Episode 19 - “It’s Just A Challenge” Mindset, How to Approach Your Writing Problems Through This Lens, Meeting Self-Imposed Deadlines, Crafting Interesting Characters and Strong Opening Pages

In this episode, I talk about:

• Balancing giving yourself time to write the best book possible while also pushing yourself to meet a deadline that’s a little stretch (yes, both are possible 😜)
• How to make a plan for you to finish a draft by a certain date and how that can be useful in your process
• How to see the progress you’re making on your novel by breaking it down in smaller pieces
• Why it is important to diversify yourself as a writer, how it can bring you more stable income but also more joy in your career, as well as ways for you to do it
• How making your goal less specific opens you up for more hope that you can reach the life of your dreams
• How to find the recipe to write strong opening pages for any genre
• The steps to approach any writing problems as a challenge
• Get inspired by other stories to make sure your story innovates while still being in conversation with the works of your genre
• How woo-woo I am about characters and ideas
• How to craft interesting characters
• Why sometimes the best thing to do is to move away from the challenge

✨ Join the 5-Day Writer Hype Challenge! Five days of me hyping you up to get you so excited about your writing again and get you eager to go back to the page every single day! We start April 20th. Join here: https://stan.store/leftieaube/p/join-the-5day-writer-hype-challenge-c7bwq81j ✨

Mentioned in this episode:

• Support the podcast on Ko-Fi
• Horror Writers Association
• The Scholarship from Hell
• Follow me on Instagram or TikTok
• Join the 5-Day Writer Hype Challenge!
• Book one of my editing services or a writing coaching call with me here
• Subscribe to my newsletter
• The Haunting of Hill House TV series
• Victoria Aveyard
• Kristen Kieffer
• Well Storied
• Kristen’s Character Creation Workbook
• Ted Lasso
• Email me

Recorded on April 13th, 2026

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Try out Scrivener (my favorite writing tool ever, the one I use to write all my novels!): https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener-affiliate.html?fpr=leftie68

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Intro music credit: “Cinematic Cello Arpeggio Trailer” by Gregor Quendel, found on Free Sound https://freesound.org/s/555995/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Lift Yo-Based Writing Podcast, where I share with vulnerability and positivity my journey towards making all of my writing dreams come true. I hope you learn with me as I go from the things that go well and what doesn't go so well. But mainly, I wish it inspires you to pursue your own writing dreams. Now let's begin. Hello and welcome to Lefty Obe's Writing Podcast. I'm so happy that you're here with me today. The topic for this episode is it's just a challenge, and that's a mindset shift that I've done years ago actually working on my debut novel. And it made such a difference in how I approach every single problem, quote unquote, that I had with my novel, with also querying, writing query letters, synopsis, everything. And that's a mindset that I return to every time I stumble upon something difficult in my writing journey. It's not a problem. There's no problem with the story, there's no problem with me as a writer, as a person. It's just a challenge, and I just have to find a solution to the challenge and make up to it. Um, is that what we call? I always get confused because in French the word challenge, there's like it's relever different, and this word, this verb, relever, I haven't found really what I found is a good equivalent. So I'm always like a bit not really knowing how to do this, but step up to a challenge, I think something like that. But it's it's better in French. It's rare that I found there. There is a more precise verb in French than in English. But in this case, it seems like there's one, and there must be a cultural reason for that that I will not go into. Before we get into the episode, I just wanted to quickly remind you that there is a Ko-Fi page for the podcast. If you want to support the podcast and help to cover the cost so that it can remain free forever, you can go over and check out Ko-Fi and become a supporter. I have so you can do a one-time donation, so buy me coffee, or you can also become a member, and the memberships come with really cool perks, so you can go and check out what those perks are. And if you ever had an idea for a perk that I haven't thought of, just let me know. I'm always open to subjection. But you can go and check out there, and your support really means the world to me because there is cost associated to this podcast, even though I try to keep them down. So if you like the podcast, this is a beautiful way for you to show me that you enjoy the podcast. Now let's go into the update for this week. So two weeks because I didn't record an episode last week. The Monday was Easter Monday. This is like a holiday for us here in Quebec. So I was with my family. I still took time to write, which I don't always do on holidays, even on weekends, because I love to spend this time with family. But because it was a long weekend, I had spent a lot of time with my family, so I managed to sneak in some writing during the day, but I decided to prioritize writing my novel instead of recording the podcast because I already said that there would be weeks without an episode when I have the kids with me on Mondays. So that's why you didn't get an episode last week. So, since the past two weeks since I last recorded, I received another short story rejection. It's for the short story that I've been submitting for years and years and years, and it was the last one from a paying market that I was waiting on. I got a form rejection, so it was like, okay, we're done with paying markets for this story. I just want it published. I want to be able to share it with readers because I absolutely love this story. So I submitted it to what just one market this morning. It's an unpaying market who had already sent me a personal rejection letter before saying they liked my voice and encouraged me to submit again. And I knew it was really a personalized response because I had had previously a form rejection from them and they didn't include this little line. So I was like, okay, I will submit to them. And I really like this magazine, I like the vibe of this magazine. So I submitted this morning. It's a market that responds fairly quickly. So maybe by next week we'll know what it is about. But if I wanted to first submit to them because I enjoy them, and if they reject the story too, then I will go and submit it to more free market, just like wildly submit it. And hopefully before the year is over, I should have another story published, and I can't wait to share this one with you. It's called What Could Have Been, and I really love this story. So we'll see what happens with that. Also, last week I applied to the scholarship from Hell or two weeks ago, I don't remember. So I'm a member of the Horror Writers Association, and going to StokerCon, which is the horror writing convention. This is the convention to be. If you are a horror writer, this is where they host the Stoker Con awards. The Stoker Awards, yeah, Stoker Awards. It's been a dream of mine to go there. Like every year when it's StokerCon, I go on Instagram and I follow the hashtag and see people posting from there. I have friends who go every year, so I would love to go there and meet them in person. So that would be so amazing. But it's in the United States, so the costs to go for me as a Canadian are even