107. Cultivating Hope as a Novel Writer with Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Feeling stuck, discouraged, or lost somewhere between your first draft and your publishing dreams? In this episode of The Whole Writer, I sit down with New York Times bestselling novelist Miranda Beverly-Whittemore (Bittersweet, Fierce Little Thing) for an honest, inspiring conversation about the realities of a long writing career — and how to keep going anyway.

Miranda shares the full arc of her publishing journey: from selling her debut novel at 25 in a six-figure deal, to having a second book sell fewer than 2,000 copies, to eventually landing on the New York Times bestseller list — and what she learned at every painful, pivotal turn.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• How to strategically study the books you love to write more compelling, commercially resonant fiction
• Why outlining doesn't have to be at odds with literary writing — and how Miranda thinks about plot like a piece of gossip
• What it really means to shelve a manuscript, and how to emotionally move forward
• How shame silences writers in publishing — and why breaking that silence matters
• Miranda's plot coaching work and how she helps stuck writers rediscover their story's potential
• A simple, powerful practice for reigniting hope when writing feels impossible

Whether you're querying your first novel, navigating submission with your agent, or wondering if your shelved manuscript means you've failed — this conversation will remind you why you started and how to keep going.

🎙️Connect with Miranda: Website | The Plot Solution on Substack 

🎙️Connect with Nicole: Website | Dear Whole Writer on Substack

Transcript

THE WHOLE WRITER EP 107 - Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

[00:00:00] Miranda Whitmore: Returning to a book that you read that felt like a magic trick to you at some point in your life, and you were like, I cannot believe the writer pulled this off. Sometimes that can be a twist. Sometimes it can be just a beautiful stretch of writing. Sometimes it can be a character that you love or a love story.

[00:00:19] Miranda Whitmore: Taking yourself back to that place and remembering that, that's why we do what we do. Is to give that gift to readers, I think can be so recentering.

[00:00:40] Nicole Meier: Welcome to the whole writer. A place where we talk about what it means to show up as someone who's grounded in their voice, in their community, and in their creative path. Even when the world tells them to hustle, compare, or conform. I'm Nicole Meyer, a multi published author and book coach who believes that nurturing the person behind the page is just as important as refining the words on it.

[00:01:06] Nicole Meier: In each episode, we'll explore the terrain of writing life with honesty, warmth, and practical wisdom, creating space for you to write from a place of wholeness rather than depletion. Whether you're drafting your first manuscript or publishing your fifth book, you'll find conversation and companionship for the journey here.

[00:01:27] Nicole Meier: So settle in, bring your questions and your curiosity, and let's discover together what it means to write and live with authenticity and purpose. Hi listeners. Welcome on in. Today I wanna have a discussion with my guest around the topic of cultivating hope for novel and memoir writers. It's something that's in short supply, but heavily in need.

[00:01:53] Nicole Meier: But first, let me properly introduce her. New York Times bestseller. Miranda Beverly Whitmore has published five novels including Fierce Little Thing and Bittersweet in her popular Substack, the Plot Solution. She shares insights about her career and writing strategies. She also loves working as a plot coach with writers feeling stuck.

[00:02:15] Nicole Meier: Welcome, Miranda. 

[00:02:17] Miranda Whitmore: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here. 

[00:02:19] Nicole Meier: I'm so happy you're here. And by the way, I just remember loving, bittersweet. That was a great novel. Aw, 

[00:02:25] Miranda Whitmore: thank you. I know. I can't believe it came out what, 12 years ago? How is is time? What is talking in this era? 

[00:02:34] Nicole Meier: What is time? One of the reasons I brought you on here is I loved your books, but also I have just loved seeing how you engaged the writing community on Substack, and I also know you're fresh off the airplane, so to speak, from a WP.

[00:02:49] Nicole Meier: Yeah. Which was really exciting. 

[00:02:51] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah. Yeah, it was great. I went to a WP last year in LA and I was standing with a friend and I had this moment where I was like. The panels I love the most are the panels where there is practical advice offered because I think a great lifeline that writers can offer to other writers, especially writers like me or you with many years of experience, is to just say like, this is how I do it.

[00:03:16] Miranda Whitmore: And that doesn't mean that it's the best way or that it's the right way. It just means this is how I do it, and I think. I benefited the most in my coming up from other people giving that to me. So I was realizing that the thing that I think I can offer people is a real understanding of plot and outline.

