56. Nurture Your Novel: How to Start Strong and Keep Going with special guests

For the next three episodes, I'm doing something special. Recently I had the Joy of gathering with 15 of my book coaching friends, an inspiring group of thoughtful, compassionate coaches and editors who are all deeply invested in helping writers like you bring their stories to life. We spent time setting intentions supporting one another and talking about the many ways we can uplift the writers we work with.

And as we talked, I couldn't help but think, what if I could bring their wisdom and encouragement straight to you? So that's exactly what this three part series is all about. Over the next three episodes, in these round table style conversations, you'll hear insights, guidance, and heartfelt advice to help you write forward with clarity and confidence.

You'll notice a variety of skill sets and focuses among the group. Some specialize in memoir, some specialize in children's books and others while coaching adult fiction. Bring a unique perspective to the work. I hope you'll grab a notebook, settle in, and soak up the wisdom these writing coaches have to share.

Links to guests from this episode:

Susan DeFreitas

Suzette Mullen

Julie Artz

Samantha Skal

Janet Fox

Nicole Meier

Transcript

STEPS TO STORY EP 56 - Part One Coaches Interview - 3-19-2025

[00:00:00] Nicole Meier: Hi friends. I wanna take a moment to give a special intro into this week's podcast. In truth, I sat in front of a blank word doc for a long time, wondering how to express all that I wanted to say. This is because at the time of this recording, it's only been a short time since I learned that a fellow book coach, friend, and podcast guest, Susan DeFreitas, has been lost to a valiant battle with cancer.

[00:00:27] Nicole Meier: The news came as a shock to our book coaching community, especially because just before her death, a group of us had gathered in Arizona to retreat in community with one another. And during this retreat, Susan graced us with her warmth and wisdom in a podcast recording. You'll find her words in today's round table episode.

[00:00:47] Nicole Meier: And while Susan has been lost to us, her teachings have not. Please know that her courses will remain active and available on her site since Susan would've wanted her teachings to live on. You can find more at the link in the show notes. And finally, listeners, please let this be a reminder to all of us that life is fleeting.

[00:01:08] Nicole Meier: If your dream is to be a storyteller, I encourage you to begin today. Don't wait. Time is precious.

[00:01:20] Nicole Meier: For the next three episodes, I'm doing something special. Recently I had the Joy of gathering with 15 of my book Coaching Friends, an inspiring group of thoughtful, compassionate coaches and editors who are all deeply invested in helping writers like you bring their stories to life. We spent time setting intentions supporting one another and talking about the many ways we can uplift the writers we work with.

[00:01:45] Nicole Meier: And as we talked, I couldn't help but think, what if I could bring their wisdom and encouragement straight to you? So that's exactly what this three part series is all about. Over the next three episodes, in these round table style conversations, you'll hear insights, guidance, and heartfelt advice to help you write forward with clarity and confidence.

[00:02:07] Nicole Meier: You'll notice a variety of skill sets and focuses among the group. Some specialize in memoir, some specialize in children's books and others while coaching adult fiction. Bring a unique perspective to the work. I hope you'll grab a notebook, settle in, and soak up the wisdom these writing coaches have to share.

[00:02:27] Nicole Meier: And a little behind the scenes tidbit. My podcast Mike broke the day. We were set to record, but sometimes you just have to roll with it. So with a little improvisation and a lot of heart, we made it happen. Let's begin.

[00:02:49] Nicole Meier: Welcome to Steps to Story. This season I'm focusing on helping you grow as a writer and as an author. I'm Nicole Meier, multi published author and certified book coach here to guide you on strengthening your story and getting it out into the world. This season we'll explore ways to overcome the challenges that hold writers back from breaking through creative blocks to fine tuning your story structure.

[00:03:14] Nicole Meier: And navigating the publishing world with confidence. Wherever you are in your journey, consider this your supportive space to find clarity, direction, and encouragement. Let's take the next step in your story together.

[00:03:32] Nicole Meier: Hi listeners. Welcome back to Steps to Story. I'm so thrilled that you're here with me today because I am recording remotely. I am on a retreat with my fellow book coaches. They have so much goodness to share. Today we really wanna talk about starting a novel and keeping the momentum going, so I would love to just jump right into it.