higher than it would be of an American. So my budget as a mother with two kids just doesn't allow for me to spend that amount of money on a convention, especially given where my career is at. Like I cannot really justify spending that money. I'd rather go on a vacation with my family than go and spend like a lot of money on a weekend convention. But I would still love to go, and the Horror Writers Association offers a scholarship to bring a writer to Stoker Con, attend multiple workshops there because there is the horror university, I think that's how they call it. I can remember. But the OST workshop also to learn about the craft. So that would be so amazing. I could meet so many amazing writers in the horror community and just be immersed in this community for a weekend. That would be so amazing. So I've tried applying before, but I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna try. I'm just gonna try it and see what happens. So I applied and we'll see what happens. It's at the beginning of June. I don't even know when I'll hear back, but you know, we gotta try if we want things to happen. Also, I kept on making progress on my novel, of course. So I finished reading scene five of my novel. There is 62 scenes total, so the progress is slow indeed. I know now that it's because I'm thinking a lot about big picture things, so I'm not like worried about the pace. But I told my agent our new tentative deadline for finishing this draft and submitting it to editors, going out on submission with the novel, is beginning of September. Basically, that's the goal that we gave ourselves. And I was like, okay, at the pace that this is going, like, I'm not sure how we're going to make it out. So I decided to take a step back and just look at the numbers of scenes I have and just break it down with the time that I have to form a plan of work to finish editing it that would make sense with what I know I can do, but that's also pushing myself a little because like it's all good, and I still want, I say still want, but I don't even remember if I talked about this. But I did a post on social media, so if you don't follow me, I'm on Instagram, I'm on TikTok, and I post about writing content all the time and sharing about my journey and everything and the realization I have. So it's just an extension of the podcast in a way. So if you like what I do here, go follow me on social media. Well you will love it too. But I did a post about wanting to really take my time and write the best book I possibly can. It's the most important to me for reaching my goals of being a published author, of having a career as a writer. But also, I have time right now. This is the only luxury I have as an author that's not on deadline, who doesn't have a contract or anything, is that I can take my time. So I need to embrace this good aspect of the place that we are in my journey right now. So I want to stop like forcing and wanting to go super fast and really take the time to write the best book that I can. Now, this doesn't contradict what I just said. It's just that sometimes when you give yourself all the time in the world, you can take all the time in the world. So I feel like sometimes it's good to balance both taking the time that the book needs. So it means being flexible with the deadline you give yourself, but also giving yourself deadlines that push yourself a little so that you just don't slack on your goal, that you really commit and that you really put the time in and the energy in to make your dreams happen. So I think there is like a fine balance between the two, between you need to go, go, go, go, go and force too much and being too strict with your deadline when you know that the books require you to take more time. So that's not what I want to do. But on the flip side, you can say, I want to write the best books, I'm gonna take all the time in the world, and you can take way much more time that would have been actually necessary to finish the good book. So that's why I'm doing it this way. What I'm doing is I decided I want to finish reading the novel, taking notes on what I want to edit, think about the global elements that need to be really set and really figured out before I start editing and analyze with the story grid. So if I want this part of the editing process to be done by June 1st and I have seven weeks, it means about eight scenes a week. So I have like two weeks, yeah, that I need to do nine scenes, but for the rest, it's eight scenes a week. Now that's a lot given that my current pace has been like one scene a week. But I at the same time I know that it's possible if I really dedicate myself and really put myself out there, and I also know that the beginning is always slower than the end. I'm pretty sure the last 10 to 20 scenes I will be able to bang super quickly. It's always how it goes with my process. I made a visual plan that I share this morning in my stories on Instagram. That's why you need to follow me and check my stories. So I made a visual plan of my seven weeks, and I did some boxes for every scene I need to do every week, and I will cross them every time. So it's visual. I see the progress I'm making, I see how much I need to do. And if for whatever reason I see that I'm at week seven and I'm halfway through the scenes, and I know that I did everything that I could, like I didn't slack on it, I wasn't procrastinating or spending all my time doing something else. If I knew I really worked, really dedicated myself, and I'm just at half the scenes done, then I will just extend my deadline. It's not about forcing myself in. I don't know if it's the word in English. I don't know what's the word. Like it's not it's not about cutting corners. I will use this one because I don't know if it's the English word. Sometimes in French we use English words that are inappropriate to say in English, but we don't know because it's just an expression we have in Quebec and it doesn't mean anything to us. Like the F-word, like people say the F-word a lot here, and it doesn't mean anything to us, so it's not even a swear word. So I wasn't sure that the word I was thinking about could be like a swear word in English. So let's say I don't want to cut corners, it's not about cutting corners to fit with a deadline, but just to be sure that I'm pushing myself. So this is the plan for now, and after that, from June 1st to the first week of September, it would give me 13 weeks to edit the scenes, really change the words inside the scenes for my 62 scenes. It means four to five scenes a week. Now, this seems to be a bit pushing, like I'm really not sure I'll be capable of doing that. But for now, I'll still keep this deadline. I will see how it goes, and if I see that I'm really not up to edit that many scenes a week, I will just tell my agent and say, Okay, let's move it past. And also, I will have an idea of how many scenes I can do per week, so I will be able to give her a more accurate deadline, having the data of how many scenes I can work a week. But I think it helps to see it in numbers, so that's a tip I have for you too. Sometimes giving yourself a deadline saying, I want to finish my first draft by November 1st. Okay, how many words am I shooting for in this entire draft? Let's say you're shooting for 75, which is a decent amount of words for a novel. So let's say you're shooting for this and you have, I don't know, 10,000 words written, so you have to write 65,000 words from now to November. Then you can break it down in either weeks or days. So before I used to do it per day because I was always writing five days a week, so this was really stable for me. So in Scrivener, if you have Scrivener, you can actually say your deadline that you have