Your Purpose

In this week's post where I reflect on finding the balance between full time work and staying consistent with your creative endeavors, I wanted to talk about purpose.

I've done a lot of research on archetypes for my writing and it's interesting that when examining these archetypes, finding purpose is a core aspect in what drives us as humans.

In a post-modern liberal society, the idea of finding your purpose can feel a little trite or even oppressive, depending on the context. But at our core, every single one of us wants to make an impact, to be remembered, or feel like we're being true to ourselves.

Our species also tends toward the grandiose, which is why so many of our superheroes are saving the world and not just their neighborhood (thanks Spiderman). But our purpose doesn't need to be something grand and heroic for it to be valid. Your purpose might be writing music, or being a good spouse, or being the best Scrabble player in the tri-county area.

Your purpose can be whatever you want it to be and it doesn't have to matter to anyone else. You should know though, you may have long ago chosen your purpose and you don't even realize it.

Now if you're a creative person who loves working on your art, you probably already know what your purpose is. I know mine is to write silly stories that make people feel good.

If you don't know what your purpose is, and you're reading this post and your heart is making the Pikachu face, let me give you a few tips:

- Your purpose is usually related to what you're afraid of. It's something you feel resistance about doing because you know deep down you don't want to fail.
- Don't get caught up in hustle culture, it took me a long time to stop defining my success with my purpose with the financial success my writing was bringing.
- Think about things you used to do when you were younger that you don't do now. Take a weekend and pick it up again, if you feel nervous or stupid before you try it, but then feel good afterwards, those are some strong hints.

Why is this important? Well, my therapist told me that he has a lot of clients of people in their forties or fifties who on paper have successful looking lives. A family that loves them, a great job, but suddenly they're having panic attacks and don't know why.

Now obviously there are likely more factors than any one thing, but he told me that it always comes out after a few sessions that they gave up guitar twenty years ago, or they stopped volunteering, or whatever. But when they started bringing these things back into their life, it usually made a difference.

Don't let your purpose go by the wayside in pursuit of the other things we're supposed to do.

If you'd like to know a bit more about some of the archetypal energy that drives you, I made a fun little "choose your own adventure" style personality quiz that will help you explore some of those drivers.

Feel free to check it out here: https://lnkd.in/g-Ei5tY8

Inspiration Spotlight: Jane Austen

For this week's reflection where I talk about finding the balance of working full time and making time for your art, I thought I'd also honor International Women's Day by talking about a huge inspiration of mine, Jane Austen.

Being the son of a mother and a brother to four sisters, Jane Austen has probably been one of the most significant author figures in my life.

At first, her significance in my life was by osmosis - just being nearby when an adaptation of hers was on TV. Then it was through resistance - with my pre-teen wittle masculinity groaning when it was "period romance night" and leaving the room. Then, it was faux-resistance, where I groaned but would say, "Ugh, I mean I guess I'll watch it too" - especially if the adaptation had an actress I had a crush on in it.

But over time, that resistance faded. The 2005 Pride and Prejudice was genuinely an inspiration in my love of movies and in wanting to go to film school. Fast forward nearly twenty years later and I've read every book Jane Austen has ever written, some more than once, and was told by an English professor that I "write about Austen with verve" - which is still some of my favorite feedback I've ever received.

There is so much that can be said and has already been said about Austen's timeless humor, brilliant characterizations, and tantalizing story arcs. But so many have no idea about how much of a radical she was.

If you're already a fan of her writing, I invite you to pick up an annotated version (I recommend the Norton Critical Editions) of one of her books, where you'll see footnotes explaining context on just how often she was criticizing class and gender dynamics, and how often she was making fun of real public figures, other authors of the time, or even subverting common writing tropes in extremely clever ways.

Whenever I read Austen's prose, I get excited about my own writing. And in the end, participating in art is one of the easiest ways we can get excited about our own art, especially when we're exhausted after a long week of work. So thanks for reading my first reflection where I spotlight an inspiring figure in art, I'll do more of these in the future, and not just with authors, but with filmmakers, artists, and musicians.

Keep working on your art, you outlaws. And always remember to live your life in such a way that Jane Austen would never have reason to invent a character based off you that was either a buffoon or a villain.

The Money Talk

For this week's reflection on balancing working full time with my art, I'm going to talk about money.

Today, I overheard a coworker talking about an art class she's taking where they're working on an assignment building out budgets to help them prepare for a life of poverty.

Pragmatic? Yes. A huge bummer? Also yes.

I've based a lot of my life decisions off of that same pragmatism. I've tried to find the balance between working hard enough to build a skill in something that would help me to not deal with poverty, but also something that doesn't require most of my creative energy.

I purposely eschewed jobs related to writing because I knew that I would only get frustrated I was spending so much time NOT working on my own writing.

I once went back to school to become an English teacher because I figured summer break would be a great way of getting a lot of writing done, even if I was certain the rest of the year would likely be emotionally draining enough I wouldn't get much done. Then covid hit and I realized being a teacher was probably a bad idea - but that's another story.

My entire adult career, I have made all of my decisions filtered through the lens of how much it will impact my writing. I've tried to be smart about it all, and you know what?

I regret not being more brave when I was younger and betting on myself and my writing, rather than committing so much time toward a career that was always a plan B. I'm betting a number of you feel similarly.

