Ken Stubert: Our Writers' Contest-Win $500-Along with Hearing his Journey

Join me as we talk to the San Gabriel Writers' League President. Ken Stubert will share his writing journey and belief in the power of voice.  We also want to invite you to enter our writing contest starting this month. Check us out below:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0DW4KTP33?ref_=ast_author_cabib&ccs_id=856a7333-2fbe-4da6-b783-5a3dbe62aa7e

Transcript

Lisa 0:01

Hello and welcome to the How to Write a book from A to Z podcast. Today we have another writer joining us. He currently has three books available on Amazon at KF Stubert, S-T-U-B-E-R-T. Ken has a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and a minor in oral communication. He is also a proud Navy veteran. He also holds the esteem position of President of the San Gabriel Writers' League. We encourage you to join, coming up is our writing contest where the winner will win$500. So be sure to check us out on the San Gabriel Writers' League website and learn more about Ken and our writing contest.

Analogue 1 + 2 (Focusrite USB Audio)-4 1:06

hi Ken. Thank you for joining us today. Where or why did you start to write. I guess it goes back to school. I always liked to write and when it came time for essay questions, I was on it. I would eat those up, and all the other kids groan. So I enjoyed writing and someday I said, I'm gonna write a book. Well, that someday was a long time from high school to I finally wrote one, it's something that I've always enjoyed and people said I was pretty good at it. I wrote professionally, I did mostly textbooks and advertising, Manuals that kind of thing. Nothing somebody would pick up and read. It was a career that keeps you from writing when you're young, I think. And so much other things going on. It wasn't until I retired, I got serious about it and started to write and, and it's been fun. It sounds like it was a bucket list item for you. Yeah, for like 40 years. It's interesting, all those years you kept it in the back of your mind. I had the opening sentence for the book and I thought I knew where it was gonna end, but I didn't have anything in between. But that opening sentence was just stuck in my mind for decades. In September or so of 2019 is when I finally decided I'm gonna write it. I finished it March of 2020. The book was called Triangulation, correct? Correct. Correct. Triangulation? Yes. And it started with what you wanted it to? It started the way I wanted it to. Yeah. I finally put that sentence into print. So, did you play with the structure all those years or once you decided to do it, did it all kind of come together? Good. Good question. I did, when I started the book, I had a beginning and I thought I had the ending, but as I wrote the book, it deviated 180 degrees. I write and I'm what's called a pantser someone that writes by the seat of their pants. I let the story and the characters kind of dictate the path that the book's going to take. And it was quite different than what I first started or had in my mind. So you had a special agent, Peter Hunt? Did you use him in all of your books? Yes, yes. He's in all, all three books, but it's not a series. All three books are different storylines, but the same main characters. How did you come up with your main characters? I, I like James. A lot of people do. I wanted a simple name, and Peter Hunt was simple. I have a, friend that kind of looked the part, and his first name was Peter. So I said, I got the first name and a nice short little last name. It's easy to type and I wanted something simple. That's Peter Hunt. Did you create Peter, the character, his personality, his physical appearance, did you already know what that was going to look like before you started? He's the only character that I had a picture in my mind of what I wanted him to be like. All the others were, came up as a story developed. Tell us about Special Agent Hunt. I'm trying to think of the term, somebody that you would not feel would be notable. He would fit into a crowd. He would wear a blue blazer with khaki pants and a white shirt. He wasn't outstanding in any particular physical way. He's not a superhero. He has one thing that separates him from most of his peers and he is a special agent for the FBI. He can see the solution to a problem before most people understand the problem. So he's usually a step or two ahead of everybody else. That's his outstanding trait and his ability. Other than that, he's a nobody. So he doesn't like his, his martini shaken, not stirred? No, just a guy that you would pass on the street and wouldn't look at him twice. Interesting. All right. So it's realistic fiction. Mm-hmm. Correct? Correct. Did you create a storyboard? I mean, I know you said you pants but how much of the story did you create beforehand? None. None? None. None. No chapter by chapter. Sometimes go back a chapter or two to fix something because it didn't work in the succeeding chapters. But no, no storyboards, none just as the story went, that's where it took the characters. So you were just trusting your gut.. I, as I got along, I kind of wondered how it was gonna end