[00:03:51] Nicole Meier: Without further ado, I'm going to let the first five coaches introduce themselves to you and we'll get into our first question. 

[00:03:59] Sam: Hi everybody. I'm Sam and I coach Mystery solar and suspense authors, and I really love Twist brainstorming. Nice, 

[00:04:06] Julie Arts: welcome. My name's Julie Arts and I help writers who are status quo busting writers of social and environmental justice 

[00:04:14] Janet : fiction.

[00:04:16] Janet : Hi, I'm Janet Fox. I'm an author and a book coach of books for young readers from picture book through young adult awesome. 

[00:04:23] Suzette: Hi, I am Suzette Mullin. I am a memoir author and I coach memoir writers, and I particularly enjoy working with the LGBTQ plus community. 

[00:04:34] Susan Defreidas: Hi there. My name is Susan Deus. I'm an author, editor, and book coach, and I specialize in working with authors of literary and speculative fiction, particularly those engaging with themes of environmental or racial justice and or grappling with moral themes in a complex way.

[00:04:56] Nicole Meier: Fantastic. Welcome coaches. Okay, listeners, so you can tell we have a rich variety of book coaches here, and the first question I wanna pose today is what advice do they have for writers who are just starting out with their first novel manuscript? And follow that up with what's a tip for keeping that good momentum going.

[00:05:19] Suzette: Hi, I am Suzette and I coach memoir writers, and there's a lot of overlap about getting started, whether you're writing a novel or you're writing memoir because it's all about story, but some particular tips for memoir writers who are just getting started. The first thing I would say is be sure that you have a personal, independent burning desire to write your story.

[00:05:46] Suzette: If the reason you're writing your story is that people keep telling you, you should write a memoir, you should write your story, but you don't have an independent need to do that or desire to do that, you might wanna step back and think about that. But if you have an independent burning need to write your story, I have three things I would recommend.

[00:06:07] Suzette: The first is to really get clear on your why. You'll probably hear a lot about that today. Why is it that you want to write your story? The second is, what is it you want to say? And we often refer to that as the point. And I like to say, if you were standing on a soapbox and you had a crowd in front of you and you could only say one thing to them, what would it be?

[00:06:32] Suzette: I. So think about what is it that you've really come to the page to say? And the third thing is, who do you wanna say it to? And thinking about who needs to hear your story. And very often that may end up being a. The person you were when you were going through the thing that you were going through. So if you can start out by identifying why you wanna write, what you want to say, what you've come to the page to say, and who do you wanna say it to or write that story for, that is a great place to start.

[00:07:06] Nicole Meier: Really good. Suzette, I love the soapbox analogy. That's a good one to keep in mind. 

[00:07:12] Janet : So, hi, this is Janet and I coach writers for young readers. So there's a kind of a different approach. I totally agree with what Suzette just said in terms of getting started, but the thing you have to think about if you wanna write for kids is your audience, the audience age, the appropriate language for that audience age, the appropriate genres for that audience.

[00:07:32] Janet : So whether you're writing a picture book. A middle grade novel or a YA novel, your whole approach at the very beginning is gonna be completely different. And the first thing I'd send you to is the library or the bookstore to read books in that genre and age range that you're interested in writing for.

[00:07:49] Janet : So that's my big tip for getting started. In addition to what Suzette just said. 

[00:07:53] Sam: Hi, this is Sam. So I'm a little different in that I coach extreme genre fiction where there's usually a lot of bad things happening. So the way that I like to think about where people start is I like to start with a scene and think like if there's a dead body on the page or whatever it is, what does it look like if you're looking at it through one perspective versus another, and play with that.

[00:08:14] Sam: Think about what if it's the person who found the dead body, or what if it's the person who did the thing or. If it's the person who's watching from over around the corner that nobody else knows is there, and I think that that can be a really valuable and powerful way to start your premise for what's going on because in mysteries alarm suspense, we often do by genre expectations, as Janet said, need to have a dead body near the front of the book.

[00:08:36] Sam: Then from there, the most important advice I can give you is knowing your villain, knowing your antagonist, and knowing what they're up to and why they're doing what they're doing. Like why don't they take the easy way out? Why don't they stop? Why don't they turn themselves in? What is their driving need to be doing?