But, we all make choices that put us on a road, and even if I'm not in a place where I can afford to step back and take more of a chance on me, I've been working towards a day when that can potentially be an option again.

So yes, it's depressing that we are teaching our young artists to expect poverty, but we have to play the hand we are dealt. There are still strategies and ways we can push for time for our art. Yes, it gets tiring, working to make rent, only to then push yourself to spend so much of your free time working on your art.

But what are you going to do? Give up on your art? Nah. I'd rather be a failure than a quitter. Plus, I 100% believe that I'd have a harder time at work if I wasn't keeping my well full with the writing projects I'm excited about.

So keep working on your art, keep narrowly avoiding bankruptcy, and keep the faith. Your art makes the world a better place just through the act of creating it. And if that's not a leap of faith, I don't know what is.

Feedback is a Skill

For this week's reflection on balancing your creative endeavors with working full time, I wanted to talk about feedback.

Wednesday night I met with my writer's group to go over some pages of a short story I've been working on.

And let me tell you, they had a TON of feedback for what I'd written. I was honestly surprised at just how many suggestions they had for how I could improve. At the end of our discussion, I had pages of notes.

Looking back, I would have struggled with this kind of feedback. The fact that 99% of it was constructive and not necessarily positive would have upset me. I dreaded days in college when my screenplays were due to be read in class and I'd have to sit there silently while I received feedback, both good and bad. Same with performance reviews at work - it was hard to ignore the blood rushing to my face, feeling my ears get warm as I sat in my embarrassment during these reviews.

But there is a difference between feedback given by people who are truly invested in you and your growth, and those who aren't invested. They may still be trying to give feedback from an authentic place with an intention to improve, but you can still feel the difference.

Wednesday night, even though my writer's group had A LOT to say about how I could improve this story, I could detect the passion and excitement beneath their criticisms, as they could see the potential with what I was trying to build, and they were energized in helping me get there. So even though there was a lot to be improved, I felt energized and ready to revise when it was over.

Being a writer has helped me immensely in giving and receiving feedback, but also in recognizing helpful, solution driven feedback, and unhelpful, maybe even harmful feedback. It's a skill I'm glad I have, even if gaining it came from being put in quite a few situations I was uncomfortable with.

But also, don't write off the feedback you might initially think is unhelpful. As I learned in screenwriting, sometimes even if you disagree with the issue someone brings up, take a second look at the section they're pointing out, because there might be an issue there worth addressing, even if their diagnosis is incorrect.

Keep creating you wild bunch of outlaws.

Finding the Nuance

Let's get theoretical for a moment.

In this week's writers roost, I wanted to talk about the purpose of art.

For this, you'll have to bare with me and read some longer paragraphs than you're used to seeing on our LinkedIn feeds. I mean, we all gotta eat our vegetables and read paragraphs sometimes. So let's get to it.

We all know that art can help us see the world in a new light. Whether a film’s camera angle of autumn leaves blowing on a sidewalk helps us notice that moment the next time we experience it in our life, or how that song that's hitting just right can help us feel so many things. We can better understand this power of art by turning to some ideas from a literary theorist named Viktor Shklovsky.

Shklovsky’s argument about the power of art stems from the idea of automatization, which is the process by which our minds automatically filter out the routine actions we make every day. We've all had those times when we drive into work, put our car in park, and realize we have no memory of the actual drive. We're so used to it our brains tuned it out. Shklovsky claims that this is “how life becomes nothing and disappears. Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war."

Sit with that thought for a moment.

Scary right? But how do we fight this tendency? According to Shklovsky, it is the enstranging power of art that jolts us out of our automatization and allows us to experience whatever idea is being represented precisely through the way it is presented:

“The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things." To Shklovsky, enstrangement is the core function of art. By “not calling a thing or event by its name but describing it as if seen for the first time, as if happening for the first time," art breaks us out of this numbness from the routine and gives us life again. Helps us see again.

There's even promising research showing measurably how this happens in our brains.

This is where we come to a quote, from the movie Stranger than Fiction:

“As Harold took a bite of Bavarian sugar cookie, he finally felt as if everything was going to be ok. Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren't any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true.”

Now that you want a sugar cookie and a hug, remember that so many things can break us out of our automatization, not just art. Schklovsy believes that’s the sole purpose of art - to break us out of that automatization. But I believe that both participating in art, and creating it, are some of the most powerful ways we can break out of it as well.

So that's the post and my point. No, my dumb stories and the art you make are likely not going to literally save a life. But I know that working on my art sure felt like it did for me. Keep working on your art, keep watching movies, find time for nuance. And be excellent to each other.

The Buddy System

For this week's reflection on balancing work and your creative endeavors, I wanted to talk about the buddy system.

I am an introverted person and like many of us, COVID made me even more so. I've been trying to break out of that state of mind and be more social in general, but hoo boy is it tough sometimes.

The reason I bring it up is because when I was first making real moves on wanting to become an author, I asked a New York Times bestselling author if he had any recommendations for a writer just starting his career. He told me to "join or form a writers group, and stay in it."

Whether your chosen creative endeavor is writing or painting or cross-stitching, one of the best things we can do to keep us accountable is to join a group of like-minded people.