because I really didn't have any idea. So I think that's fascinating because you hear so often of people strategizing and I mean doing all of this work beforehand, and then you have people like you who just organically it fits. I think that's the way it works in real life. You might have an idea where it wants to go, but life and the story and the circumstances, the people, what happen, all the other stuff that goes around, you might get to the same place, but it might not be in the same direction that you had thought it would take. So. Boy, and that's the way my stories stories go, that's very true. So tell us about the travel piece, where did all of the travel come from in your books? They're all places that, that my wife and I have been to, or I've been to, I try to make them part of the story. They're, they're places that visited. In the case of Triangulation, a lot of it takes place in The Bahamas. My wife and I spent a lot of time in The Bahamas and lived there for months on end. I know the lay of the land, I know the people. I tried to bring that into the book, the way the people talk, the way they act, the places that I take them to. That holds true for my other, other places, other books as well. There are always places that we visited and I try to bring those places into the story and give people a little bit of an idea of places, their culture, and try to weave that into the story. That's a great way to do it, using your life experiences. Yeah. One, one example we were in Turkey and there's a backstory, I like backstories. I think it brings interest in, it was about how do you make Turkish coffee and the ritual that goes behind it. That was fun researching. when we went back to Turkey, I was able to walk up to the counter and order a Turkish coffee for my wife and I in Turkish. That made the full circle from visiting at one time, then learning about the culture a little bit more, and then applying that culture in a second visit. It makes it so much more personal too, because that's kind of a intimate thing that everybody can relate to. Tell us about resources. Are there any resources that you found that really helped you, that might help fellow writers? Honestly, no. And I'm gonna qualify that'cause I think it's a mistake that I see a lot of writers doing. They try to research how to write, how books should be structured. You gotta do this, that, and the other, and you gotta be in this order and you can't do this and you can't do that. And you can go on the internet and find a hundred different ways of do doing things. The best piece of advice I ever got was from a retired English professor and he edited two of my books. Write the story the way you want it. If you like it, other people are gonna like it. And I took, took that to heart. Now you want to do some editing and you might have a set of eyes on it looking for errors and so forth. But write the story. I know of probably half a dozen people off the top of my head that are trying to write a story, but they keep researching, I gotta do this, I gotta do this. I'm reading this, I attended this lecture. I heard what this person said, and they're not writing. If you don't write it, you're never gonna do anything with it. So my advice to people is write the book, write the story. Then you can work on the editing and finding an agent and all that other garbage that goes with it. But you have to write. I think that's fabulous advice because when you write your own journey. Like mine, a healing journey. It's almost like I don't need to publish it anymore. It was more like something I needed to do for myself. I got wrapped up in, what do I do now? Yeah. You're right, it is a healing process you go through, but consider this, Lisa, the healing that people go through can be transferred to other people through a writer's feelings. And if you put your feelings into it and emotions into it, somebody else is probably experiencing the same thing in their lives, maybe in a different way, but the same, the same feelings that they're having carry over. And if you've got healing from it, other people would benefit from that healing. What you don't wanna do is lose your voice. Your voice in your book and your story and in your life is what's most important. So don't listen to people who say, oh, you gotta take this out. You gotta change that. You you have 10 people, you'll get 15 different ways of doing it. Yes, but use your own voice. Say it in your own voice. I appreciate that because I do feel like what I say and how I say it is me. Exactly. That's kind of what I like about it, is that I'm honest. Yeah, that's a good point. You can who you want to edit it for spelling and grammar. And punctuation and things like that, but you don't want lose your voice and your story out of that. It's easy for people to mutter the book, no question about it. Let me ask, how other people may have helped you. I had my very first book triangulation. I sent it out to two different people to edit it, and I made a big mistake in thinking that they edited well. Frankly, they didn't do a very good job, and I ended up publishing the first edition with a lot of mistakes in it because