of number of words that you want to write, your deadline and the days of the week that you're writing. And it calculates your target session of words every week for you, so it's really useful. But right now, because I have my Mondays off where I can do more work, and because I never know the rest of the week how much I'm going to be capable of spending on my novel, doing a call per week made way more sense to me. So that's why I break it down in weeks. But you can try to do that if you know that you can write two days a week, every week you can, and you have until November 1st, and you have this many number of words that you need to write, break it down, do the math, and see okay, how many words do I need to write every single day in order to hit my deadline? And you can adjust if you see that you're asking way too much of yourself and it's making you feel down. You can just put your deadline later. Or actually, if you see that it's quite easy to get the word count every writing session that you have, then you can say, I'm gonna try to finish two months before. Crank up this deadline and let's finish this sooner. So that's a trick that I almost do with every novel is really giving me clear deadline of okay, I have this to do, and that's why I love to break it down in scenes also in Scrivener, and I tick them when they're done, and I feel like it's really helpful to see the progress because that's the thing with writing a novel, it's so freaking long, there are so many stops, and it's so big that sometimes it feels like you're not making progress at all. So breaking it down into smaller pieces, smaller steps of the process, it makes you feel like you're progressing and it feels better. So that's what I did for my novel, and I will come back to that in the topic because that's what inspired the topic this week. But when I was reading scene three and four of my novel, I realized that there was a problem with one of my main characters. I still don't know really what it is, but the scene wasn't working because there was something fundamental about this character that I haven't put my finger on. Like, I don't know. There's something that's not working with this character, and I didn't know what it is. I still don't know fully to be honest. So I was like, okay, I need to figure out this character before I move on. And so I stopped and I worked on this, and that's where I decided, no, no, no, that's not a problem. You don't have a problem here, you just have a challenge. The challenge is figuring out your character. So let's stop and let's figure her out. So, in the topic part of the episode, I'm going to go deeper into that of how exactly I'm approaching the challenge and specifically how I did it for this particular pro not problem. You see, I was about to say it again. With this particular challenge of character, how did I manage to tackle it? So I'm going to share this in the topic part of the episode. If you ever like find yourself struggling with your characters, maybe that could be helpful. And last thing in my updates, this is really new. This weekend, I went to the Quebec Books Fair. I really love this book fair. Every year I go with my kids as a way to introduce them to books, to the world of publishing, to authors, make them meet author, talk to author. And also, like through the years, I made some contact by working in a bookstore with other amazing people who wanted to be writers who now are writers, so I get to meet them there, and also contacts that I made online through the years that are there at the book fair. So it's a French book fair, so I don't really go there with the intention of making industry contacts or anything because it's all in French and I don't read. I I was about to say much, I don't read in French at all since I started writing in English. So I'm not really up to date with what the current Quebec writers are doing. I'm not really in this world, but because of my kids, I am in the children's space for books a lot. Like I'm reading every evening with my daughter. We are doing reading times for her since she's now learned how to read. So I'm really in this space of the children's literature scene in Quebec. So this is what we were doing more. My kids always know I always buy them one book, and they can use their the money that they got at their birthdays to buy themselves another book. So they they choose really carefully which book they are going to buy, and they are always so excited to buy books there. And we meet with the author, we talk with them. So it's really fun. But I always go there, never with an idea of making connection or advancing my career in any ways. But this year I went with an open mind of maybe an opportunity could come out. I just said that, like I had no intention of really having an opportunity come off. It was just maybe it could happen. And two of the authors that I go that I know from either my work or social media that I talk to every year, I go and see them because they're always there, because they are both children's authors, so they release multiple books every year, so they are always at the book fair, and so I always go and talk to them, and every time it's just catching up. But this year I was okay, this is a sign. Universe and sending me a clear sign, but they both said, Why aren't you writing for kids? Like, you should be writing for kids. The market for kids is so big in Quebec. You have children, you are like in an interaction with the world of children's literature because you are in them with your kids, you're an author. The possibilities in Quebec for publishing books for kids is so big. Like, you should get in. They both said that. And I swear to you, I wasn't the one who brought it up. You know, I just I was just talking with them, and I don't even know, but we got to that point, both of them, and both of them offered to help me to get connections in the industry through their publisher and talk to me about like in Quebec, there is this program where authors can go to schools, go talk to kids, and I did that. I went to my daughter's class to talk about my job of being a writer because the teacher was just if there is parents want to talk about their job to the kids, we love to get parents. And I said, you know what? I'm not a professional writer, but I'm going to talk about what it is to try to be a writer. And before it was, oh my god, I'm going to discourage those kids so much. But it turned out to be amazing. And there was two kids, but one little girl in particular went to see me after the fact, and she was like, I want to be a writer. And she and she had her eyes that sparkled, and I could see myself in this little girl, and I was like, Yes, you can do it, do it. And she was like, Oh, I could see that her head was buzzing, and I was like, Okay, this little girl will remember this moment, like she will talk about this moment. And I was like, Oh my god, I love being there with the kids. So when he told me about this program, I knew this program existed, but he was like, You can get there, there is opportunity, you can make also money from that, but you can meet kids and you can sell your book there. And they both talked to me about this, and I was like, Oh my god, I loved talking in front of my daughter's class so much. I could do this with other class with other kids, and I love talking about writing, so I was like, Okay, this is a clear sign from the universe that I need to move forward. And I tried, I dabbled myself into trying to write a little story for kids in French, and because I am immersed in this with my daughter, it feels more natural to me to write in French for kids than it feels like I told you my translation journey, and I haven't heard anything about