I’d be like, It’s a Ch. But he didn’t say that. What he said is, don’t tell me the moon is beaming. Show me that it’s glinting off of the piece of broken glass. So he didn’t even make this hard, fast rule that we’ve made into a hard, fast rule. We’ve just taken it so far. But again, we need to know the rules if you want to break the rules. We need to understand them. I wish we would stop talking in jargon. And I think that this book, Launch Pad: the Countdown to Writing Your Book, is really going to help break down that jargon so that new and seasoned writers can be like, That’s what everyone means. Okay, I’m just going to do it. And just be empowered to write the best book that they can.
Emma
And we have been very careful in the book where we have used terminology that is specific to the writing world that, especially if it’s been used in a shortened way like POV or WIP. We have been very careful to make sure that we’re telling people what those phrases mean, so that if you are new to them, it’s one you’ve not come across before, then now you will. You’ll have that. You’ll be part of the jargon, too. You’ll be able to use it comfortably.
Kat
You won’t have to go Google it. Because I think sometimes we do forget there are new people, but there are also people outside of America or the UK. We might have our own English jargon, and there’s people all the time coming into this business from different languages and different countries. And I had to look up WIP at one point in my writing career. I remember specifically being like, what?
Emma
And it took me a long time. It’s funny you talk about jargon. I do remember there being a time where I kept… I’m just trying to think of one that there would have been now. I’m thinking about James Scott Bell, who I love. I love his writing. He would talk about these doorways. And I said, oh gosh, okay, what are the… I’ve not come across that before. What are doorways? Is this something I should know? It took me a long time to realize that he was talking about the break between Act 1 and 2 and then between 2 and 3. Other people just call them act breaks.
Kat
He had to call them doorways.
Emma
A lot of writers come out with their own jargon, which I know from experience can be confusing when you’re brand new to this. So we do not do that in the book. We use very standard phrases that you will find just about everywhere, and we do definitely make sure that we explain what they are and write them out in full so people know. But, Kat, I want to just jump back. So you said you started the next manuscript?
Kat
Yes, because it’s a duology, so I’m bringing it out at the same time. So it has to be finished.
Emma
You are on fire right now. It was worth all that work you put in last year.
Kat
It was because now he appears in the next book, so he better have a personality. He’s got to woo the girl. Yeah, it was completely worth it. Completely worth it. I wish that this book had been out, the Launch Pad book had been out, but I’m still in editing, so I can still use it. But actually working with him did force me to really look into characters. And so I am grateful for all the trouble my character put me through.
Emma
You won’t forget him in a hurry. All the agony. I was just going to say, another chapter I do want to make sure that we mention is Stacey’s chapter. Stacey’s chapter on grammar and punctuation. Now, for some of you listening, this will be easy for you. It will be something that you get, you understand, makes logical sense to you. And you might not need this chapter, although I still think it’s worth looking at. But there are other people like me, putting my hand up, for whom this is not natural, for whom this is not run of the mill, and we miss things and forget as well. We might do punctuation and grammar one way in one chapter, and then we forget that we’ve adopted that style in the next and do it differently. Stacey’s chapter is… She’s such a wonderful teacher. She has made what could be a very dry topic, not dry. She’s explained things in really simple, easy ways. She does this with everything that she does, Stacey, gives fantastic examples and highlights very clearly what you put where and why you put it there. I’ve been cheating and using this chapter a lot, even before it’s been published.
Kat
I can’t wait for this chapter. I’ll probably print it out.
Emma
And using it a lot. And it was one of the chapters I was very adamant about having in because it is something that I do find tricky and I do… I’d rather get it right first time when I’m drafting, if I can, then then have to go through a whole manuscript and make those teeny tiny changes through the whole thing, which is so tedious. So if I can learn to get these things right and just take two seconds to go and look at Stacey’s chapter, know what I need to do, and then come back and put it in my draft as I’m going through it, as I’m writing it, that just makes my life so much easier. And I don’t think the other books have these things. I don’t remember ever seeing a craft book that included this. Yet, there are whole books on style guides and punctuation and things, but I don’t want to look through a whole book.
Kat
Who wants to read that?
Emma
Exactly. So this is just for writers. This is what we writers need to put for our books. And then done. We just need one chapter.
Kat
I love how judgmental she is. Is that a word? She’s not judgmental at all, Stacey. She knows this, like the back of her hand. She knows grammar, she understands it. And yet she completely understands it. It’s almost a misnomer to call us writers, we’re storytellers. We’re not Grammarians. And I swear grammar has changed since they taught it to me in fifth grade because I put commas where everyone says I shouldn’t. I specifically remember a teacher telling me every time you take a breath, well, that’s all the time. At first I had commas everywhere. There are specific rules, and it really does make it so much easier to do it from the beginning. And it’s nicer to not get that much red back on your manuscript because it’s hard to do this. It’s hard to get your manuscript out to the editor and have it back. And just like, do I know anything? As you said, our mindset. So just knowing specific rules and having a guideline for them, it’s empowering and it feels good to get the comma where it should.
Emma
Yay. And she’s highlighted the 10 most common mistakes that she sees. And you mentioned mindset again there. So just by having the 10 most common and that she can identify those tells me that other people are making these errors as well. I’m not alone. So that helps my mindset as well. It helps my confidence keep going.
Kat
Absolutely. This book has everything. It’s upping our confidence. So where can people find Launch Pad: the Countdown to Writing your Book?
Emma
So you can find it in all the usual places. It’s Barnes & Noble, Amazon. Where else is it? Cobo, Apple. It’s in wherever you buy your books, you will find it. It is out wide.
Kat
For everybody. And is it ebook and print?
Emma
It is ebook and print, yes.
Kat
Okay. And the countdown, is that a whole separate workbook or is it within the book? Do they have to buy two different things?
Emma
No, the countdowns… I’m so glad you mentioned this, Kat. So if anybody wants to get a feel for the book and one of the countdowns, you can download Kat’s Top Ten Countdown for free and we’ll put the link. I can’t remember off the top of my head, we put the link in for that?
Kat
Yeah, we’ll put the link in the show notes, absolutely.
Emma
That will give you a flavor for what you will be learning. And then if you buy the book at the back, there is a special link and it will take you to a special resources place. There’s some bonus downloads, which does include downloadable top tens so that you can print them out and put them wherever you need them to be handy. But there’s also some more details about all of the contributors. There’s also a resources page where you can find out more on any particular topic that you’re interested in, including things like podcasts, blog posts, YouTube channels, all kinds of places that are going to help you take things to the next level if you need it. Awesome. So you can get those bonuses as a special code in the book there for that. But it’s a wonderful resource. I’m so proud of it. I’m so delighted to have been participating in it and being able to work with all these amazing writers. And I genuinely believe we have a phenomenal resource for not just new writers, but maybe writers too, who are just looking to jump start their writing again and just need to get their mojo back. This book will help you do that.
Kat
Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, Emma, for coming and talking to us about Launch Pad, the countdown to writing your book. It’s always great to see you.
Emma
Yes, and you, thank you.