I've been part of a writers group of folks I met in college for I don't even know how many years now. I can honestly say that I don't think I'd write nearly as much if I didn't have their support. Plus, sometimes when none of us have pages to discuss, we play D&D together. Win win.

Almost any contemporary writer has some form of group they write with to keep them accountable and motivated, but this isn't something unique to writers. There are painters clubs, wood working groups, and many more for just about everything you can think of. With virtual groups becoming more common, you don't even have to stick to local chapters if you find an online community you feel more comfortable with.

I genuinely believe that if you're struggling to find time with your creative endeavor, joining a group that aligns with your goals will make a huge difference. So bake some lemon bars and put yourself out there you artistic gremlins!

The Outlaw Method

For those who don't know, I made a goal to make weekly reflections on finding the balance between working full time and finding time for our creative endeavors. It's a balance I still haven't quite found, but like all of my writing, my primary audience is generally myself.

But this week, I was thinking about why when I originally started these reflections, I called them Reflections from the Writers Roost. It's a play on words for Robbers Roost, the hideout for Butch Cassidy and other outlaws of the old west. Because honestly, sometimes making sure I take time to create feels like an act of rebellion - especially in a world where when we're not working, we're usually consuming content.

Again, I struggle to find the balance. Yesterday, when I finished working, I played video games all evening. I was the perfect little worker/consumer. And as much as I love TV and video games, and fully intend to continue participating in that content - I don't want to just be a consumer in my downtime.

And that's it. That's the reason. Creativity is its own reward, but when all I want to do after a long day of work is veg and play Baldur's Gate 3, I can sometimes trick my brain into fighting that complacency by pretending I'm a rebel for doing so. An outlaw for the sake of art.

Is it dumb? Yeah, but so is most of the stuff I write. I love dumb stuff. But that little extra bit of dopamine cosplaying outlaw helps me to feel extra good about making time for my art.

So welcome to the Roost. It's more a state of mind than a place. But it's a hideaway from the law, where you can work on your art in peace.

Thinking About Writing

In this week's writing reflection, I wanted to talk about how I've learned to nurture my art during those times when work is occupying most of my mental bandwidth.
 
You know what I'm talking about. Those times when some project or team sprint has you thinking about work on your commute home, when you're getting ready for bed, and when you're in the shower getting ready the next morning.
 
And that, is both the problem and the solution. I had a writing mentor once tell me that you are what you think about. So when you don't have as much time in the day for dedicated writing time, then make sure you're at least thinking about it. Sound lame?
 
Well, he said the best way to do this is by tricking your brain. We're pretty simplistic creatures when it comes to habit, and he said even if your time is occupied by other things, if you make sure the last thing you're thinking about when you fall asleep at night is your art, and it's the first thing you think about when you wake up, eventually, even when you're super busy with work, your brain gets into the habit of thinking about it in the little quiet moments. Eventually, it might even become a meditative practice for you during stressful times at work.
 
So next time you're in one of those time periods where your work is taking up all of your bandwidth, set that boundary, and just make sure to start and finish your day with your art. It makes a difference.

The Side Hustle Pressure

Alright, for my first real reflection on finding work/art balance, I wanted to talk about the pressure to side hustle and how it impacts motivation.

For so many artists, this is the pressure that hangs over us the most. Not so much how do I make this the best I can make it? But how do I make money doing this?

I've even felt this pressure to side hustle with hobbies that aren't related to my writing. I mean, how many of us have looked at something we made and started brainstorming names for a hypothetical Etsy store?

This might be a no brainer for people, but it was a big moment for me when I realized that I didn't have to define my artistic success by how much money it's bringing in. That I can and should define my success more off of the satisfaction it brings me in the making.

But that side hustle pressure remains. And few people talk about how this pressure to make money off the things you love can kill your motivation to work on it faster than anything else.

Because let's face it, none of us are going to be one of those TikTok kids who made the right post on the right day and is now a millionaire doing what they do. Most artists who achieve financial success spent years if not decades of consistent effort to achieve that success.

I'm convinced part of the pressure I feel to make a career off being a writer is because jobs aren't fun, even if our job is something we generally enjoy doing. So the idea of our job being our art sounds like freedom from work!

I truly believe that our art should be an escape from the working world, and that doing something purely for the love of it will bring more satisfaction and will take so much more pressure off our artistic endeavors in the long run.

The freedom that can be found in working on our art, in my experience, only comes when we free ourselves of these expectations.

So the next time you're feeling pressure to turn something you love into a sidehustle, or if you start feeling like a failure because you aren't making money working on your art, just remember that working on your art for its own sake is good for the soul. It's meditative and motivating and makes us better people.

So let's free ourselves from the pressure of turning our art into our job and instead find success in having fun with it.

If you're someone who has felt this pressure to turn something you love into a side hustle, I'd love to hear more about your experience!

Work/Art Balance

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

- Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

As an indie writer who also works full time as a recruiter, it can be frustrating trying to find the right balance between work and art.

Especially this time of year, I often think about Jimmy Stewart's character in "It's a Wonderful Life" and the tension between his dreams and responsibilities. My mind occasionally echoes his character in times of frustration, shouting internally "I want to do what I want to do!"

