101. Five Lessons Learned After 101 Books

After working on more than 101 books in the past year, Suzy has started to see patterns emerge. In this episode, she shares with listeners five valuable lessons and answers the question "Can you look at a rough draft and tell if the book will be successful?"

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Transcript

0:43

Welcome to the Show Don't Tell writing podcast with me, Suzy Vadori, where I peel back the layers of how to wow your readers with your fiction through nonfiction. Anybody can bang out a first draft, but it takes a little more work to make your book as amazing as it can be. Join me as I share the step-by-step writing techniques you could apply to your writing right away as I host successful writers who share a behind-the-scenes look at their own writing lives and as I live coach writers on their pages, giving practical writing examples that will make your own writing stronger. Nobody is born knowing how to write an engaging book. There are real and important skills that you need to learn. On this show, I cut through the noise and get you all the info you need. I can't wait to see how this information is going to transform your writing. Welcome, dear listener, dear writer, to podcast episode 101. I can't even believe how we got here, and I just want to take a moment and say thank you so much to all you who've listened and binge listened. Please go and download them all and let us know what you think in the comments. I'm just so pleased. When I started this podcast nearly two years ago now, I could never have guessed how many listeners we would have on a weekly basis. Keep 'em coming. We just have the best guests, and we have the most interesting topics, and I really want to celebrate with you all episode 101. And I know we could've celebrated 100, and it wasn't that we forgot. We didn't forget, but there's something about 101, it's Write a Book 101, that really called to me, and this is the episode that I came up with because I really just wanna talk to you today about all the things that I want you to know because this episode is both a love letter to you and it's also a cautionary tale about all the things that I have learned over working with the last 101 books. Now, I have worked- On hundreds and hundreds of books with thousands of writers in my programs, last year alone in 2025 and 2026 so far this year, I've spoken to over 150,000 writers in the communities that I'm a part of, and I am just so privileged to get this opportunity, but I also learn a ton, and that's why my job is so special because I get to work with so many different writers. And the lessons that I've learned watching these writers thrive, watching these writers struggle, watching these writers persevere and get their books out into the world, and seeing which ones sit and which ones take off and which ones affect their readers, I am somebody who thinks in patterns, and there are patterns, and that's what I'm here to share with you today. If you are writing a book, if you are thinking about writing a book, if you have already written a book, these are the lessons that I have learned over working with the past 101 books. Enjoy. All right, so I thought I had... At one point, I actually thought I might have 101 lessons, but guess what? There's five, and they are the most important ones. And of course, they encompass lots of other things, and I might ramble on just a little bit to make sure you really get it. But if you pay attention to these five things, your life as a writer is going to be golden. So the first thing that I wanna talk about, what I've learned over the past 101 books that I have worked on with writers, is that I actually can't tell from a first draft if that book is going to be successful or not. And what I mean is this, because I work with a lot of my colleagues who are editors and book coaches in the industry, and I, I haven't shied away from working with new writers. I work with a lot of new writers, people who've never written a book before. Maybe you're a new writer and that's how you found me. But a lot of people, professionals in the industry, don't, and they will take a look at a writing sample and they will decide, is this-- does this writer have what it takes or something? I'm not sure what we're judging for here, to be honest. Because I can tell you that as long as a writer is passionate about their topic and that they are committed to learning and open to trying, I can teach them, and that's not what's important, right? Spelling and grammar happens to be a superpower of mine, and I've got lots of theories on why that is, and actually, I really like it. Nobody will play Scrabble with me. I actually floated it this past weekend with my family when they asked me to pick the board game and everybody just looked at me like, "That's not an option, Mom." Because I will win. I will win every time, and I will be ruthless about it. But I really like spelling and grammar. So guess what? You don't have to because you can work with a strong editor who's interested in it. For me, I started elementary school in the United States, and then I moved to Canada, and I had to relearn how to spell, and I think that went a long way into... Because we actually spell things differently in Canada and in the UK and in Australia, even though we all speak English. And I think that's maybe surprising to some people who haven't had to straddle that. But I had to relearn a lot of things, and I became really interested in it. So I have a background in that. It's something I love to do, and I'm perfectly happy to share. But I can't tell from a first draft if that writer has what it takes. What I can tell is when I ask them to fill out their intake form and ask them why they're writing this particular book at this particular moment in time, if they have a good answer, if they tell