[00:08:52] Sam: What they're doing throughout the story? And from there, all of a sudden you're looking at the protagonist, just being the one who discovers what's happening because you know what the villain is doing until the very end, until they get caught usually. 

[00:09:03] Nicole Meier: I love that idea of starting with that perspective, and I remember the first time you told me that and it stuck with me.

[00:09:08] Nicole Meier: That's awesome. Okay, so Julie and Susan, I very much wanna know tips for keeping up the momentum. Once a writer gets going, it's easy to fall off. So who wants to start with that? 

[00:09:20] Susan Defreidas: Susan here. So what I have seen in terms of where people lose momentum. It is very much a matter of when they feel like they don't know what they're doing.

[00:09:36] Susan Defreidas: They don't know what comes next, or they feel that they don't have the skills to do what comes next. So number one, cancer who do not have an outline or who feel allergic to the idea even of having an outline. They often find that they do lose momentum. Once the power, the excitement, the juice of their initial premise sort of wears off and they don't know where they're going.

[00:10:06] Susan Defreidas: So the number one tip that I have for keeping up the momentum is developing an outline no matter how loose, based on really sound storytelling principles. And sometimes people just need to pants their way through a first draft. A lot of people do this outline as a reverse outline as they're headed into their second draft, their first developmental revision, so to speak.

[00:10:34] Susan Defreidas: But when you find yourself wondering, oh, what comes next here? What am I even doing? Like, does this book just suck? You can look back at that plan and say, okay, here's my marching orders. Here's what's supposed to happen. The number two thing is, okay, I know what's supposed to happen next here, but I don't feel able to do it.

[00:10:58] Susan Defreidas: I don't feel like I have what it takes to write this scene. I don't know if this character even makes sense. I don't know whether this should be related in scene or summary, and those are questions of having a framework of craft. There are good answers for whether something should be summarized or dramatized, and there are good answers for what needs to happen in your scene and how to make it really powerful in a way that's, you know, will be very vivid and memorable to your reader.

[00:11:34] Susan Defreidas: And no matter how little. You have to work with in that scene, you might feel like you're just slapping words down on the page and all you have is a dialogue and it's hardly even something you could call a scene. If you have a framework of craft, you can return to it and you can make it a fully fledged scene in revision.

[00:11:53] Nicole Meier: That's great. I feel like all that's very empowering to a writer and writers. I hope you're taking notes because we're getting some good tips here already. 

[00:12:01] Julie Arts: Julie? Yeah, Julie here. So I'm going to start off with my very unpopular opinion, which is that I don't believe that writer's block is a real thing, and here's why.

[00:12:13] Julie Arts: People think that writer's block is this thing within us that is fundamentally wrong with us as writers and we cannot get past it, but it's not real. It's actually comes down to a variety of easy to fix causes. And so by just, I. Blowing it up and saying, I don't even think writers black exists. That can really help you keep momentum going because you had that beautiful, shiny idea that the others were just talking about, and you're so excited and you sit down to write and you probably write those first couple of scenes that came to mind when you were first dreaming up the novel and then you run out of gas, and then you're sitting there staring at a blank page and there is nothing more terrifying.

[00:12:52] Julie Arts: And so then you think. Oh no. I've got writer's block. It is an incurable disease, and now I am done. It must give up and go away and never write again. Right? Wrong. There's a few key things you can do. The first is being really, really honest about why you're not writing. Have you really, like Susan said, do you have a craft mind block that's keeping you like, I don't know how, I don't know how to write multiple point of view, so I have to stop right now and figure out how to write multiple point of view before I can go forward.

[00:13:20] Julie Arts: Or do you have. A lot of other things that are going on in your life that are cluttering up your mental space so that you can't come to the page and be creative, or have you spent too long sitting there staring at the page and you're just feeling overwhelmed and blocked. So identifying what is causing it can really, really help.

[00:13:39] Julie Arts: A lot of times. I think the best thing that a writer that's feeling stuck can do is get up and walk away. Go take a walk, go read a book, or watch a TV show. Or a movie that's gonna refill that creative cup so that you can come back to the page and keep writing. So often I get my best story solutions. I.