But we can't. Every day, artists have to choose between their responsibilities and their dreams, and nearly every day responsibilities win. And how can it not? If we shirk responsibilities, the rent doesn't get paid.

If we shirk our dreams, the consequences are much less immediately tangible, though my therapist tells me it causes internal consequences later in life. Either way, this daily tension can be all consuming if we don't find the right work/art balance.

2023 was an extremely challenging year for me, and not just in finding that work/art balance. But I'm determined to change that this year.

To that end, I made a goal to to reflect weekly on the challenges and learnings I've experienced on this journey and share them. Feel free to follow along if you'd like and please share your own experiences too! But this is admittedly more for me than anyone else.

Process #2 - Horizons to Strive for

“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

Every story is a question that must be answered. It’s a descent into the unknown and then back into the known. It’s going down into the dark basement to change the lightbulbs. It’s a journey into death before being reborn. Stories are as natural as life and death, light and dark. There’s a reason why no matter the culture or who is telling it, stories generally have similar elements and structure. We could debate all day as to why that is, but the truth that telling a story comes naturally to us, is a truth that guides me in my writing process.

As you recall, our last newsletter was about process, specifically how I personally develop the initial ideas for a story until it starts to take shape. The next stage in my process, and likely most writers’ process, is the outlining stage. This is when you take the story idea and start to plot out the actual events of the story. We all remember the lessons we learned in school, the inciting incident, rising action, the climax, and falling action. For me, I write mostly in a three-act structure. I’ve experimented with four or five act structures before, but that was when I was doing more screenwriting than novel writing. For whatever reason, the three-act structure is easier for me when writing a novel.

Truthfully, the first time I started to really outline a story, I was overwhelmed. Do you know how long novels are? It depends on the genre, but generally at least 50,000 words. Less than that and you start getting into debates about labelling it a novella or short story. What was the longest essay you had to write in school, ten pages? A ten-page essay was a nightmare to me in school – and I was good at writing essays. But even outlining a ten-page essay so that it was coherent with a good flow of ideas made me want to pull my hair out. Well, ten pages is about 2500 words. So write twenty ten page essays and you’ll have a novel. That’s a lot, right?

And 50,000 words isn’t even that much. If you own my first Mariana book, it’s pretty thin compared to some novels you might have on your shelf, right? Well, I just checked and book one of Mariana is about 60,000 words. I don’t know, maybe this doesn’t overwhelm you, but when I first started writing, I was baffled about how I could turn a story idea into an actual novel if even just outlining one felt this daunting.

The nice thing is when you start at the basics and map everything out, things do start to take shape. Especially if you do what it takes and learn the basics of story structure, you start taking the different beats you do have outlined and you plug them into the story structure. If you look at something like Star Wars, and you have a beginning and an ending in mind, you plug those beats in and then start asking the questions you need to answer (see the last post) to fill in the rest. The beginning of Star Wars starts with a farm boy who is tired of farming. The ending of Star Wars has him radicalized and blowing up the evil empire’s space station and everyone in it. You then ask yourself, how does this happen? How does this story get from point A to point B? Well, what radicalizes a kid more than killing his family? What if you have an old guru who tells him he’s special and that he takes after his father he never knew, who was a great Jedi. What if on the journey to exploring this new information he meets a princess who needs his help? What if in his journey to rescue the princess a planet gets blown up and the empire is going to blow up another – the one you and your new friends are on?

Obviously, there’s a lot more to the story, but those are the broad strokes, and you can start to fill in the blanks. Especially once you start building out characters and allow them to make decisions in your story. What’s magical about outlining is that often the characters start to take control a bit. You’ll sometimes paint yourself into a corner in a story because you’ll find a character makes a decision that you’re honestly not sure how you’re going to have them deal with the consequences. But that’s part of the fun.

I know that I’m only painting broad strokes here, but these posts are about process, and truthfully, if you take the time to do the nitty gritty and trust in the process, your characters start to work things out. Obviously, you don’t want them to make all the decisions, because you’ll find they sometimes want to take the easy way out, or that sometimes you’ve started to care about the character so much that you don’t want them to go through something too difficult. But that doesn’t make for very compelling stories. I mean, look at Han Solo. He literally did take the easy way out at first, he took the money and got the hell out of the cross hairs of a planet destroying space station. Course, that made it all the more compelling when he showed up at the end and saved the day.

The last thing I’ll mention about my outlining process is that I generally like to write out a guiding principle that helps keep me in line during this fleshing out of the story. I call it my “horizon to strive for.” I often picture story telling as navigating a vast valley, walking towards the west edge of the horizon. The horizon that I strive for is an idea or a feeling that I try to keep in my mind as I outline and as I begin writing prose. Especially since outlining can mean getting caught in the nitty gritty of story, getting stuck in the weeds, struggling to just make it all make sense. But if I occasionally look up at the horizon and remember what I’m aiming for, it helps keep me on the right path. For book one of Mariana, the horizon I strove for was the idea that Mariana is always right, especially when adults are telling her otherwise. The doubt she’s made to feel is her journey into the unknown. She agonizes over the ideas adults are trying to tell her for her own good, because why shouldn’t she trust the adults in her life? But her challenging them is good for them and for her growth too.