[00:03:34] Miranda Whitmore: I tend to write books that end up in the literary sphere of things, but that are plot driven. So I'm kind of an odd writer. I have been kind of seen as an odd writer at times because I like to write a beautiful line, but I also really like stuff to happen in my books. And I think maybe because I didn't get my MFA, those were not mutually exclusive to me.

[00:03:56] Miranda Whitmore: It took me a long time to realize that that made me strange. So this year I organized a panel about outlining and it was really fun. It was four of us who outline, and then Brian Greco, who is not an outliner, who also has a great substack, and he just asked us questions about our outlines. We showed images of them on the screen.

[00:04:16] Miranda Whitmore: And it was a riot. We had so much fun. We were laughing the whole time. There were 400 people there. It was standing Ramone 

[00:04:22] Nicole Meier: amazing. 

[00:04:23] Miranda Whitmore: And I just had this feeling of like, this is what it is. Like this is why being in community with other writers is so great because you can share knowledge in a way that is about.

[00:04:36] Miranda Whitmore: Welcoming people. And of course there were only four of us talking about how we shared our, you know, sharing our outlines. But I hope that that meant that there were a lot of other people in that room who also outlined and were able to take those conversations out into their own lives and their work.

[00:04:49] Miranda Whitmore: So it was really fun. 

[00:04:51] Nicole Meier: Ah, amazing. So, for anyone listening, thinking. I don't know what a WP is. Should I be thinking about attending one year? Would you recommend emerging authors to go? 

[00:05:02] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah. So a WP is the Associated Writing Programs Conference. It's 10,000 people, so it started out as like a writing program conference for programs offering at MFAs.

[00:05:14] Miranda Whitmore: I did not get my MFAI went for the first time nine years ago, I think. And I will say that it is so fun. It is like summer camp. Wow. It's like filled with other writers or 10,000 writers. And a lot of them have not published books. Like there's a lot of younger people who are just there. There were even some high school students there this year who went to a high school that has a fiction program.

[00:05:40] Miranda Whitmore: And so they're undergraduates, there's graduate students, they're also then people who are kind of the career level I'm at. And it's just a lot of, there's plenary sessions, there's a book fair, and then there's just a lot of evening events, dance parties. Hanging out at bars like trivia nights. It's just very positive.

[00:06:00] Miranda Whitmore: It really feels like summer camp. So if there's even the next year's gonna be in Chicago and it's, I mean, you know, it's expensive. It's not inexpensive, so you have to make sure it's worth it for you. But it is really fun, especially if you go with a buddy. 

[00:06:14] Nicole Meier: So cool. I'm sure everyone listening is like looking up tickets and when's registration?

[00:06:19] Nicole Meier: Yeah, I, I wanted to go to the one that was in LA but I couldn't go at the last minute. But yeah, that's on my bucket list for sure. 

[00:06:25] Miranda Whitmore: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

[00:06:26] Nicole Meier: Oh, cool. 

[00:06:27] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah. 

[00:06:27] Nicole Meier: Okay, so let's get back on track because we wanna talk about you and all of your good things that you're putting out into the world these days.

[00:06:34] Nicole Meier: But for people just getting to know you. I would love you to share your journey with us. So you've published five novels, including a New York Times bestseller. 

[00:06:43] Miranda Whitmore: Yes. 

[00:06:44] Nicole Meier: I would love for you to share just a snippet of what that path has looked like, maybe what even surprised you about it? Anything you wanna share?

[00:06:52] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah, so it's very bumpy. Success looks very bumpy, and I think that that's something that I always try to tell people is that, so I was very young when I sold my first novel, the Effects of Light, I was 20. Five when I sold it in 27 when it was published, and I was just like completely wide-eyed. I had no concept of anything and I sold it in a mid six figure two book deal.

[00:07:18] Miranda Whitmore: It was at a time in publishing 2005 where there was so much money bopping around that they were just kind of like throwing money at a certain kind of writer. Like I was a young woman who looked a certain way, and that was definitely something I had to wrestle with on the other side because. Through various circumstances.

[00:07:39] Miranda Whitmore: My first book didn't end up selling as well as kind of hoped by that point. My editor had left the publishing house. So my second book was what's called Orphaned. So I had a second book because I was contracted for a two book deal. But I was kind of stuck at this publisher, who it was pretty clear, was not thrilled to have me there.