[00:13:58] Julie Arts: In the shower, in the vegetable garden, when I'm pulling weeds, when I'm out for a walk, just moving my body because in the background of my mind is processing and comes up with the answer. So staring at the blank page, if you've been there more than 15 minutes and haven't written a word, you're not actually doing anything except stressing yourself out.

[00:14:17] Julie Arts: Instead, if you get up and walk away, you might be able to come back. But another pro tip that I have that can really help with this. Is to always stop your previous writing session about halfway through a sentence or halfway through a scene so that you know what needs to happen next, maybe only in the next five minutes of your story.

[00:14:36] Julie Arts: But nevertheless, when you sit back down you're like, oh yeah, I know they were just going out the door to get coffee, and so I know what they're doing and you can just keep right on writing. So I think you can really, in some ways, mind hack your way to getting through writer's block just by saying what's causing it.

[00:14:54] Julie Arts: Do I need a break? Do I need a drink of water? Do I need to read a book to refill the creative cup? Do I need to call a writing buddy? Do I need to listen to a podcast and look for some inspiration? And all of those things are not writing, but they'll get you back to the page and keep you moving forward.

[00:15:10] Nicole Meier: I love that. Thanks for going deeper with that too, because you didn't just stay on the surface. And I think that most people out there are nodding their heads right now going, okay, that makes sense. And that's something attainable that I could do today. 

[00:15:22] Suzette: I wanted, it's Suzette, I wanna just jump in. And Julie didn't use this word, but I know that it's a word that she does use 'cause she was my book coach and helped me with my memoir is the word doubt.

[00:15:35] Suzette: And Julie talks about doubt, demons. And I think that when we are experiencing maybe what we might call writer's block or we're procrastinating or we just feel stuck. It's because doubt has crept in, and it might be creeping in because we feel like we're not, quote unquote, good enough writers. We don't have the craft skills perhaps, or whatever it is.

[00:16:00] Suzette: And I think that the two things I wanna say about doubt is I think all writers have doubt. So just normalizing it. It doesn't matter if you're a beginner writer, it doesn't matter if you're a bestseller writer. You will experience doubt in your writing process. And so to just not beat yourself up. When you're feeling doubt.

[00:16:19] Suzette: And then the second antidote I think is to have some kind of writing community and some place to go to when you are feeling that doubt is to a place to express it, people to bolster you and to help you move through that doubt. So I just wanted to share that. 'cause I know as a writer myself, believe me, I have had a lot of doubt.

[00:16:41] Suzette: And when you're writing memoir. I don't know if it's more than any other genre, but I certainly know memoir. When it's your own story, you can have so much doubt about will anyone really even care. 

[00:16:52] Nicole Meier: So true. Yeah. Janet. 

[00:16:54] Janet : Yeah. I think that every author feels this. Whether you're writing memoir or whether you're writing kid lit, or whether you're writing literary fiction, it doesn't matter.

[00:17:03] Janet : We all have our doubts. No matter how far down the road you've gone. And as an inve cancer, I know that having that little nugget of where is this story going to end? I always like to know where my story ends and what my character, my main character's arc is in terms of change from the beginning of the story to the end of the story.

[00:17:26] Janet : If I know that. I can kind of feel my way through a story that I haven't really planned thoroughly, and that also alleviates a lot of the doubt because you have a feeling of something whole in your hands as you're starting. 

[00:17:39] Susan Defreidas: I'd like to weigh in on that because I would venture to say that is a plan, and Janice published money novels at this point, so she kind of has it by feel, but that's such a big part of it.

[00:17:54] Susan Defreidas: Is knowing what you are driving toward in the story. And again, some people need to have a very detailed plan at the beginning, especially often if they're just starting out. Others can do it more by the seat of their pants or by feel, or by the light of the headlights. To use another literary analogy, but what I hear Janet saying is something I say to my own clients, which is.

[00:18:23] Susan Defreidas: It's understanding the point of the story, right? Mm-hmm. And it's not just the point of the whole story, it's when you sit down to write a chapter, a section, an interaction, a conflict, what is the point of it? Understanding how the story ends gives you a big part of that answer. 

[00:18:45] Janet : Yeah. 

[00:18:46] Sam: I'd love to jump in there.