me that book won't leave them alone, that they can't sleep at night because they're thinking about that book, I don't care where you're at with spelling and grammar, we're gonna get that darn thing written because you have an opinion, right? You have a point of view. And writing, believe it or not, is not something that we come out of the womb knowing how to do. It is not a talent. It isn't. It's not a talent. Anybody can learn how to write. What is a talent is your voice. What is unique is your opinion. And if those things are clear enough and you are willing to do the work, I will work with a writer. And sometimes even when we've done a couple of drafts or we're drafting a book and I'm like, "I'm not really sure," I've done enough of these to know that if the writer sticks with it, at some point, maybe it's the next deadline, maybe it's the one after that, I'm gonna get a scene from them or a chapter from them that absolutely blows my socks off. And guess what I do when that happens? I tell the writer, "You blew my socks off. I knew you had it in you." I've done this so many times that I know that moment is going to happen if we just hang on. There's sometimes a messy middle or a muddled mess of things to get through before we get there, but I know how to get a writer there, and now I just have faith that is going to happen. I also warn that writer that just because they had an amazing week, don't be sad if the week after we're back to that muddled mess with a different topic or a different section of their novel. Because again, drafting is just telling yourself the story for the first time, and there are real techniques, I'm gonna talk about that in a minute, that you need to learn, and having a strong coach support you on it means that you can just let go and be yourself and not worry about it. I tell writers, don't even stress, right? If they're embarrassed, if somebody-- if their third-grade teacher told them they sucked at writing We can carry a lot of trauma about that. We can carry a lot of trauma, and it's amazing to me how many writers don't write even though they really, really want to because they were somewhere along the line told that they sucked at it or they weren't good enough. That is not a thing. I can help you be good enough. I can't tell from a first draft that somebody submits which ones are gonna go the distance. What I can do is meet with that writer and see how much they want it, and challenge them to try and support them. I work with writers who have English as a second language. I work with writers who have all kinds of neurodiversity, including dyslexia. There are reasons that different people find the actual spelling and grammar easy or more challenging, and none of that matters if you have a story to tell. It just means that if something isn't your preference or something isn't your strength, you will have to complement your writing with somebody who can help you on that front, right? So the transformation that I've seen can happen for anybody, and all it takes is a great idea and the willingness to be open. So the lesson is from this, number one, it's a little long-winded. I'll try to be shorter on the next ones, but I feel really passionately about it and I think you can probably see it coming through. But it is not a talent. You can learn, okay? Get support. Get support. Anybody can write a book, and if you are frustrated because you haven't yet or you're comparing your first draft to that published novel that you just read that you thought was incredible, don't beat yourself up. Nobody, not even that published author who wrote that amazing novel that you love, did that on their first draft. It takes a team behind it, right? All authors, especially published authors, have agents, have editors, have other people working with them alongside them. Maybe they have a book coach. There's different paths, but you can get there if you want to. Okay, number two of the most important lessons that I have learned over the last 101 books that I've worked on. Writers need to give themselves permission. Sometimes they need someone else to give them permission, so here I am today to say that you have permission to be yourself, okay? This isn't that dissimilar from number one, but when you give yourself permission to really be you and not be perfect, th- that's when the magic happens because only you can write your stories. Nobody else in the world is exactly like you, and I like to tell students this when I go to conferences for young writers, which is I could give you each the outline for my next book, and I'm not worried that you're going to steal my idea because you can write it, but you can't be me. You can't write anything the same as I'm going to write it. That might be good or that might be bad. You could probably write it better But here's the thing, I could hand you my outline and we could go away and say,"We'll meet back here on the podcast in a year and you will read me your story and I will read you mine," and there won't be anything the same about those. And the reason is because you are unique and only you can write your story, right? There's only one you. And so give yourself permission to be yourself and to find your voice. We are not trying to emulate somebody else's voice. You do not need to emulate my voice. You do not need to emulate that published author that you admire so much. You can be inspired by it, but ultimately it's not going to be you. Only you can write your story, and give yourself permission. If you need my permission, here it is. You have permission to splash your ideas, your personality, your quirky characters, splash them all over your pages, right? Get it out there. Make it big. Make it weird. Make it as you or as your character as you possibly can. You can always dial it back later, but have some fun with it at first to find your voice and to find