[00:07:58] Miranda Whitmore: That publisher doesn't exist anymore, so I can say all sorts of less great things about them, and I think they did the best they could. Right. Yeah. So then my second book came out. It sold less than 2000 copies. And then I couldn't sell a third book. I pitched two different third books and I couldn't sell them.

[00:08:15] Miranda Whitmore: And so I went back to the drawing board and I had lunch with the original editor who had acquired my first novel, and I asked him for advice and he said, oh, you gotta write a best seller. And I was like, oh, thanks for that. So helpful. But. I will actually say that I think he wasn't being totally flippant and I took that piece of advice and I looked myself squarely in the eye and I was like, do I want this career or not?

[00:08:41] Miranda Whitmore: Like I would love more than anything to always write than to do any other job. So that probably means making some career choices that are more about commercial choices. And again, this is a very different time when it was still kind of like achievable to think about being a full-time writer and actually making a run for that.

[00:09:02] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah. So that's, this is said with like an asterisk, not that I don't think that people shouldn't try. I just think that what was going around financially at that point was just a different game. So I basically sat down and I wrote down a list of the books that I liked to read on vacation and the books that had kind of been popular over the course of the last like couple years.

[00:09:22] Miranda Whitmore: And I basically figured out I wanted to, I kind of engineered the thinking about a, the kind of book I'd like to write, and I was like, I want it to be a book Allah, kinda like Brideshead Revisited or The Line of Beauty. This idea of a person being a doorway for kind of like a poor, not well connected dowdy person who kind of opens the doorway of that other person into another world, usually through education.

[00:09:51] Miranda Whitmore: I wanna write that story about women. I wanna write that about two women. 'cause I think that there hasn't been a really powerful female friendship book for a while, and I really want to write that book. And I also wanted to be a gothic thriller. So I wrote that book, which is called Bittersweet. And even then it took two rounds of editors to snap it up.

[00:10:14] Miranda Whitmore: My beloved editor, Christine Koresh, ended up snapping it up. She and I worked together and that book became a New York Times bestseller. And the narrative of that book that's really interesting for me is that it's the lowest advance I've ever gotten on a book. But then Christine was really, was like a young scrappy, she's now an executive editor at Flatiron, but at the time she was the young, scrappy, just out of being an assistant and she got the sales reps on board in-house, especially the foreign sales reps.

[00:10:45] Miranda Whitmore: And so when those people were like, yes, we can sell this, and then the book sold in foreign sales, what I had been made on my advance back within like the first six weeks. It just changed the narrative in-house in a way that was really compelling because then suddenly. It was like I was back from nowhere and I was on and up.

[00:11:08] Miranda Whitmore: Like it was amazing how just like optics 

[00:11:11] Nicole Meier: Yes, 

[00:11:11] Miranda Whitmore: changed everything. And so suddenly that book was like this monster hit even before we were remotely close to publication day. And then it debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. So it was like, 

[00:11:23] Nicole Meier: oh, 

[00:11:23] Miranda Whitmore: the dream. 

[00:11:24] Nicole Meier: That is a such a great trajectory. Just that snapshot of how that book went from point A to point B.

[00:11:30] Miranda Whitmore: Right, exactly. And also I will say that you can tell, you can take the temperature and it can be scary to do this with the first or second book, but like by the time you're farther along you can really tell whether your book is a priority for a publisher or not, just based on like. Dropping in to meet your editor.

[00:11:52] Miranda Whitmore: And what happens when you get off the elevator? Like if you go into a publisher and six different assistants come up to you and they're like, oh my gosh, I've read your book. It's so great. You're like, well, this publisher is doing everything they possibly can. Yeah. Like their momentum and house for this book.

[00:12:09] Miranda Whitmore: And if it doesn't hit in the outside world, I don't need to regret that I. Didn't push them to do their work harder. Right. And that feels very different from when you like try to drop in on your editor and someone's like, oh yeah, she's not available. And then you realize like, oh, I gave my name at the desk and they don't even know who I am.

[00:12:30] Miranda Whitmore: Right, 

[00:12:31] Nicole Meier: right. 

[00:12:31] Miranda Whitmore: That and also be an indication. Right. So there're all of these ways that you can kind of sense that. And I will say that like with my second book with them. Christine had left by that point. And again, I was kind of, I had sold that book. It just didn't do what they wanted for all sorts of reasons.

