Some things get sacrificed when you’re writing a book. That’s because 1) there are only 24 hours in a day; and 2) those of us who are unproven are doing this on the side.

I read Be the Gateway: A Practical Guide to Sharing Your Creative Work and Engaging an Audience, by Dan Blank. Dan has a ton of experience working with indie authors on how to communicate and share and eventually sell their work. He takes a differentiated, human-centered approach that resonates with me.

Writing a first draft for the second time, I find it’s like building a skeleton. Laying down the bones. The bones are the scenes and basically what the world looks like and generally how people are feeling and probably what they would say in certain situations.

I believe that the sustainability movement, including ESG and impact investing, is symptomatic of humanity having entered or at least striving to enter its third major phase of development.

We learn the most about the characters through actions, through behavior, and through dialogue—the building blocks of immediacy, of scenes.

Sometime during my first draft of Lucid, I asked a friend who was a screenwriter for advice. It was an open-ended question, and his response was related to dialogue. He said something to the effect of, Have your characters talk the way people actually do.

Readers usually notice a lack of restraint or discipline with POV—that is, they notice arbitrary deviations from it. Sometimes they notice it consciously. Sometimes it’s just a feeling that sours them for reasons they can’t quite define. Stein writes: “It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.”

The biggest mistake I made with Lucid, my first novel, wasn’t really a mistake.  It was a function of where I was in the process of becoming a writer: the very, very beginning.  But it cost me time and might serve as a learning experience for others.  What I did was start writing before knowing enough about my characters, plot, world. 

My advice to any self-publishing author who dreams of reaching more than their friends and family: you must absolutely, unequivocally hire an editor.  It’s not even a question. It’s not cheap, but your editor will add significant value to your manuscript, and you will learn a lot, if you conduct a robust search process.

Creativity requires space.  A busy mind can accomplish many tasks, but it will struggle to generate new ideas.  The best ones come from our subconscious and unconscious minds.  And the only way to access this material is to quiet the conscious mind.  Said differently, the key to creation is to not think.

I read an article or something about the editing process sometime during my first or second draft. Maybe it was a chapter from Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway. It said be prepared to edit your book a number of times, probably a dozen or more. It said you have to rewrite and then rewrite again. I thought, sure, a lot of people probably have to do that but not me.