that, and I'm not expecting really anything out of it, and I didn't really enjoy. Writing for adults in French. But for kids, like I really found that it was cool because I really think it's because I'm immersed in this world and I'm hearing the words in French for kids every day with my daughter. So it feels much more fun and much more natural, too. So that's it. I'm saying it. 2026 is the year I'm also on the side pursuing writing for kids. I think there is a beautiful opportunity there. And I think it's important also as authors. This is something I've heard so much for so long. And I had been fighting for so long. As an author, I think it's super important to diversify yourself and diversify your income too. Because the income you cannot really predict it, you cannot plan on it. Sometimes it will be up, sometimes it will be down. And the best way to really make a career as a writer is to diversify your income. And I don't know why, but for so long I had this idea that you were only truly a real, real, real writer if you were only making money enough to live only for your books for adults. I don't know. That was how I was seeing it. But that's just putting a limitation on myself that doesn't need to be there. And so I think that's why, like with social media uh since January, I've been doing a lot more social media. I've been really loving it. That's why with the Course for Writer that I'm working on, a little reminder that the five-day writer hype challenge is coming up. We're starting April 20th, so it's really soon going to start. And it's basically a week of me sending you audios every single day that you can listen to while you do your chores in the house, driving to work, things like that. So it doesn't take any of your writing time. So you can listen to the audios during the rest of the day. But I'm hyping you up and getting you excited to get back to the page. So that's when your moment to write comes, you're really excited and you really want to go and jump in. So I'm going to give you mind sense exercise, but that you can do just in your head, like while listening to the audio. So it again, it doesn't take any more of your time. We're keeping all your precious time for your writing, and also little writing exercise, just tricks of what you can do to integrate to your work in progress to get you excited to get back and to continue writing it. But the main thing is really the audios where I hype you up. So if you like my voice in your hair, you can have an entire week of more audios of more of me in your ears, and you're going to be able to keep the challenge forever. So anytime you're feeling down, you don't feel so motivated or inspired to go back to the page, you can just go back into the challenge, re-listen to the audios, get excited again about your writing and about going back to the page. I'm really excited to host this challenge, and I cannot wait to have you inside. It's just $15 Canadian. So for you in the US, it's like close to $10. So it's a small investment for you, but I'm promising you that it will be worth it every dollar. I promise to over-deliver and get you so excited about writing. So this challenge is coming up, but this is too a way for me not only to diversify myself, but also to do what I love. And what I love is talking about writing. What I love is helping other writers. What I love is to teach too. That's what I found out when I was doing in my day job, I had a teaching gig come up about something super technical about my job that I don't really enjoy. But it was speaking in front of people and it was teaching. So I was like, yeah, get me a hand. I'm gonna do this. And I had a lot of fun doing that. And even though I really wasn't as passionated at all or motivated about the topic of the course I was teaching in my day job, people said they really enjoyed me as a teacher just because I love talking to people and also teaching. So I was like, I love doing this, I love writing, I love talking about writing, and I love teaching. So why wouldn't I do a course to help other writers and don't sell them? So it's all part of this, but also writing for kids. It could be super fun, it could be super cool, and it's writing and it's getting me closer to my dream of being a full-time writer. It's a way of diversifying myself and adding in the vision in the class for the kids. I'm like, it just feels so good and so great and so possible. While I'm still working, also, of course, on my novel. I'm never going to stop working on my novel in English for adult, my horror novel, because this is like deep down in my soul, this is what I love the most. But it feels like diversifying instead of stealing time away from writing my main novel, which before that's what it felt to me. If I'm working on this, I'm not working on this. Now I'm seeing it as a bit of an expansion. Like working on this can actually give me more time so that I can work on this. This being working on other projects could actually diversify myself and give me more time to then spend working on the project that's more dear to my heart, which are my horror novels in English for adults. So I'm really, really excited about all those projects and all the possibilities. And I think coming back from how I felt like my hope was so low. I think really again, and I cannot stress this enough, I feel like the problem before with the fact that my hope has eroded, it was because I was way too specific in what I was shooting for. Like it was like the only thing I could have was writing books in English for adult horror. That was the only thing that was available to me. And of course, it's hard to have like proof that what you're doing is working when you're working towards such a small target. But when you make your target bigger, then every step you're taking, you feel like you're going in the right direction because the target is so big. And it just feels better on a day-to-day to be working on all those things when it feels like it's all leading me where I want to go, which is a full-time career of doing what I love. And all of this, everything I mentioned, the podcast, the Instagram content, the course for writers, the the children's book, the visit in the class. This is all things that I love to do. And so if my life can be doing all of those things, then it would be a freaking amazing life. And it doesn't have to be just books for adults and just like going on book tour and signing books. Of course I still want that, but it doesn't have to be just that for me to love my life and for me to have an exciting life. And it just feels so great to see that I finally, finally see it, that there is a way for me. And making the target bigger also means the hope is bigger because I don't have to know which one of those things is going to be the thing that allows me, for example, to replace my income. I don't have to know, but I just know that somewhere in between something's going to work, and it's easier to have hope that one of the 10 things that you're going is going to get you where you want to go than one specific thing, you know? And it could still be, like at the end of the day, it could still be my second novel who sells and you get this big deal and who gets me to have the career of my dream. Maybe it's going to be that. But now I don't have to hold it so tightly as being the only thing that can bring me my desire, you know. So yeah, I'm really excited about all of this. So that's about it for my updates this week. Oh my god, I cannot miss another week. It makes for two big updates when I have two weeks of updating you about. And to say that I was worried that I wouldn't have anything to say if I was doing weekly updates. So before we get into the topic for