[00:12:49] Miranda Whitmore: And then my next book, my most recent book, fierce little thing came out with Christine, but she was at that point at Flatiron Fierce Little thing. Had some really great, I'll say like review momentum behind them, like the New York Times gave it a great review was huge. Yes. It was an editor's pick on Amazon.

[00:13:10] Miranda Whitmore: It was one of their best books of the month, but it was also the summer of 2021, so you might remember we were in the middle of the second pandemic summer and people were just done. 

[00:13:22] Nicole Meier: Yeah. 

[00:13:23] Miranda Whitmore: So that was my most recent book, and so I have been very open about the fact that I have another book that I spent the last four years working on.

[00:13:32] Miranda Whitmore: I'm really excited about, and it's just not hit in the way that my agents that I want to. So it's on the shelf and I'm writing a new book, which I'm really excited about. Kind of like the same pep talk I gave myself with Bittersweet. I was like, okay, I'm gonna go back to the drawing board. And I had had this idea that's kind of like a high concept idea, and I pitched it to my agents and they were like, we love it.

[00:13:58] Miranda Whitmore: We think you should write this book. So I'm writing that right now. 

[00:14:01] Nicole Meier: Okay. Such good stuff to unpack there. I wanna hover over a couple points. 

[00:14:06] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah. 

[00:14:06] Nicole Meier: One, especially for the writers that are listening, I always say, and I'm sure you say this too, readers make the best writers. And the fact that you have been intentional, not once, but twice, of sitting down with all the books that you're enjoying.

[00:14:18] Nicole Meier: Mm-hmm. You know, sort of the space you wanna live in. And really diving into those I think is brilliant. And sometimes the simple things are most powerful and we overlook those simple things, but. You've gone back to the books that you love and where you wanna live, and I think people need to really hear that because you would not believe how many manuscripts I get where I ask people, what are you reading right now?

[00:14:38] Nicole Meier: What's your favorite genre? And they're like, oh, I haven't really read in a while. Yeah. And it just kills me. 

[00:14:43] Miranda Whitmore: I know. And it's so hard because I do go through periods of time where I don't have time to read because I only have so many hours in the day. That said. I feel like I'm constantly have my finger on the pulse of what's hitting.

[00:15:00] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah. And I catch up. So I'm like, okay, I wasn't able to read that book the month it came out, but I'm gonna be sure to read it this summer. Or I'm really loving this particular genre and I'm gonna do a deep dive and I'm gonna do some backlist reading of books that have kind of like hit in that genre.

[00:15:17] Miranda Whitmore: It's also like, it doesn't mean that you have to be. Spy hardcover books or living in a place with an amazing library, you right. But also you can listen to audiobooks, right? Yeah. Like that counts too. So I think it is partly just keeping your finger on the pulse of like, what am I digging and what are the stories that I keep seeing in my feeds or that my friends keep talking about that are like the things that they love.

[00:15:44] Miranda Whitmore: It can be really great for you to know and then also to kind of analyze that and be like, well, what do I keep going back to? Like, something that I have realized I love is like a very smart woman who's kind of narratively. Driven by a sense of like being disenfranchised and middle aged and feeling pretty angry, but she's very funny.

[00:16:08] Miranda Whitmore: Like that voice I'm thinking of like Vladimir by Julia Ma Jonas, which just came out as a series, the Katherine Newman books, which and Rec. 

[00:16:17] Nicole Meier: Yeah. 

[00:16:17] Miranda Whitmore: Those voices are so compelling to me. And so this book that I'm working on, even though it exists in third person close, I'm kind of giving myself the gift of playing in that realm.

[00:16:30] Miranda Whitmore: I like how that book, it sounds kind of gossipy and I love that a novel can be a piece of gossip and the story that I'm telling right now in my new book is like, Hey, do you wanna hear about this crazy group friends and something that happened with them? Okay, here you go. So like that kind of work can play out for you in all sorts of different ways.

[00:16:50] Miranda Whitmore: It can just even being like, here's an element. That I really love, that I keep returning to, and every time I find it hitting, I'm just like, Ooh, I love that. And that can be the thing that you kind of know you need to work on. 

[00:17:04] Nicole Meier: Oh, I love that so much. And I love being invited in like a friend, like you're gossiping or you're selling the tea.

[00:17:10] Nicole Meier: Yeah, I'm your friend. You're narrating to me like a friend, so, 

[00:17:14] Miranda Whitmore: right. 