[00:18:47] Sam: This is Sam, so this is all, assuming that you do have a point and a plan if you know where this story ending. But one thing I find that really helps me and does help my clients as well is when you're stuck writing and you're like, oh my God, I don't know where to go from here. I just, I'm, I. Sitting in my chair and nothing's happening and it's been 20 minutes.

[00:19:05] Sam: Think about the motivation and the assumptions that your characters can make about other people's motivations, other characters' motivations, and those assumptions are what lead you to create twists, which in mysteries to learn suspense is one of those key things that really trips people up. It can feel like, oh, I have to have three, which you do, but they can feel very intimidating and they are not.

[00:19:25] Sam: Twists exist across all genres, and in pretty much every book ever. It's always about the assumption of motivation. So if you get stuck, just think about that, but also keep in mind what Susan said about there has to be a point for the scene that you're writing. If there's no argument for why it should be in the book, it shouldn't be in the book.

[00:19:42] Julie Arts: So true. 

[00:19:43] Nicole Meier: Yeah. Julie, you 

[00:19:43] Julie Arts: wanna say something else? Yeah, sure. And we're talking about a lot of the important elements of story twists and character motivation and all that stuff. But it, stepping back to the 10,000 foot view is also just to remind yourself that a first draft is just that. Mm-hmm. It's first draft, it's not a published book.

[00:20:00] Julie Arts: Mm-hmm. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't even have to be good. In fact, I like to talk about the zero draft. Which is when you as the writer are telling yourself the story for the first time. You're figuring it all out. You're wandering your way through and maybe you have some planning support, but maybe you don't.

[00:20:15] Julie Arts: Maybe you're completely paning it. I completely pantsed my first several novels and it was fine. I did a little bit more revising. It's not what I do now that I have written more than just a couple of novels. But it's important to remember that you are just mapping it out. It might just be talking head dialogue.

[00:20:30] Julie Arts: You might not know exactly what every twist and breadcrumb is yet, but you're telling yourself the story, and then you can go back and add more structure around it in revision. So right now, your job is just to get the story down, not to have it perfect. No author writes a perfect first draft, and then it goes straight to publication.

[00:20:48] Julie Arts: We go through those rounds of revision, we iterate through the process. That takes some of the pressure off of that first draft too. 

[00:20:55] Suzette: You're 

[00:20:55] Sam: here. We're all nodding so 

[00:20:56] Suzette: vigorous 

[00:20:57] Nicole Meier: right now. A hundred percent. 

[00:20:59] Suzette: Yeah. And I love that because it's Suzette, you'll hear from all the experts how important that page one is.

[00:21:07] Suzette: That page one's gotta grab your reader's attention. It's gotta do all these things and you can put so much pressure and, and that is true. And you don't have to get page one. Right. In the beginning, and if you get so fixated on that, you will never get to the end of the draft. My memoir that was published last February, the only way through is out what ended up on page one that was written in my final draft out of so many other drafts.

[00:21:37] Suzette: So don't get fixated that you have to get page one right in the beginning and all these other things. They will come, but like as Julie said, you'll never get to the end of the first draft if you get fixated on feeling like you have to make everything perfect. 

[00:21:53] Nicole Meier: Yeah, good advice. I think that what I would love to do to wrap this up is because you all are writers as well, is think back to when you wrote that first draft of your very first book.

[00:22:05] Nicole Meier: What's something that you would go back and tell your earlier self? Hey, I've got a better way. Don't do it this way. What's a mistake or something approach that yes, you learned from, but maybe you wouldn't tell yourself to do it again. 

[00:22:19] Suzette: This is Suzette. I think what I would tell myself when I was writing my first book is that you don't have to have it all figured out, that you have to go in with an idea of what your story's about and.

[00:22:36] Suzette: It is okay to let the true deeper story emerge and just to relax into not having to feel like you have it all figured out. 

[00:22:45] Susan Defreidas: Beautiful. Susan here, and I am almost about to say the opposite. You can, memoir and fiction are really different beasts. They do have some similarities in the overlap. But I worked for a decade on my first novel in my twenties, and it was hugely ambitious.

[00:23:08] Susan Defreidas: I had big ideas about the themes and the characters and all the ways that things were gonna intersect, and I was pretty clear on how the whole thing opened, but I had no idea how it was gonna end, and I thought I would just figure that out as I wrote it and I was wrong. And it goes along with what I was saying earlier, that knowing the end, having a sense of the end, at least as Janet was saying, it's an organizing principle, it lights the way forward with the whole story and.