The horizon doesn’t always need to be this profound idea either. For the Brother Paradox, the book I’m working on right now, the horizon I’m striving for is that the main character always chooses the chaotic route and it has to be funny. You could say for Star Wars that the horizon George Lucas strove for was that the story had to be fun and remind him of the old scifi serials he loved as a kid.

In the end, the final thing I’ll say is reiterating that outlining is daunting. It’s not my favorite thing in the world. Honestly, there are times when I truly hate the idea of outlining because of how unnatural it feels to plot out beat by beat, something as natural as storytelling. Some of you may not even need to outline, I’m sure there are authors out there who never do it. I’m not going to be the kind of writer who acts like there’s only one way to do this correctly and obviously it’s my way. No, you gotta do what makes sense for you.

But remember that a beautiful home always needs a blueprint. It’s the least glamorous part of building something, but I personally would rather regret the time making a blueprint I didn’t end up needing, than wishing I had a blueprint I didn’t have. Course, if you’re the kind of savant writer who doesn’t need one, then f*** off and go write your next great American novel, okay? This newsletter isn’t for you.

-Jacob

Process #1 - Questions and Answers

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house . . . The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is . . . but as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows.”

-George R.R. Martin

When I first started writing, I spent a baffling amount of time trying to figure out other author’s writing processes. I’m not really sure why, other than the fact I remember not wanting to become a writer the wrong way. I wanted to know where they got their ideas from, where their characters came from, and how they took those elements and turned them into full-fledged stories. I wanted to know what they did to get in the mood to write. I wanted to know how they outlined their novels. I wanted to know when they knew that it was time to stop outlining and when it was time to start writing. I also wanted to know if there were any authors out there who didn’t outline, because when I first started out I hated the idea of outlining. But this post isn’t about outlining, it’s about process (next week’s post will be about outlining).

Process was a black box that as a newbie writer like me made me worried I’d never figure out how to do it right. But the honest truth is, there is no right way of doing it. In fact, everything I’ve ever written has had a slightly different process. So for the next few posts, I want to illustrate some of the ways I build out a story. Today’s will focus a bit on my process for coming up with ideas and characters and how I start to turn them into full stories. Next week’s will be about outlining, and the week after will be something else in this series that I haven’t figured out because guess what? No matter how much planning you do, you gotta just let things happen sometimes.

So how do I come up with ideas and then how do I turn those ideas into stories?

Magic.

Just kidding, though sometimes thinking about how the process of taking tiny little ideas I’ve had and turning them into full stories honestly feels like magic in retrospect. But as I’ve mentioned before, magic can never happen if you never sit down to write. For me, the most important thing when having a new idea is getting it down on paper.

Literally. For me, writing an idea down digitally doesn’t seem to cement it into my mind as easily as writing it down physically on paper. For my current project, a novel called The Brother Paradox, the idea started out simply. The fact that I generally have a really hard time with time travel movies. Other than Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and I’m sure a few other exceptions if you were to fight me on this, but I can’t think of any off-hand, I’m generally not a fan of time travel as a story element. So this story idea literally started as, what if I write a time travel novel where time travel is the problem, not the solution? This entire novel was birthed from that simple idea. Since I haven’t finished the novel yet (I’m trying!), I don’t want to give any spoilers, so let’s talk about how Mariana’s story grew instead.

No matter what story I’m writing, generally I just start writing down these ideas and seeing how they evolve. The mind has a fascinating ability to make connections once we begin exploring those ideas. With my Mariana books, the very first idea I had for them was this idea of a little kid named Hector who had a ghost as a friend that he thought was his imaginary friend, not an actual ghost that was haunting him. This ghost was a nonbinary person named Morgan.

Once I started writing down more ideas on what could be fun about this character, Hector became Mariana, and because I didn’t want my first nonbinary character to be a ghost, I started thinking of other ideas (those who have read book two may recognize that Morgan still ended up in Mariana’s story, just not as a ghost). I thought it’d be funny if that ghost was a historical figure. But a tall tale type historical figure, someone who has become so mythologized by American history that they’ve become more of this legendary archetype of a historical figure, not so much that figure themselves. But then I had to ask myself the question, how did Mariana come to be haunted by Benjamin Franklin? This birthed the idea of the artifacts. Well, why would Mariana have one of these artifacts? That birthed the idea of a magical museum. As I went, I realized this could be a good point to tell the story of two characters I’d come up with years ago, but had not found a way of telling it yet - Mr. Steel and Miss Murphy. What if Mr. Steel was the curator of that magical museum? Etc. Etc.

You can see that generally, my ideas start out as a simple concept that I think would be fun to explore. But as I start to write those ideas down, you have to ask yourself questions. The methodology for answering those questions is just having fun with it. As you begin to answer those questions, the story naturally starts to take shape.

Huh, it’s almost like every story is just asking a question and then answering it. Hmmm (more on that later). But just know that as I start asking myself these questions by writing them down, answers do sort of begin to flow naturally through trial and error. That isn’t to say those answers never change further down the line, but they are certainly the foundation of the stories being built.

But then how do you take those ideas and beats and start turning them into an actual story? How do you maintain the ideas and themes you’re trying to explore while building this all out? How do you not get lost in the vastness of a story while you’re building it all out?

Tune in next week as I walk you through my process of taking these questions and answers and start turning them into some semblance of story.