[00:17:14] Nicole Meier: Yeah. I'm here for that all day long. Okay. 

[00:17:16] Miranda Whitmore: Me too. 

[00:17:17] Nicole Meier: So good. The next thing I wanna talk about, 'cause we're staying on, this manuscript you're working on right now, is the shift. So you had the idea of the other manuscript, it just wasn't doing the thing you wanted to do out with publishers.

[00:17:31] Nicole Meier: You decided to shelve it for now. Yep. I'll walk listeners through that sort of mental or emotional shift you made to jump to the next project. 

[00:17:40] Miranda Whitmore: I mean, it's always really sad, and I will say that I think I have found that I do best when I indulge myself pity, because then I fully go deep into myself pity, and then I get so bored of it that I'm like, okay, what's next?

[00:17:55] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah, like that wouldn't necessarily work with everybody, but for me, it's like I have to be like, I am in the pit of despair. I worked so hard on this book. I love this book. I do still believe that it's the best thing I've ever written. I'm so proud of it. I'm excited because I'm working on it right now as a like a TV show pitch with my sister who's a filmmaker, and she and I are collaborators and an independent producer.

[00:18:18] Miranda Whitmore: So like it is getting new life in a different space and I'm sharing that with other people, which is really exciting. So I feel like part of it was like pivoting and being like, okay, I have other people in my life who believe this. Is a story worth telling and putting it in the world and there are other ways to do that.

[00:18:39] Miranda Whitmore: But even so, I still felt really sad for a while and really disappointed and really worried about the publishing business because one of the things that my agents were like is this is a book that like two years ago would've hit. It's pretty like standard, kind of like Hello Sunshine kind of book. It's about two women, but nobody dies in it.

[00:18:58] Miranda Whitmore: It's about two women and how kind of women. Destroy themselves when they get caught up in the idea of destroying each other, that's the hook. 

[00:19:06] Nicole Meier: Okay? Yes. 

[00:19:07] Miranda Whitmore: And there's no murder in it. There's a lot of feelings. There's a lot of female bodies in it. There's miscarriage in it and sex in it, and birth in it. It is very, very feminist.

[00:19:20] Miranda Whitmore: And so in this particular moment, sadly, that is not something that is hitting in a way that I would've hoped so. It was interesting to kind of take a genre switch. They were like, you have written thrillers and even though we've pitched them as psychological thrillers, you have it in you to write a more kind of down the middle thriller.

[00:19:45] Miranda Whitmore: And it can be a psychological thriller, but also it could have all of these various elements that we feel are kind of like. Doing well. And in that moment I was like, this is an idea that I have that I think fits that bill. So it wasn't like I went out and was like, I'm gonna just desperately choose an idea that, yes.

[00:20:08] Miranda Whitmore: Right. It was more like looking at kind of like the wheelhouse. What's in my wheelhouse? What are some projects that I have been thinking about? And this was the one that kind of had floated to the top of mind. And the thing about this book is that the structure has to bear. Some leaps in time. So a lot of it involved me doing a lot of planning behind the scenes so that the story can seem very simple.

[00:20:33] Miranda Whitmore: Just like with a piece of gossip where like when you're telling someone a piece of gossip, you have to know the entire story so that you can decide when you're gonna let the bomb drop. You're not gonna say, oh, she was his sister until the end, right? But you have to know that he is a sister if you're telling the story.

[00:20:54] Miranda Whitmore: That is the kind of like game I was playing. So I've been really in planning mode with this book for like probably four months and now I'm writing and it's great because it all planned and it's just feels like a fun piece of gossip. It's just like, it's so fun. 

[00:21:10] Nicole Meier: Okay. This is so fun to even hear you, because I could see your whole energy like shifted when you started talking about this.

[00:21:16] Nicole Meier: Yeah. And this is a great segue for me wanting to talk about the plot solution, which is your lovely substack because you have pulled back the curtain and you have said, I'm sharing everything. I'm sharing that I had a book on submission that didn't go anywhere. I'm sharing my frustration with the publishing industry.

[00:21:35] Nicole Meier: I'm sharing the hope. And what I have loved about you and your message to other writers, you're cultivating hope online. Oh, I'm 

[00:21:43] Miranda Whitmore: glad that, 

[00:21:44] Nicole Meier: yes, you're cultivating that. So I wanna talk about that. And were you afraid at all or were you just full guns blazing of sharing? The real, real on Substack about this journey, which so many writers don't talk about, is we all have manuscripts hiding in drawers that didn't sell, and we had to move on to the next one.