this week, there's just one little thing that I wanted to mention too. So I've been running my newsletter for maybe when since I started recording the podcast again. So maybe a month, maybe more than a month. I don't know. I started this newsletter, and right now what I was doing was just telling people a new podcast episode was up, telling about the course. I talked about the five-day writer hide challenge. I talked about my editing service, also something that I didn't mention here. If you'd like me to read the five first K of your novel or your short story that's 5k or less, and give you feedback on it, either big picture feedback or inline feedback. This is something I now offer. I also offer one-on-one writing coaching calls. Or if there's something you're struggling with right now in your writing career and you'd like someone who's on the journey to who's been on this journey for more than 15 years, just to give you an outside perspective to discuss the issue with you. I would love to do that. So I offer also those coaching calls. You can go in the show notes, by the way. I will make links to my stance store. So this is basically where all my offers are. You can go and check that out. But I was mentioning those things I was offering my newsletter, and I was doing a small paragraph of introducing either the service or the course or the podcast episode. But I have no clear direction of and I also sent, yeah, my my overlook short story. I sent it in my newsletter. So I was using it a bit for everything and not having lots of purpose for it, but I was like, okay, I need to have purpose for my newsletter. So I decided to move the newsletter to once a month. I'm going to send out an email with some exclusive content in the newsletter. So this is going to be the place because it will be my personal space where my people only are in. I'm going to share my most vulnerable thing. And I've already started working on the first real newsletter that will be coming up later, maybe next week, or the other after that. I still don't know. But it's going to be a monthly newsletter with some exclusive content. The most vulnerable, the most personal, I'll be it's going to be inside my newsletter. And I'm also going to share after that the podcast episode that came out in the month. And also if there is any new course that went live or any other resource or service that I've meant available for writers, I will also mention it at the end of the newsletter. But the main part of the newsletter will really be this exclusive piece of content. So things I will not share on the podcast, things I will not share on my social media, it will be exclusively for subscribers. If that interests you, just go in the show notes, subscribe to the newsletter. I really felt like it was important to make something special for the newsletter instead of just like sending out anything and everything because I really value your inbox spaces. I know this is a very, again, more personal quote unquote private space that is the inbox compared to like just following someone on social media where you don't see everything that they do, which is bad, but you know, this is how social media works. But the email, you always see it. And so I really wanted to honor that space that I have for subscribers. So you can go and subscribe right now, and the only time I will break this once-a-month newsletter is when I have publishing news. So this is going to be the most exclusive place for publishing news for me too. So when I have a story accepted or a story published, either novel or short story or children's book, who knows? This is always going to be the first place that I will tell people about my news. So also, if you want to keep up with the newsletter, will always be the place. But those emails will be like super short. Hey, got a story accepted there. Or I have a story published there. So this aren't going to be big emails. But for the rest, like the real email will be the monthly one with exclusive content. So now that we're done with all of this, let's go into the topic part of the episode. So it's just a challenge, it's a mindset shift that will really help you to approach what we would call problems, what we will call things that are working, plot holes, things that you have to do but that are hard to do, like writing a query letter, writing a synopsis, writing a good first page. The first page of a novel is the most important one. If you're querying, like most agents will decide in the first page if they continue to read or not. It is the most important thing. And they are looking. I know it's harsh, but they are looking for a reason to reject your story, basically. And as soon as they find one, if this is this the second sentence that doesn't work for them, they will reject immediately. I know that it's harsh, but it's because they receive so many, they don't have a choice but to do this. Because if they were giving 10 minutes, 15 minutes to every submission that they got, they wouldn't have any time left for their clients. And their clients is the most important thing, of course. You would want your agent to spend more time on working for you than on their query inbox. So they need to go quickly. The first page is so important, and it could be daunting to say, okay, I need to write a first page that convinced an agent to keep on right reading, and it needs to be like basically perfect, otherwise, they're going to stop reading. It is really daunting. But if you see it as it's just a challenge, suddenly it's like, ooh, it's a challenge. Okay, let me let me take it up. I'm still unsure if that's what you say. It's just a really different way of seeing it. A problem, something daunting, something difficult. Your body contracts, like you don't feel like you want to do it. It has a bad connotation. Whereas if you see it as a challenge, like I was talking about in last episode of your thoughts hygiene, the way that you approached things, if you see it as a challenge, suddenly it's like fun, it's like a puzzle. It's just something that you need to find the way to solve, to resolve. Again, really not sure if that's a word, but I'm sure you're following me. It's a small mindset shift, but that makes all the difference. And one way that I'm doing this, when I'm confronted with something not working, something that I need to do that I don't know how to do, the first thing I always do is I go look at how other people did it successfully. So I'm talking about the first page because this is really something, and I'm sure with this novel, when I'm there, this is always the thing I do last because this is the hardest. And if you try to write the best first page before you write the last page, you will never finish. Write the fastest draft you can for your first page and then live it off to the end. I'm telling you. So when I go back and I really rework this first page, I know that I will have to redo this all again. But for my first novel, when I was like, okay, I need a strong first page. Also, that's why I offer the first 5k words of a novel as a start for editing because this is the most important part, and this is also the place where you see the things that you're doing that are not quite working. So I've worked with writers before helping them online and gave them feedback on their first 5k words, and they were able to apply what I told them in those chapters into the entire book. But anyway, I'm digressing here. What I did when I saw that okay, I need a strong first page, it's a challenge. I don't know how to write a strong first page. What I did is I went to novel in my genre that I'd been successful, debut, either in my genre or other genre. That's important because a debut is totally different