that balance, right? If it's all over the map, you might need to dial it back and make it make sense within the context of a book, but don't be afraid to play. This is playful. This is fun. Stop trying to make your book so professional that it could be published in The New York Times tomorrow, right? Again, that's what your editors are for, to help you level that up and to make sure that everything looks the way that it should, quote-unquote, in the end. But your voice, that specialness that only you can bring, you need to play. You need to get out there and you need to make it big, make it loud, make it you. Okay, number three, and those of you that work with me and in my inner circle, you know this one well. Here's a lesson I have learned over 101 books. It all has to get done. And what I mean by that is every single thing, not just new writing. And so many times writing coaches or newer writers are focused on things like word count and drafting and am I done my first draft, and all of the things. But there's a lot more to writing a book than just that first draft. There's also revising and straight up editing and there's, you know, executing each little thing that you think needs to happen. And guess what? Writing a book is actually pretty hard. It takes an immense, immense amount of concentration, of willpower, of imagination, and time. And if you think it's going to be easy, then I'm not going to dissuade you if you haven't written a book yet, because maybe if I tell you how many hours it actually takes, you won't do it. It's one of those things like giving birth to a child, where if somebody had told me, then maybe I wouldn't have done it, right? But the thing is, it all has to get done, is something that I wish that I could bottle and actually give to you, and you could drink it, and all of a sudden you'd know, ugh, it all has to get done. Here's how it shows up if you are not understanding this. It shows up with resistance. It shows up with hours and hours spent sitting, staring at your pages going like, "Ah, I feel like there's this big revision, and if I just were to delete chapter five and move chapter 10 to chapter two, it would fix it, but that seems hard, so I'm gonna sit here instead and think, You know, Suzy said I should do it, or my critique partner, or I know in my gut, but really, what if I just published it anyway? Nobody will notice, right?" I can guarantee you they will notice, and if there is something that you know needs to get done, you need to do it. And this is the funny thing, because writing book two is often a lot faster than book one, and yes, it's because you learned all of the things, sure, and you know what you're doing, but also it's because you spend way less time because your body is now conditioned to not fight you on it and just say, "You know what? It all has to get done. I'm just gonna do it," and you spend way less time wondering if you should. So let go, right? If you're sitting there going like, "I know I need to do this thing," just sit down and do it. But also notice that it's not just drafting. It might be something in formatting. It might be something grammatical. You know, it's not uncommon for writers to be really bad at dialogue punctuation. It's the one that I see forever, and it took me forever to learn it, because it's not what you learn in English class necessarily. We do it differently in novels, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's one of those things that I understand it, but if you don't understand it, don't beat yourself up, because most writers don't. It's the only grammatical lesson that I actually teach in my courses, because unless you learn the parts of speech and understand that there's a difference between a dialogue tag, which is he said/she said, and now I'm giving a grammar lesson, which is not what I meant to do here, but I can't throw it out there and not teach it, right?'Cause I want you guys to have that information. Or an action beat, which is she smiled, she leaned, she did whatever. That changes what kind of punctuation goes with- inside the quotation marks, and if you don't know the difference, and you feel like it's arbitrary and it's always being corrected or it's always wrong, it's because you haven't learned the difference between a dialogue tag and an action beat, and if you figure that out, that is the key, my friend. So, but maybe you have to go through your entire manuscript and do that. That's gonna take you many, many hours to do. It is finicky, and Grammarly can't do it for you. None of the autocorrect can do it for you, because they can't see the difference between a dialogue tag and an action beat, and it's really hard. Now, as grammar goes, and as spelling goes, if enough people do it wrong, eventually it'll be fine, and they'll change the rules, but for now, you need to learn that one So if all has to get done and there are sort of nitpicky tasks like going through and checking for your filter words or filler words or fixing a grammatical mistake, notice what you like, notice what you don't like. I could revise all day long, but drafting is hard, and I actually have systems for myself when I am drafting something new. I often will go to a coffee shop or at least leave my house. Editing is fine or revising is fine. I can do that in my home office'cause it feels like work. Drafting feels like play. Drafting feels luxurious. Drafting feels sinful almost, I like it so much. And so I have a hard time doing it at home because there's other people's work to work on, which is more serious than my own. So I make sure that I give myself a lot of time and space, and as my good friend Michelle Hazen and writing coach likes to say, "Give yourself a long, luxurious warmup to ease into that and you're in good shape." But it all has to get done. When you get later on in the writing process, you're gonna have other