[00:22:03] Miranda Whitmore: It's so common. I think that that's the thing. I mean, in some ways I think it's about like, not to take this to a very dark place, but I do think it's kind of like when you find out about miscarriage and you're like, oh, actually miscarriage is very common and we just don't talk about it. And as someone who had miscarriages myself, I was really helped by other women being like, oh yeah, that happened to me and it was really hard.

[00:22:24] Miranda Whitmore: And someone else who was like, that happened to me and I was okay. So I think that the diversity of experiences can be very similar. Because, and the reason I use that example is that I think especially for women, there can be this sense of shame built into it. Yeah. And I do think that the publishing world, you and I were talking about this a little bit earlier, is like, I do think the publishing world.

[00:22:47] Miranda Whitmore: To some degree operates on a system of like letting shame, silence authors as this idea of it kind of being like, well, if you're not strong enough to bear the shame, there's plenty of other vision to see. Right? Totally. And I just think that that's ridiculous because we all have failure as part of our story.

[00:23:08] Miranda Whitmore: And failure is what makes you really brave. I think failing at something is what makes you realize like it actually doesn't really matter. Like all the things that I have told myself that I don't like about it myself, that are holding me back are just completely arbitrary things inside this big head of mine.

[00:23:27] Miranda Whitmore: So when I couldn't sell that book and when I felt like, dang it, I know this is a really good book. I think that's also something about like long career is. As a younger person, I might have thought like, maybe this book isn't good, and I actually am like, oh, it has nothing to do with that. I know now that there's probably plenty of things that I could improve about it, but the story itself is really compelling.

[00:23:53] Miranda Whitmore: I know the writing's really good. I think it's really funny, like, I'm proud of this book, so why would I be ashamed of it? There are all of these other reasons I can't sell it. And maybe one of those things is that the book. Is not hitting in a specific way in this moment, but that doesn't mean the book itself is something I need to be ashamed of.

[00:24:13] Nicole Meier: Oh gosh. I love that. 

[00:24:15] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah, and I really wanna empower people to think about that because when you write a book for four years or two years, or 10 years, that's a journey that is really important. No matter what happens with that product, it's the process that really changes you. 

[00:24:29] Nicole Meier: Oh, I love that you said all of that.

[00:24:32] Nicole Meier: And the shame. I mean, the shame is so tangible to so many of us because there's so many parts that we have no control over in the publishing business. 

[00:24:41] Miranda Whitmore: Right. 

[00:24:42] Nicole Meier: And it is about being a storyteller. And the journey, like you said, is bumpy. I don't know a single person that it has not been bumpy for. 

[00:24:49] Miranda Whitmore: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:50] Nicole Meier: But also, if you are emotional or upset or whatever about it, it means you care even more about it. 

[00:24:55] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah. 

[00:24:56] Nicole Meier: So, keep going. What has the response been to you when you've shared this whole. Other side of your journey? 

[00:25:03] Miranda Whitmore: It's really interesting. I have so many people reaching out and thanking me and sharing their own stories much more than I thought would be, because when I'd started the Substack, I was just kind of like, oh, I'm just like, there's plenty of stuff I have to say and I just wanna say it.

[00:25:19] Miranda Whitmore: I'm not starting. The Substack is a way to make money. My paywall strategy is like when I talk about something that's personal, I put it behind the paywall. I want the people who are paying to feel like they have access to that deeper personal part of me. But it cuts how many people are reading that. So I felt like I was just kind of like, I'm just gonna say what I have to say.

[00:25:41] Miranda Whitmore: And I'm here and I keep writing books and I'm not worried that like me. Speaking out of turn, I mean, I think as a younger woman in the industry, I felt like this very sense of like, if I speak out of turn I'm gonna get in trouble. Absolutely. And I went, screw that. Like, 

[00:25:57] Nicole Meier: yeah. 

[00:25:58] Miranda Whitmore: Like I just, who has the time?

[00:26:01] Miranda Whitmore: There's the world is burning around us. Like I do not need to worry about my feelings getting hurt. Or like somebody choosing not to work with me because they're afraid I'm gonna say something honest, because I also feel like I am very discreet and there's been plenty of stories, believe me, that I could share that I don't.