-Jacob

Brooding with Butch #1 “Content”

“If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”

- I don’t know, some boring capitalist dude. This is real quote, I just don’t want to attribute it because we make our own rules in the writers roost.

Hello everyone! I totally forgot to send out a newsletter yesterday! Since I’m quite busy today, I thought I’d use it as an excuse to release my first in a special series of installments called Brooding with Butch. I figured that entries in this particular series will be exploring things about being a creative writer that make me mad. For our first installment in BWB, we’ll talk about one of the main things that makes me feel all sorts of anger. That is the unholy relationship between the artist and hustle culture.

The decision to independently publish my Mariana the Moon Girl series was an experiment I decided to try after the early uncertainty of the COVID pandemic made me think it might be worth exploring. I’d always intended on traditionally publishing and had spent the year before the pandemic reaching out to editors and agents about Mariana book one. I don’t know if y’all remember March 2020, but it felt good to take a little control during a very uncertain situation to do this. While the decision to go independent and do it myself isn’t something I regret, it has laid bare some realities about being independent that I’m not a huge fan of.

Namely, that we are all expected to be expert marketers nowadays. I’ve tried experiments with facebook, instagram, and amazon ads, getting onto BookTok, done research on blog blasts, even looked into hiring a social media marketer. For anyone that creates anything these days, there’s this overwhelming expectation of creating content. This has even seeped into my day job in recruiting, where I have seen more success as an indie recruiter when I’m posting content on LinkedIn, versus when I’m not. Think about that. I’m posting hiring content on LinkedIn to be more successful at my job. And while I only post things that I’m passionate about, it still bums me out hardcore that the largest and most successful social network I have is on LinkedIn. Oof.

I’ve honestly started to even just hate the word “content.” You need to be making content! How can you expect to sell any books if you aren’t putting content out there? What kind of content are you creating to get your work out there? You cannot be content with your current collection of content!

This, plus the expectation that everyone needs to have multiple streams of income just to make ends meet nowadays, and that hustlers especially need to have passive income streams, is just so boring. I hate hustle culture. Can’t we do anything just for the love of it? Why do I have to turn my writing into a hustle? If I could afford to do it, I’d release my books for free. But I want to build a life where I can spend more time on my writing than on anything else, and it’s difficult trying to figure out how to do that.

Confession, I once seriously considered and even began researching what it’d be like to sell erotica books online. I’ve heard of multiple indie authors who make ends meet by coming up with very low effort fantasy erotica (a la Twilight, but with actual sex), churning out a book a week, and making good money doing it. This is an accepted method of being a successful indie author! I even outlined a few ideas and came up with a penname, but in the end I just couldn’t do it. On the one hand, I knew I was too much of a perfectionist that it’d kill me putting something sloppy out there (even if it was supposed to be sloppy!). Plus, even with a penname I was worried about someone making a connection between a random erotica author and the guy trying to write really sincere young adult novels.

But hey, did you know there are finance bros out there who recommend publishing books as a great passive income stream? I mean, I’m sure they’re right when you’re talking about the following that they’ve built, writing books called “Making Sense of Sales: the Things I Learned about Selling by Scraping Elon’s Tweets for a Coherent Throughline” but it also makes me die a little thinking about my books as passive income streams.

There are people out there doing it though! They’re out there making a living doing exactly what I’d love to do, because they’re far more willing than I am to feel like a shill putting marketing out there that people really don’t mind. But here’s the important part: I’m the one in the wrong here. I do a disservice to my writing for feeling like a fraud every time I encourage people to buy my books. It is dumb of me that I don’t work harder at this. If there is a reason why I never am able to do this full time, it will likely be because of this.

Be better than me at content creation if you’re thinking of going indie. Understand that you need to occasionally turn your artist brain off and turn on your business brain. I’m incredibly happy with the success I have had in publishing independently. I’ve sold way more copies of my books than I honestly thought I would with the network that I have. But my sales have faltered and that has been a result from my marketing efforts faltering too.

Below is a picture of my cat, Butch. I hope you enjoyed our first entry into Brooding with Butch.

-Jacob

P.S. Is it weird that part of me is convinced I could have written some pretty stellar erotica? It was going to be scifi erotica too, so stellar could be both literal and figurative in this case.

Writing & “Writing”

“A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.”
-Bill Watterson

There’s a paradox with writing that I think everyone has experienced in some way, even if you’re not a writer. I’m talking about when you sit down to write and then quickly get to a point in your modern-day adaptation of Moby Dick, except it’s an English woman working as an executive assistant for a prominent politician, and you realize while writing a driving scene that you’re not actually sure what England’s driving laws would be for a particular situation. You quickly open up your web browser to do some research, but then two hours later, you’re on your fifth youtube video from a British comedian specializing in pedestrian related pranks.

This is what I call “writing” versus writing. It’s a special type of avoidance that we sometimes allow to take over our own effectiveness. Because hey, you sat down to write, you utilized your precious time and energy doing this, and you’ll even tell yourself it was productive—but it wasn’t. We experience this type of avoidance at work, doing household chores, or just about anything we view as a task we don’t want to do. It might be spending an hour dusting while listening to a podcast rather than doing the dishes that are starting to smell bad in the sink. It might be me writing one of these newsletters rather than responding to a few emails sitting in my work email’s inbox. So when you sit down to write, are you writing? Or are you “writing”?