activities that aren't drafting and aren't revising, such as marketing and contacting people and sending out newsletters and recording podcasts, whatever it is that you end up doing as a writer. And you don't have to do all of those things, by the way. Pick one or two things that you actually like doing and do those. For me, I like sending newsletters to you once a week, and I love, love, love doing this podcast. That's all I do. You won't find me very often on social media. We do post things. We kind of direct people back to, you guessed it, the newsletter and the podcast. So keep it tight, right? But those things have to get done as well. So notice your patterns. When do you like to do those things? Which ones-- When are you having the most energy? Save that for your drafting or revising if you hate revising, right? And then the other pieces, slot them in on times when you're not feeling so creative. You can go through and do a mechanical task like formatting your novel, okay? Or numbering the chapters. It all has to get done. Give yourself credit. If your only goal in writing is finish the book, you're going to be disappointed week after week after week that you didn't accomplish it. Make your goals much smaller. There are a lot, a lot of things that go into writing a book. Make sure that you notice them. Make sure that you make a list, check them off, and celebrate, because every single thing that you've done brings you one step closer to that bigger goal of finish the book.

Okay, number four: 20:34

There are good and real skills to learn. Okay, you can notice a theme. These aren't that dissimilar. When I sat down to write these, I could see they all kind of bleed. Just like when I teach writing theory or writing technique, a lot of the techniques actually look the same to me after a while because they're all in service of the same thing. And in fact, that's part of this good and real skills to learn. What I teach, usually most of what I teach revolves around your reader. Okay? It's also why are you doing this? What do you bring to the table, what it is that you wanna say? But we also flip the script and look at the reader, because there are ways, and readers' brains work a certain way, and if you figure out how to tickle their brains with your writing and how to get through to them, then they'll like your writing more, but they may have no idea why, and they may not even understand what you did. Even if they're professionals, they may not understand it. But we inherently like or dislike things. It's not actually that subjective. It isn't. There are actual techniques that will make your reader like your reading more or writing more, that will make them experience it in a different way, like show, don't tell, and all of its sisters and cousins within the technique world, the writing technique world. It's helping them experience it in a certain way, and also reducing friction and making it easier for them to understand, and making sure that your ideas are very clear. There is technique behind that. There are ways to do that on the page. So if you have a great idea, I like to say it's like playing the game of telephone, and I'm sure you've played this game. Yes, the children's game where you whisper, whisper, whisper all the way along the line, and the object of the game, in theory, is to get your sentence all the way to the end of the line without having changed it. Of course, it's a children's game, and it's a lot more fun if it makes absolutely no sense at the other end of the line. But that's not what we want as writers. We want your writing to get all the way to the end of the line and for readers to actually see and hear and experience what it is that you were trying to say. Because if you don't take the time to learn how to translate what's alive in your brain onto the page in a way that's going to work for readers, guess what happens? At the end of the line, they hear something completely different, and that's where you get a one or two-star review, and writers are often surprised by this. But i- if that happens, know that they are not reacting to your awesome idea and rejecting it and saying that it wasn't a good idea. I bet your idea was great. It was enough to keep your attention as you wrote it, and it was enough that you put all the love and attention into your book. But if they didn't see it and they saw something else because you haven't learned the technique to get it into their brains the same way it looks for you, they're actually reacting to that different message. They're not reacting to you. So it's a different way to look at those, those negative responses or the kind of lackluster-- If you're not getting the response that you want, my guess isn't that- Your ideas are bad. They're not. My guess is that you haven't either found the right teacher that's helped you figure out how to translate your voice, or you haven't taken the time to learn the skills because you think that we're born this way and we can either write or we can't, and it's a talent. I'm here to dispel that myth. 101 books, 5,000 books, I don't know how many books I've touched over the last decade. It's a lot, at least in part. But every single one of those books started out with a draft that wasn't clear, and every single one of those writers who put in the effort and eventually got it to the end of the telephone line and shared what it was that they wanted to say, those are the books that are successful. Those are the writers that have the best experience starting a conversation with the world because it's the conversation that they wanted to have, not a conversation that happened because they didn't actually communicate what they meant to. Okay, I'll get off my soapbox for a second and just say this, that number five is probably the most important one because people come to me all the time and they wanna know, "Is