[00:26:18] Miranda Whitmore: I think there's that interesting thing that happens on social media, whether you wanna call substack social media or not. Where I think we confuse being personal with being intimate, and I have a pretty clear sense of what the personal stories I'm willing to share are and what the intimate stories. I will not share R 

[00:26:36] Nicole Meier: right.

[00:26:37] Nicole Meier: Well, you're not disparaging anyone in particular. I mean, this is a very small right circle of people at the end of the day publishing. You will run into people in publishing that like I see or hear from people that I haven't talked to in 12 years and they're still in the business. So all the time 

[00:26:50] Miranda Whitmore: I know.

[00:26:51] Nicole Meier: Yeah, 

[00:26:51] Miranda Whitmore: all the time. People just show back up in your life. 

[00:26:55] Nicole Meier: Thank you. And you never know 

[00:26:55] Miranda Whitmore: how 

[00:26:56] Nicole Meier: they 

[00:26:56] Miranda Whitmore: will. 

[00:26:57] Nicole Meier: They really do. Okay. So I love that you're doing this on Substack, but you also, you're sharing some unpublished work of yours openly. You're helping people with their sort of plot problems. So can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:27:10] Nicole Meier: 'cause I bet there's people listening who want to get into your community. 

[00:27:14] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah, I love helping people with plot stuff and I am recently really making that into more of a business. It has long been a thing that I've done for many of my writer friends. Not to toot my own horn, but I feel like I'm kind of known.

[00:27:30] Miranda Whitmore: My group of friends is like the person that you send your book to and they're like, do you have time to tell me what I didn't do? Right? And so that's been really fun. And I think what's interesting about plot problems and outline problems in a book is that as the person who's approaching me, you have to wanna do that work.

[00:27:48] Miranda Whitmore: And it is a little humbling. It is gonna be work. So I think what's interesting about the work is that it's self-selecting for people who actually really wanna write a book. You have to kind of know what a book wants to be and kind of know that you have some of that, but not all of that in order to wanna work with me, which I think is kind of a hurdle that some people don't cross, and that's fine.

[00:28:12] Miranda Whitmore: But I will say that when we get into it and we start working together, there's this, this really exciting thing that has so far always happened. Where if the person is really open to doing the work, and I find that this is where it's interesting that money speaks if you're paying me to help you do the work, you are by nature interested in that work happening.

[00:28:35] Miranda Whitmore: And it was interesting as I tried to figure out like, what do I even charge for this work? Because it's not like book coaching, it's almost like therapy for your book. It's like me with your book. Advocating for your book to you and being like, this is what your book wants. Your book wants this, and it's all here.

[00:28:56] Miranda Whitmore: I see all the clues. I had this really cool thing happen with a friend of mine who's a screenwriter, and I read his script and he was like, I, this is the pilot for this show. I wanna pitch. And I feel like it's just like there's something missing. And there was this character in the pilot that just. It's kind of like this dangling character.

[00:29:13] Miranda Whitmore: He showed up three times, but he like wasn't doing much. And I figured out, I was like, the story is that this person is the last moment of the whole arc and your main character needs to kill him. And he was like, oh my God, you're right. And I was like, right, because that takes this little discrete pilot to the next level.

[00:29:38] Miranda Whitmore: You really want us to think that this man character has the capability to kind of like be dark and make a dark decision in pursuit of her dreams. So if we see her kill this person and believe that it's merciful, we will know that she has that. You're not having to tell us anything. And he was like, oh my God, how did you know that?

[00:29:59] Miranda Whitmore: I was like, 'cause he was just there floating around waiting for somebody to see him. And I think that that experience when you're in someone else's book, when you're working with someone else's plot, 'cause I've just done this for a long time, I'm able to see something that I think a lot of people can't see with their own book.

[00:30:17] Miranda Whitmore: But also, it's so fun to be holding someone's hand through that process and being like, I believe in you. You can do this. It's hard. You might have to rewrite the whole book and you don't have to do that. I'm not gonna make you rewrite your whole book, but then it probably won't be fixed. Right. So it's kind of like this fun, it feels like play to me, honestly.

[00:30:40] Miranda Whitmore: It feels like make believe. It's like taking kind of a structure that makes sense to my brain and offering it to other people as a gift to say like, do you wanna try this too? 