I just took them at their word that they had done it and, mm-hmm. Good. Were ready to go. So obviously I'm not using those people anymore. My other, my other books, I sent it out to this friend of mine for editing. That was it. Everything else I did myself and in internally. No critique groups, no first reads or anything like that. It's, it's my book cover to cover, literally designed to covers and everything in between except for the title of my last book, which my wife had to come up with'cause I could not think of a title. And what is the title? Icy Depths. But other than that I don't use a professional editor or anything like that. So when did you know that it was done? Oh, the story told me, from start to finish. The storyline was automatic. I'll use Icy Depths as an example of my last book. I read it through at least 12 times for edits, personal edits and changes. You reach a point. Least I do reach a point where it says, okay, I'm done. If there's something else wrong with it, so be it. I've done the very, very best job I can do, and I'm done. I'm done with it. In a case of triangulation, I did go down and make a second printing of it with some changes, but it didn't change the storyline. Some of the, the wording could have been a little bit better or something could have been explained a little bit better or things like that. So there were minor changes, but changes that made me feel more comfortable. I think any author could go back over his, his or her work and say, well, I could have changed this, or maybe I should say this, or maybe I should say it that way. I think it was Victor Hugo. He changed the last paragraph of one of his long books 19 different times. That's just part of the evolution. I think you reached the point where you say, I feel good about it. I'm done. Just like you, your story, you said you feel you've said what you wanted to say. Then start your edits for punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, get it out there, get it published. Yeah, I don't like all that stuff. I do, well, I do use grammar. Here's the way I end it. I'll go through the book two or three times myself, reading it through, reading it through for content, reading it through for punctuation and reading it through for maybe a couple other things. And I'll use Microsoft Word and spell check and I'll run it through Grammarly Pro. It's gonna reveal all those other things. You run it through all of that then you got a book that's pretty well clean and pretty well edited by a professional editor that's not human. After that, I'll read it through maybe two more times before I go into kindle Direct and publish it. Have you used AI at all? No. I touched it, doing some research and found out if you did that and put that into a book, it would be terrible. It's not your voice. I think you just hit the nail on the head. It's the voice piece, right? Just like you mentioned earlier, don't let anybody take your voice out of it. And that's exactly what AI would do right now. It's okay if you want to use it for, for research and the way it compacts things, that's okay. Great. So you have a third book too. The one in the middle is called Layer of Lies. Tell us about that. Well, that's a book that takes place in Turkey. It takes place in New England, also New Hampshire, mainly up in New England area, and also goes to Switzerland and some of the other countries. As of the three books, that's actually my favorite in the book because of the background of Turkey, the information and the main characters. My favorite character, his name is Irving Pickleman. And Irving Pickleman is a perfectly proportioned, miniature human being. He stands about four foot six. He's had numerous physical problems and health problems because of his size and growth. He's also pigeon toed. So he's he's kind of an interesting character. You could call him a protagonist, but he is not quite at that point. He's kind of, sorrowful figure, let me put it that way, he also happened to be Jewish. Interesting. Now, how in the world did you create Irving? I have no idea. That's quite a character I, I. I, I really, I really don't, don't know. It's just he, he just, he just kind of evolved. I thought of this little sad sack kind of character. Mm-hmm. I needed, needed him to be, and it just started to flow together. You know, one thing led to another. I said, gee, if he's this, he's that. You know, he has this ailment, he has this ailment, this happened to him when he was 12 years old. And built the character isn't that fun? Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is fun. No restraints, no restrictions. You just that, that'll work. That sounds good. I'll put it in there. That's the beauty of what you are doing, Ken, you can see that you're writing, you're doing it for the joy. yeah, absolutely. And that's what people need to understand. That's where great stories come from is you do it because you love it. Mm-hmm. Right, right. Well said. And I think that might be the difference between people like me who just needed to write their story and those who truly want to write. I think it just dawned on me why I am struggling, because I didn't ever wanna really write. Mm-hmm. I just felt like I needed to get my story out. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Whereas for you, you're like, I know one day I really wanna write, and it came naturally to you. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think very few people when they start writing to heal, recognize sometimes that's the difference between the two and you don't have to feel like you need to publish it. Right, right, right. Just be happy it gave me what I needed. Yeah. But remember, today you've got the ability to publish a book. Not necessarily for the masses, take your written word, put it between covers and have an heirloom or a legacy that you can pass along to a brother or a sister or family members. If you wrote that, it doesn't cost you anything to do it in KDP, the price is very, very minimal. If you print six copies of it and give it to people that's fine. Everyone needs to tell their story because we lose our ancestry because we don't remember anything. Exactly. You know, instead of, instead of writing it in the family Bible like people used to do, and your story's gonna be expanded anyway. Print five or six copies. Or print it as you need to. KDP doesn't cost, it's a very minimal, it doesn't cost you anything and that's Amazon, correct? That's Amazon, yep. Yep. They'll assign you an IBSN serial number on the book. They can design a cover for you and do a proof check also. You get a chance to look at the book in its completed form before they print it. You get an office copy to look at, make any changes you want. You don't even have to put it up for sale if you don't want to. Or you put an extravagant price on it and nobody's gonna buy it. Right. When somebody buys the book, you'll get a couple authors copies that costs you maybe four or$5. Wow. Plus shipping for, for the author's copy for you, for you to kind of proofread before you publish it. Hmm. That's it. Fascinating. Yeah. You can easily print, small quantities. We've come a long way, baby. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's something like 80,000 books a day are being printed on Amazon. Wow. yep. Different World. That's revolutionized the publishing industry and you see more and more published writers, people that do this for a living are also publishing their books on Amazon. They make more money than they do through traditional publishing, or in hybrid publishing you have to pay for. I know the exact reason is because then you have to do the marketing. You have to do the legwork, right? Yes. If you're a professional writer you might have a publicist and things like that to help sell the books. That's true. But every book you sell on Amazon, you have to sell, oh, let me see. You make an average, let's say you make$4 on a book from Amazon. You have to sell almost a hundred books to a traditional publishing company to make up for that, for that one book that you sold on Amazon. Oh my gosh. Wow. Wow. That's amazing. Well, is there anything else that you would like to share with our audience about writing or about yourself? I just encourage people to write, as you said, everyone's got a story to tell and it's a good experience. It's work. Yes. You won't feel like you've wasted your time. That's a good way to put it. So how can people buy your books? Through Amazon. If you Google KF Stubert, S-T-U-B-E-R-T, all three books that come up there and available for sale. I said get in a couple days out Texas. Fantastic. Is there anything you'd like to mention about the San Gabriel Writers League to our audience? Yeah, San Gabriel Writers League is 37 years old now which is a long time for that kind of organization. And I will say this, I wrote my first book in 2019 before I joined a league. I joined the league in 2021. And my writing knowledge went from virtually nothing to hundred fold. Learning more about the joy of writing and talking to different writers. And we've got some extraordinary people in this league. Lisa, you know, as well as I do. Yes. People that have done things that I can't even imagine we'll get a speaker next month that's gonna blow you away who has been all over the world and done things that, like I said, you wouldn't even think about doing. It's really the, the number of different life experiences people have in a group that's just fascinating. And I agree. And I think they need to know that you can join us from anywhere in the world. Right? Right. We're on Zoom. We send out a monthly newsletter via email, and it doesn't cost you very much. It costs you less than probably most organizations now it's$35 a year. It gets you 11 meetings and some newsletters and writing tips and all kinds of good things. So it's well worth the money. And we have a writing contest that's gonna start with prize donations in cash. And again, anybody from any place in the country is welcome to enter. They can check our website. And get the details and begin writing and maybe they'll earn some cash in the meantime. Okay. Well thank you Ken. I really thank you. Appreciate you spending some time with us and good luck with you and your writing journey. Okay. And same to you. Thanks, Lisa.