my writing good? Is my writing good enough? Can I make it as a writer? Can I make a million dollars? Will I sell five million copies? Will I be on big stages? Will my book be a movie?" Here's what I can say, 'cause I don't know. Remember I started this out by saying I can't tell from a first draft if that book is going to be the one that is successful. I can't tell. What I can tell you is that every single writer that I have ever worked with, whether their book became a bestseller, whether they got a six-figure publishing deal, some of them do and some of them don't, and some people decide not to finish their books, and some people decide to finish their books and do something different with it or not publish it, right? These are all valid choices. In particular in memoir, sometimes that happens because ch- circumstances change in your life. But I can tell you that every one of those writers, whether they are wildly successful financially or whether they just got to the end of the book and decided that was enough, every single writer tells me that writing a book changed their life Now, I, I just want that to soak in for a minute because if you're kind of on the fence, I can tell you that the process of writing a book will change your life. I don't know how. I'm not clairvoyant. I don't know the answer, but I can tell you that I've seen it thousands and thousands of times with writers where the process of writing, doing this very difficult thing, answering the call inside you to actually do this hard thing called writing a book, and then learning the techniques and starting that conversation with the readers, and thinking about their readers, and organizing their thoughts, and exploring what their characters explore, and putting their own personal time, energy, personality onto the page, it has changed their life in ways that they don't even-- You can't imagine when you start. I've seen people launch speaking careers around the topic. I've seen people work things through that they didn't know that they were writing about, and I've seen people's relationships with those around them change, and their voices change, and their confidence change. Maybe their jobs change. Maybe they became full-time writers or maybe they just realized that they had skill and they could take that skill and do it somewhere else. The keynote that I give when I go to schools is actually around that, that writing is not necessarily just to get good marks in school or to write a book. Those are the byproduct. Nobody ever told me that writing could be a job, and I went off and did, like, really cool things for 20 other years before I quit to finally do what I wish somebody had told me I could do in the first place. But the only skill that I had, my resume looks like a mishmash of crazy things. Like, how did you do those things, Suzy? I worked on Wall Street and I, um, worked in technology during the tech bubble, and then I worked in manufacturing and I managed factories in China. I got to do all kinds of things and travel all over the world. I held executive positions at really cool companies. How did I do that? My skill is communication and my skill is writing and being able to get those ideas that are alive in my brain or listen to what's alive in, in the room or with my colleagues and be able to communicate that in writing without getting it to the end of the telephone line and having it all screwed up. That is a talent that is going to change the way that you operate in the rest of your life as well as your book. So if you're feeling that call, you don't know what doors it's gonna open. I hope you get that six-figure deal if that's what you want, and I hope that it also starts a conversation with the world about something that's really on your heart that you know in your heart that you were meant to do. Whatever your goals are, I am here to support you. The Show Don't Tell Writing podcast is here to support you, and we hope that these episodes help you see what's possible for you, your writing your book, and for your life beyond. So I think you can probably see why I said at the beginning of this episode that this list of five is actually both a love letter to you because they're things that I want you to learn so that you can make the choice to write your book or the process of writing your book so much easier, faster, all the things. Sometimes just calling it out is really helpful to know that you're not the only one that's struggling with these things. But it's also a cautionary tale because writing becomes a way of life. And once you get good at it, it is going to bleed into every single aspect of your life in a good way and open doors that you haven't even thought of yet. Happy writing. Thanks for tuning in to the Show Don't Tell writing podcast with me, Suzy Vadori. It is my absolute honor to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing or the book that you're planning to write. Please help me keep the podcast going by helping people find us. You can subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening to show how much you enjoy the show. That's how other listeners will find us. Also, visit SuzyVadori.com forward slash newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you'll stay inspired and be the first to know about all the upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community. Want my eyes on your writing? Submit a page of your current draft for a chance to come on the podcast at the link in the show notes. I'd love to chat with you about your writing in my always positive, incredibly supportive way so that you can make great strides towards your writing goals. I'm here to cheer you on. Remember, that book you're writing is going to open doors that you haven't even thought of yet. And I can't wait to help you make that it the absolute best it can be. See you again right here next week.