than other novels in your career. I will need to do an episode about debutes because this is really a different beast. You cannot approach your debut the way that you'll approach your tenth novel. And that's why sometimes, as a writer, if you're trying to write your debut the way another successful author wrote their 10th book, it's not going to be the right recipe. So I looked at also debute that I'd been successful, and I looked at classic of the genre. So I really looked at a diversify, my all my favorite beginnings of novel, basically. I looked at I think probably 10 novel opening. And what's fun with opening too for that instance is you can go on Amazon, and there is always the first pages of every novel is available to view on Amazon. So I did some screenshot of the first pages, and I also like the book that I had physically. I did a screenshot of them, the book that I had on my Kobo. I also did a screenshot of the first pages, and I highlighted it. Okay, I highlighted interiority, description, dialogue, backstory, and action. Yeah. So I have I had five things with different colors, and I was highlighting okay, what's dialogue, what's backstory, what's interiority, what's description, what's action moving the story forward. And I did that for 10 openings of books, and that allowed me to see okay, the mechanics behind the beginning of books, so that I can then mimic the same things, and I will also immersed in that mechanics of the beginnings to find a way to make it work, so I could then apply the same. It wasn't the same, it wasn't exactly like everyone starts with inferiority and then a dialogue, and it wasn't exactly the same, but it it gave a flavor of what it should look like at the beginning, which I could then replicate in my story, and that's what got me 22 full request, three offers of representation. So I I think I I really managed to do a working first page. So you go and you analyze how other writers, if it's a challenge with structure, you can go and also check movies, TV series, like limited uh TV series like The Hunting of Ill House, my favorite ever. You can go and you can check there too for structure because it's faster to analyze a lot of stories. So I do that often with horror trope when I want to see a lot of the tropes play out and see the different ways. For example, at some point I was wondering about the false ending. So this is something that you have in basically every horror story will have a false ending, and I wanted to see the different ways that different writer and creator had worked with that trope to see how I could do it in an innovative way, but also by still abiding to the rules of the trope of the genre I'm in. So I used both movies, limited TV series and books. So you can do that too, and it helps you to see what others have done, and it then gets you inspired. And sometimes you will see that it can be the same thing. Like sometimes, what did I do? I was looking for when I was writing this novel, I was looking for how the hell do I make my characters win? Because in horror, like the monster is always so much more powerful than the protagonist. I wanted my protagonist to win, so I was like, How the hell do I make my protagonist win? So, what did I do? I looked at movies, TV series, books, and I said, Okay, how do they succeed at the end? How they defeat the big bad monster. And what I realized, to my surprise, but not really surprised, there was like a current under all the books I had analyzed, and it was that love was greater than the the evilness that was after them. Like love was stronger and greater than the thing after them. It was in every single book, even if it was played out differently, it was always there. So I was like, okay, my ending needs to be there too. Sometimes you will find things that are common in your genre that you can then be inspired to. And this is the way that when a reader reads your works, they will feel like it's part of the. I think it's Victoria Ayer who said that you need to be part of the conversation, and I think by abiding to those things that are always sort of present in your genre, it's a way of being part of the conversation. But this week's particularly, what I was striving for was character, like I said at the beginning of the episode. One actually, my two main characters. There is one that I know, like is someone I've known all my life, because this character has been inside of me for so long. I even fought her at some point because I thought she was the character of a literary novel, and I was like, You're not for me. Like, I I don't write this. Thank you for visiting me, but you're not for me because I'm super wooed. Woo with characters and sorry idea. If you don't know that about me yet, I should do an episode about this too. But anyway. So she came to me, she told me our story, and I was like, You're not for me. But she kept on coming back, and I was like, Thank you again. Because, like Elizabeth Gilberg say in Big Magic, you never want to offend the world of ideas. You don't want to be someone the ideas say that you're difficult to work with. So it's always thank you for visiting me, but I don't think you're for me. But she kept on coming back, and I had also had an idea to write a haunted house story. And at some point, like the two ideas collided the haunted house story with this character that I thought wasn't for me. And it felt like she was like, I told you, I told you you were the one who was supposed to write me. So that was a funny moment for me. So this character I know really well, but the better readers said that they had a hard time connecting with her because they can't fair, she has a difficult personality. To be bluntly, she's a bitch. But there is a reason why she's a bitch, and I think because I know those reasons, I love her, and also she makes me laugh. I think she's really funny. I love her personality, but I think I didn't manage to get her personality across in the novel in the execution, and I think that's why my first reader, my friends and my agents who read it, they didn't really get her because it was my fault. It's not the character's fault on the execution. I didn't do her justice to the level that I love her. So there was that, and my other character, I don't know her that much. I didn't even know when I had the idea that she was part of the story. It was really inspired as I was writing. I was like, okay, this needs to be a dual POV novel. She came to me, and then I was like, Oh my god, this is a story about friendship. So, of course, like she's super important because this is the story of their friendship, of the power of friendships. So this character became so important, but I didn't get her the way that I got my other main character. I didn't connect it with her as deeply. And I know because I'm super woo-woo, like she's a fully formed being somewhere. And I just need to get her, and I just need to connect with her. But right now I'm having a hard time really connected with her, and I think it again it showed in the execution of the novel. There is some things I know about her that made me capable of writing the entire novel. But again, my first readers, they were like, I'm supposed to connect with her because she's the one that will be most likely like the reader because she's more cool unquote normal, she has less problem, less issues. But I'm not connecting with her. So I know there is like some resistance there in the execution of the novel. So I was like, and when I read the two first scenes from her POV, the first one is like the scene that's less working in the entire novel. The second one is working better because the setting works better, it's around the haunted house, something is happening interesting on the page, which makes the scene interesting, but not my character inside the scene. It's just the scene that's exciting, not her in it. So I was like, there is really something there that I need to figure out. I wanted to get super discouraged because the characters are so important. I was like, oh my god. But I was like, no, no, no, no, no. It's just a challenge, just a little challenge I need to pick up. So at first I turned to Kristen Kiefer. She had a blog before that was called She's Novel, then she turned it into Weld Story, which was really about craft. So I had bought from her a resource on character creation. So I went back to this, made a bit of brainstorming with everything that she gave. It gave me a clearer idea of who this character was, so it was helpful, but something was still missing. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, so I said, okay, what I need to do, I need to go and see how other people did it successfully, like how my favorite character, what do they have that makes me love them so much? So I went to TV for this, and my favorite character ever are from Ted Lasso. If you haven't watched this series, I don't care about sucker at all, like not at all. And I loved this series so much, like it's my ultimate feel good series, but also the characters are really what makes this series work. It's so so so freaking good, and you love every single character in that series. It's actually amazing how much you get like you feel like those people are real person and you love them as your friends. So I was like, okay, let me go and analyze what makes those characters work so much. So I got on my paper and I wrote the name of every character, and I started to write down what made them who they were. And what I found out is what's interesting about the characters in Ted Lasso is that they have their dominant personality. So what you see first about them. For example, you have Jamie, who's like the big star footballer, he scores all the goals, and he's arrogant, he's confident, he has this big personality of I know I'm hot, I know I'm good, and I know everybody look up to me, and he has this big personality, but it makes him also, like they say in the series, a prick. Like he's also not the best person. But what he has underneath that we slowly discover through the series makes us love him so much, is that he's hiding a really like vulnerable, very lovable, very caring nature about him that you don't see when you first meet him, that slowly you uncover as you're listening to the series. And the first time we're introduced to that little side of him is actually true. Keely is his girlfriend at the beginning. And then slowly you see it more with other little moments here and there that show you that his real personality is far more complex than the first arrogant side that you see. And it's the same thing with another example, it's the same thing with Nate. So at first you see Nate is sort of the mouse archetype, like he's insecure, he has a difficulty speaking up for himself, he's really shy, not confident at all. So that's what you see up front. But deep down is hiding, like, first, like a genius in football. Like, he's really good at seeing the game and having tactics. So this starts to show, but he also hides a really arrogant side, not the nicest side, but had always been hidden because like it didn't have an opportunity to flourish. And at the moment he gets promoted and someone gets below him, so he was a kit man, and then he got promoted to assistant coach, and another kit man arrived, he started picking up on the kit man, and that's where you see this other side of his personality appearing. And now where I'm going with this is that the contrast with you have the big first personality, and he had also like this lovable personality to him. You see first this big first personality about a character, and then kind of hurly in the story, you see hints of this other tiny other part of their personality, you see hints of it, and that's what makes them interesting. And actually, every character I listed them out, they all have this dynamic of you have this first big personality, and then underneath is hiding a truer, not truer, it's not necessarily the real personality, but you have another personality underneath, and that's what makes it interesting as a viewer, as a consumer of this story, is that you see that the characters have all layers and they're just played out and they contrast with one another. I think this is also the thing. It's not just they have another side of their personality that we uncover, like this is almost always there. But I I think the fact that makes it so interesting is that it contrasts with the big one that we see first, but by showing it with other characters that are introduced later. So that's how it fits. It doesn't feel like it's breaking the character when this other side plays out, it just really feels like it was another personality hiding that they didn't fully embrace in themselves. So I use that, and I was like, okay, so if I have my two characters, I have their big personality, they're hiding a smaller version of the complete opposite. And which character allows this side of their personality to come up? And at first I was searching, searching, and I was like, bam, it's so easy. It's each other. When they are together as friends, they allow this other side of their personality to come up, and it actually made sense because they're sort of reversed. So you have my big arrogant bitch character who hides like a really insecure, lovable, caring part of herself, and you have my other character who has this big lovable, caring, not so confident part of herself, but who hides the really funny, confident, slightly arrogant personality, confidence in herself. She's hiding it. But when they are together, they allow to this other little side of their personality to come up. And I was like, this is what makes him going to make it interesting is that when they come together, we see this other side of them, and that's the scene that will really make my readers go, Oh my god, okay, I get it. And they are not in the same room until like maybe six, seven scenes in. So I will have some time to establish the first main personality, dropping little ints that they could have something underneath it, and then they will meet and we will get them more. But I could not have been there, gone to that place of understanding my character more and finding this way of making them more interesting if I hadn't gone through the work of analyzing characters that I loved to still see then, okay, this is what I'm going to do to make my character work. So, no matter the challenge that you face, you can always find books, movies, TV series that have done the thing you're trying to do well, and then you can go and see how they do it, and then implement the same kind of things because nothing is new. We're just recycling the same things over and over and over again, putting in our personal flavoring. This is basically how it goes. So don't be afraid of getting inspired by the other stories that go there. It's not stealing because you put in your own story, your own themes, your own universe, your own characters. This is still you, but it's just using how Hutter did it well. And now the last thing that you can do also in those moments where you're facing a writing challenge. Like I said, like I've gotten a better understanding with the exercise of analyzing the characters from Dead Lasso. So, but it still feels like something's missing, especially with my first scene where we see this character. I really feel like I'm not at the right setting, it's not the right moment, the right action. I don't know what