[00:23:45] Susan Defreidas: I didn't have that with that first overly ambitious baby novel in my twenties. And I eventually just reached a point where I realized I'm not just gonna figure this out by doing it. And that's when I went back to school. 

[00:24:03] Janet : Yeah. I have like five or six first novels mm-hmm. In the drawer that will never see the light of day.

[00:24:11] Janet : And if I had to look back. I didn't understand the true craft of a novel, which is the study of a person who actually does things and makes things happen in which we call agency. And I also had no idea how to create tension in a novel. How to make a scene that built to a high point, how to make a novel that built to a high point.

[00:24:39] Janet : Looking back on it, I needed a lot more craft work than I thought I did when I started out. 'cause I wrote a really pretty sentence that meant nothing. And that's not the way to write a novel. It's best if you really do look at how novels are constructed. 

[00:24:54] Julie Arts: Yeah, that's good. Julie here. I think if I could go back and tell myself when I was writing my first novel, one thing, it would be that there's no perfect writing process.

[00:25:04] Julie Arts: It's different from writer to writer, and it's different for each writer from book to book. So I thought if I read the right books, read the right blog posts and designed the perfect process, I would make my life so much easier. And instead, I tried doing things other people's way instead of finding my own way.

[00:25:21] Julie Arts: It took me a couple books to figure out my way. And my way continues to evolve. It's not the same as it was on that first book. Knowing that it's okay if my writing buddy is a total outliner, but I feel more like a pants and I prefer a more messy, loose synopsis instead of an outline. Those can both work.

[00:25:40] Julie Arts: We just have to find out what works for us individually and follow our intuition on that and not try to compare ourselves to what everybody else is doing. 

[00:25:48] Nicole Meier: Yeah. Really good, Julie. All right, Sam. Bring us home. Julie stole mine. 

[00:25:52] Sam: Yeah. Um, so I will pivot and say that I listened to too many people during my first novel, and it was at the end I wrote it in a relative bubble for myself.

[00:26:04] Sam: And so that was good. Well done previous me, but when I got to the point of getting reader feedback, like beta feedback, I sent it to and don't ever do, this listeners, this podcast. Mm-hmm. I sent it to like 15 of my closest friends, and I asked them what they thought. And that was it. Big mistake. Mm-hmm.

[00:26:21] Sam: They all love me. So it was varying degrees of like, oh my gosh, this is so awesome. And like totally unhelpful. And then people being like, what if you turned it into like a dragon sci-fi? And so it's just, it got in my head and I, no joke, have written 17 versions of this novel. Like, not ground up. But if going back, I would say be precious with who you reveal your work to be intentional with it.

[00:26:45] Sam: In the filler. What I coach, when people get to the beta feedback stage, just to have like three questions that you ask people and tell them the page number at which they got bored when they figured out who did it, and you know, if they fell asleep during the middle of reading your book, you wanna know when that happens.

[00:27:01] Sam: You can go and fix it, but do not offer up open feedback to be like, do you think this could be a sci-fi novel? If it's not, there's nothing wrong with sci-fi. I love sci-fi, but yeah, 

[00:27:11] Nicole Meier: really good. Okay. Listeners, you have gotten a beautiful example of what it's like to get feedback and advice from book coaches.

[00:27:20] Nicole Meier: I hope that you're taking notes if something resonated with you. Just to remind you, this is the first in a three part series, but if you wanna learn more about Susan Suzette, Julie, Sam, and Janet, go to the show notes because I really encourage you. These are the pros. These are the best, and I couldn't recommend them more.

[00:27:38] Nicole Meier: Thanks you guys for joining me. 

[00:27:40] Janet : Thanks for letting. Thank you. Bye bye.

[00:27:47] Nicole Meier: If you want to check out my coaching programs for fiction writers, visit nicolemeier.com. That's M-E-I-E-R. And if you like this episode, I'd love you to take a minute to leave a rating and review for this podcast. This will help more writers like you to discover the show. And to get going on their writing journey.

[00:28:07] Nicole Meier: Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, happy writing everyone.