“Writing” isn’t something that is necessarily a bad thing at its surface, research is important when you’re writing a story, especially when you’re wanting to be accurate enough to avoid the annoying corrections from the Neil deGrasse Tysons of the world. But for myself, and from what I’ve heard from so many other writers, research is the dumb excuse we tell ourselves to avoid doing what we actually sat down to do. What’s annoying is that we still took the time to sit down and write. That time is gone after we’ve wasted it, but rather than spending it effectively writing new prose, we went down a rabbit hole to find information that is going to serve as texture in our prose, nothing more.

So how do we avoid this? I know for me, I spent years failing to avoid this. It took some serious changes to my writing time to overcome this. Because sometimes just keeping your web browser closed, or turning your wifi off aren’t enough. Not when you can just as easily turn the wifi back on with a few clicks. You need to replace that avoidance tendency with a different action altogether. When I get to a point in my writing where I need to research something to be accurate, rather than risk the temptation of the distraction gods, I don’t research the thing at that moment, instead I’ll writer placeholder text that will prompt me to research later when I come back to revise. To go back to the English executive assistant example, I’d literally just write in the middle of my prose something like this: [look up what the left turn laws in England are. I know turning right on red is generally a uniquely American traffic law, but would someone in a hurry there be seen as an ass if they turned left on red? Cuz, you know, they drive on the left side over there, those crazy tea drinking Harry Potter bastards.]

I always put it in those brackets so that I can easily do a search in the word document for instances where I’ve done this, but I also bold it so that my eye doesn’t mistake it for finished prose when I send it out to my writers group for feedback. And sometimes, depending on how great the desire to be avoidant, I’ll use colorful language and profanity to make me laugh and to make the avoidant side of me feel like it was successfully rebellious. This last bit sounds like a joke, but it honestly works for me.

Writing time is precious. Any time that we set aside for being creative is worth protecting. Especially when we are pulled in so many different directions with work, life, school, or whatever it is. Even if you’re feeling slightly avoidant about spending your time being creative, don’t allow yourself to fall into this pit of faking being productive. In my view, it’s better to blow off the time entirely and watch television versus pretending to write while spending it researching stuff that won’t be applicable for your story. Besides, television is better fake research anyway.

-Jacob

From Texture to Text: The Feeling of it All

I want you to think about your favorite novel. Not the one you think is the best you’ve ever read or the one you feel should be your favorite because you don’t want to admit to yourself your favorite novel is something you’re secretly a little ashamed of. Think of the one that brings back that feeling you got the first time you read it, the one that transports you right back to the time and place you were at when you were first reading it. Picture your surroundings, the feeling you had. Can you remember what you were wearing? What was the fabric of the chair you were sitting in? Are you feeling that same feeling you had back then?

We all know that the best kinds of art can transport us to another time and a place. But there’s a special kind of experience that comes from a book that even years down the road, can transport you back to that first time you experienced it. This isn’t an exclusive feeling with books. Lots of things can instill a certain type of sense memory that transports us right back to that moment when we think about it again. There are songs that transport me back to snowy days in Tennessee, books that bring me back to the armchair in my childhood bedroom, and movies that remind me of the friends I saw them with.

This type of sense memory is a universal human experience, and we know powerful art can create these sense memories for us. These sense memories have so much texture and special meaning compared to other memories we carry with us. But is there a way of weaving those textures into the art you create? Now, I’m not going to be so bold as to claim that you can deliberately create sense memory experiences for people with the art you create. It seems to me that even if these sense memories are part of the human experience, they’re extremely individualized and not really something you can predict. But I personally believe that you can borrow some of the texture in your own sense memories and instill a tiny part of that feeling into your art.

Stay with me here, because I get that we’re journeying into some slightly mystical territory here. But the next time you sit down to write or work on any type of art you like to create, see if you can transport yourself to one of these memories. Once you’re there, note the feelings you have. Pay attention to the other senses. Memorize this special feeling that comes over you as you sit in this memory. What are the little things? Could you feel the warmth of the sun on your skin? Were there rain drops rolling down the sides of the car window? Could you feel the rough texture of the brick wall you were sitting on with that special person?

When you’re done, write down as much of this texture as you can. This will be a good writing exercise for you if you can get into the habit, because I promise you it’ll help you add texture into your writing that will elevate your prose. Because the next time you come to a point in your story where you want to instill a certain feeling into the audience, you’ll know how to do it. And I’m not just talking about the little details that you should be adding to your prose anyway. I mean trying to capture a feeling you had and infusing your prose with it.

If you do this regularly, you’ll know what kind of texture is needed for a sentimental moment, what kind of texture is needed in a quiet moment with nature, and what kind of texture you’ll need to capture the feeling you get while two of your characters are falling in love.

Now I don’t have any evidence that this works with my own writing since I’m biased. The times when I’ve tried to instill this texture into my writing works for me, but I’ve never had anyone point out those passages to me as being particularly powerful for them. One day maybe, but my sample size is quite small at the moment.

But instead, I’m going to have you listen to an interlude song on an EP from a band I love. The band is called, The Oh Hellos, and the title of the interlude is “Planetarium Stickers on a Bedroom Ceiling.” Here’s the link, now go and listen to this song before you read anymore. Go ahead, I’ll be here when you get back.