this first scene where we see are, and I know how important it is. Like it's it's a new first scene, like it's not a first scene of the book, but it's the first POV scene of this character. It's so important. Now, as I'm saying this, I'm like, I should go and analyze. I'm going to do this. Okay. I should go and analyze in Game of Thrones again an amazing book with amazing characters who have multiple POVs. So I should analyze the first scene where each new POV is introduced and see what's the scene. I I will again, I'm not doing this just in my head. This is another part of this tip. I have a notebook that I had in school that I never finished, and it's my notebook. I write it with a pen, eraser, and I really do like I was doing a work for a class. I'm taking down notes, and I think the action of taking notes on the things you're analyzing instead of just thinking about it, I think there's something really potent into that because you can circle, you can make links, and at some point when I saw the idea that they have a small personality hiding from the big personality, like I was just making arrows, and it's so visual. Like for me, it's really helping. So, what I'm going to do, this is my homework for next week, which will probably get me behind on my goal, but that's okay. As I said, the important thing is writing the strongest book possible. I'm going to go and take Game of Thrones and write down okay, first time we see Aria, what's the setting? What's the action? What's the turn of the scene? What's going on? And I will do this for every character, and I'm sure I will see a pattern emerge that I will then be capable of using on my own novel to make it work with my setting, my character, my theme, my genre. So this is an exercise that I will do, and I will report next week on doing this exercise and seeing if it helped me to get out of this. But the last tip actually was not the exercise. The last tip was when there's something, a challenge that you have, and you've been doing your homework, you've gone and you checked out other writers approach the challenge, and you still cannot figure it out, ask. I ask my muse. This is the way that I work. Again, I should do an episode about my muse's plural, because this is a way for me, I don't know what exactly I'm talking to. So depending on your belief system, you can say that you're speaking to your subconscious, that you're letting it just marinate in your brain. You can say if you believe in something else, like you can say that you're giving it to your universe or anything, like really doesn't matter what you believe in. But just ask something other than your conscious mind. For me, it's my muse. Ask them to work on the problem at end. Say, okay, I have a problem with my character, I'm not sure I figure her out. I don't know how to introduce her at the beginning so that reader, love her. Help me with that. And then you step aside. Either you do something physically, like take a walk, train, take a shower, do the dishes, no headphones in, like just letting your brain work and don't think about it. Just do something else, not thinking about it. And also keep on working on your novel. That's what I'm doing right now. This morning I started reading the next scene. They put the two scenes, there's a little exclamation point in yellow triangle. This is an icon that you have. So I put this icon on the two scenes that are problematic that I don't know what to fix. And it was like, okay, I will come back to this later when the solutions come to me with trust that the solution will come to me. I asked my muse, can you work on this, please? And I work on something else, and I don't worry about it, trusting that the solution will come. So I think this is really important. I did this number of times for numbers of problems that I had in my writing, and the solution will always pop at some moment, and you're like, Okay, yes, I have it. This is the solution. And it did actually with the character. So with the story grid, you have the external value at stake and the internal value at stake. And my internal value at stake is about selfishness and altruism. And it worked really well with my main character, that's the bitch, because she's definitely super selfish at the beginning, but it didn't work with my other character. I was like, she's not really that selfish, you know. But I have to make them move the same progression of this value at stake because this is the novel. So they cannot be on their own journey with this, they need to be on parallel journeys with this value at stake. And I couldn't figure out how it worked for this other character, how the selfishness to altruism. And I was taking my shower, and this is the only time where I consciously think about it. And I was like, okay, what I'm going to do with this character, and then boom, it just came to my mind, and I was like, oh, of course, she's not helping others out of being selfless and out of altruism. She's helping others to prove herself that she's a good person because she doesn't think she's a good person. So I was like, actually, this is selfishness massive altruism. This is not real altruism. This is not real selflessness. When she helps someone, it's to prove something about herself. And I was like, oh my god, okay, there we go, we have it. And it was there already, and that's why I'm so woo-woo about stories, everything. I truly believe that everything is there somewhere. You can think that it's just in your subconscious, the story is all there, and you need to uncover it, but it was there all the time. Like I've written an entire novel that fits with this progression of this character going from masking as someone who's altruistic when actually she's selfish and going into true altruism. I've already done that, but I just wasn't seeing it consciously. And I think that with novel, it's often like that. Like things are already there, but you just have to consciously know what they are so that you can be more intentional with everything you're putting into the novel with the thing that you figured out what it is. So give yourselves time, work on something else, and I promise you the solution will come at some point. You might need to come back to it, you might need to do multiple exercises like I'm doing with my character. I will need to do the game of drum exercise on top of the Ted Less exercise to really find out what it is. But if you keep on doing this and you most importantly keep on having the trust that you will find the solution, I promise you you will find it. So that was it for today for me with the episode. So if you love the podcast, if you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe so that you know when a new episode is out. Rate and review. This is really helping other people to discover the podcast. And also, if you really enjoy the podcast and want to and can support me financially, you can go on Ko-Fi and support the podcast. I'm so, so grateful that you're here. Oh, and yeah, I'll let us know. If you're still here and you really like the podcast and you're listening every week, or even if it's your first one, could you just tell me that you listen? You can either yummy on Instagram, send me an email at info at leftyobay.com. Just let me know that you're there and you're listening. I love doing this podcast, I'm not going to stop, but it feels a bit like I'm talking to the void. So it would be fun to just know that there is another person on the other side listening and benefiting. It would be fun to know that you are a person existing and liking this. So please, if you want to, let me know. But otherwise, I'm going to leave you for today. Wishing you a lovely week of writing, and we'll see you next week.