[00:30:50] Nicole Meier: Yeah, I love that. And just the aha moment you both experienced together. It's just immeasurable. I mean, I'm saying that 'cause I do developmental edits all long.

[00:30:59] Nicole Meier: It's so fun, right? It's like, yeah. And just when you see someone go, oh yes, I love that idea. Why didn't I think of that? And then they get so excited to get back to the page. 

[00:31:07] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah. Yeah. I actually had an intake yesterday with somebody and she emailed me this morning and she was like. For the first time in like months, I feel excited to work on this.

[00:31:17] Nicole Meier: Oh, 

[00:31:17] Miranda Whitmore: so great. That's that's so great. Like, that makes me so happy because like, 

[00:31:21] Nicole Meier: yeah, 

[00:31:21] Miranda Whitmore: that's what it should feel like. Like writing a book should feel like. It's not always easy, but it should feel in some ways, like a pleasure. Even on the days when it's hard, it should feel like you get to do something really special 'cause you get to make up a story and that's like play.

[00:31:39] Miranda Whitmore: And so I always feel like I wanna give that back to people who are kind of stuck. 'cause I think when you get stuck in revision or you're trying to fix something by yourself, sometimes you just get stuck like in a pretzel and you're like, I don't even know what it is anymore. 

[00:31:53] Nicole Meier: Absolutely. Okay. Now let's stay on that thread just a touch longer.

[00:31:57] Nicole Meier: I wanna talk to the people who are feeling a little bit excited or inspired by what you're saying, but they just are struggling. I want you to share maybe one thing that brings that hope back. We talked about like cultivating hope and that's your mission. What's something maybe hopeful you can share with writers right now?

[00:32:14] Miranda Whitmore: I think returning to a book that made you feel something like. How do I even, you phrase this like capacity, like a book that you read, even if it felt like a magic trick to you at some point in your life, and you were like, I cannot believe the writer pulled this off. Sometimes that can be a twist.

[00:32:36] Miranda Whitmore: Sometimes it can be just a beautiful stretch of writing. Sometimes it can be a character that you love or a love story. Taking yourself back to that place. Remembering that. That's why we do what we do is to give that gift to readers, I think can be so recentering and there of course, like the danger is then you compare yourself to that.

[00:33:03] Miranda Whitmore: But I think you have to try to, once you kind of have that vision of what the thing is that you're going back to, it can also work to like analyze it a little bit and be like, how did this person do it? Oh, right, I see. They're doing like they pulled way back and like the third person close became the third person really distant or like in a lens moment.

[00:33:26] Miranda Whitmore: Or you can say like, oh, these sentences are really short and choppy. But then we get to the part of the book that I love and in the sentences are like three lines long and very lyrical. It can also give you empowerment as a craft person to know I am. Good at this. Yeah. Acknowledge that Maybe I didn't have when I read this for the first time.

[00:33:51] Nicole Meier: Yeah. Reinforces your strengths. Yeah. And I just think that's such a great perspective. 

[00:33:56] Miranda Whitmore: Mm-hmm. 

[00:33:56] Nicole Meier: Okay. This has been really lovely and really fun. It's 

[00:33:59] Miranda Whitmore: so lovely. 

[00:34:00] Nicole Meier: Yeah. I want you to share with people how they can find you, where they can find you, how they could even work with you. 

[00:34:06] Miranda Whitmore: Yeah, so I have a website, miranda bw.com, and I have my plot solution is my substack.

[00:34:14] Miranda Whitmore: Find me in both of those places. You can always shoot me an email. My email is Miranda Beverly whitmore@gmail.com, and I'd love to hear from anybody who is interested in kind of next steps, and it's just really fun to talk to other writers. It's always such joy. I think it can be really intimidating to reach out to people, but I also just always wanna encourage people to actually talk to other writers and make friends with them.

[00:34:37] Miranda Whitmore: It's so lovely to feel in community and there's so little that writers have. Community is one of the best things. We have. 

[00:34:45] Nicole Meier: 100%. I've gotten big, bold letters. Yeah, it's true. Oh, Miranda, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. Thank you for having me. Yes, listeners, I encourage you to follow Miranda Connect and we'll see you next time on the whole writer.

[00:35:07] Nicole Meier: If you want to check out my coaching programs for fiction writers, visit nicole meyer.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.

[00:35:27] Nicole Meier: Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, happy writing everyone.