Now for me, when I hear this song, I not only get the imagery the title provides, but my mind conjures up so much more. The texture my mind fills in is a hot summer evening. The bedroom fan is on, its blades slowly spinning. Beams of light from the setting sun shine through curtains, illuminating little bits of dust that move lazily through the air. In my mind, I’m laying down on my bed, letting my head hang off the end so that I’m seeing the world upside down, the stickers on the ceiling below me.

Now, that’s my experience listening to this song. Tell me if you feel similarly? What imagery did you see? Was it anything like mine? Now I argue that even if my imagery is different than yours, even if the individual sounds don’t resonate with you the exact same way, the feeling this song creates feels authentic, right? It feels familiar. I bet we had similar feelings from it.

I’m convinced that the approach to writing this song must have been similar to what I’m trying to describe here. Because even if the end result summons different types of texture for different people, that sense memory, that feeling you get listening to it happens with all of us, right?

Sit with this idea for awhile the next time you settle in to create. Think about how it might impact the feelings you are trying to conjure in your audience. This is what creating art is, right? We’re in the business of magic.

On the scale between George R.R. Martin & Stephen King . . .

I’m a firm believer that just because you have a hot take, doesn’t mean you have to share it. But for a writing newsletter named after a hideout for outlaws in the wild west, my writing advice has been pretty tame so far, hasn’t it? Maybe let’s explore the outlaw in us a bit more and I’ll talk about a subject some might find controversial by casting a bit of shade towards one of the most popular authors of our generation.

It is pretty famously known that George R.R. Martin has been working on his latest installment in A Song of Ice and Fire book series for over a decade now. This series of novels, made famous by their adaptation into the HBO show Game of Thrones, has been worked on by Martin since 1991. Martin has stated that this final book could be well over 3000 pages when it is finished, and has even announced that it will likely be split into more than one book. That’s a lot. 3000 pages would take a very long time to write. To put that into perspective, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy is about 1200 pages. It makes sense he’s been working on that book for more than a decade now, right?

Stephen King on the other hand, has stated in his book On Writing that when he sits down to write, he only tries to write about six pages a day. Doesn’t seem like much, honestly. By that measure, Stephen King would have written the final book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series in *checks notes* 500 days. Hmm. So, a little less than two years then, huh? Even being generous and saying Stephen King only writes 250 days out of the year would still mean he’d finish a first draft in exactly two years.

Now okay, I admit this isn’t exactly fair to Martin. Stephen King is not George R.R. Martin, and as King says in this video, there are books and then there are books. One could argue all day about whose books are more complex. We could give him the benefit of the doubt for how much time he spends writing and developing TV shows, video games, and other stories too. Plus, this book Martin is writing is supposed to be the final installment in this series. That’s gotta be difficult for any author, wrapping up a story with that many characters and that many storylines in a satisfying way. Plus, seeing how the HBO series wrapped up and the disappointing fan and critical reactions towards it can only add even more pressure towards getting it right. He’s probably just suffering from the worst writer’s block ever, right?

Well here’s my controversial take. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I don’t want to be an ass and say that there’s no such thing—but I am extremely skeptical. All of us struggle with motivation in some way, right? Even on things we truly enjoy doing, sometimes you just would rather not do it. A writer struggling to sit down and write isn’t suffering from some mystical block that is any different than my not wanting to do the dishes. But sometimes, even when you’d rather pull your hair out than to do that one thing you know you should do, sometimes you just have to convince yourself to wash one dish. Something, anything, to break through the resistance you’re feeling.

I’m sure there are plenty of days that Stephen King doesn’t want to sit down and write. I’m sure there are plenty of days where all he can do is convince himself to get out a single page. And it’s not like those six pages he supposedly writes daily are all perfect prose, I bet most of them need a ton of revision. But all of that said, I 100% believe that if George R.R. Martin spent more days writing than he did not, he would have finished this book long before now. So yes, the point of this entry in the Writers Roost is that on the scale of work you do, try to be more like Stephen King and less like good ol’ George R.R.

And just so that we don’t end this entry with my being very judgmental of a far more successful writer than I’ll ever be, I’ll let you in on a little secret. When I struggle to get into the mood to write? When I find myself doing like George says in that video I linked above, staring at a blank page and rewriting the same sentence over and over again? I don’t give it power by calling it “writers block” and stepping away from the computer defeated. I treat it just like those dishes I don’t want to wash, except instead of forcing myself to wash just one, I force myself to go back a few pages from where I’m currently at in my book and start revising what I’d already written. By the time I get through reworking those pages, I’m usually in the mood to keep going and start writing new prose.

-Jacob

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

- Steven Pressfield

“You wouldn’t download a car!”

“Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.”
-Aaron Sorkin

It only seemed right that a newsletter named after a famous outlaw hideout should have one of its earliest entries be about theft, so here we are. I’ll be honest, when I was a budding writer in my early teens, I bristled at the idea of doing anything like anyone else ever. I wanted my writing to be truly unique and fresh. I hated the idea of constraining myself to any sort of story structure or rehashing old story lines. Never mind that some of my earliest attempts at stories were basically just Lord of the Rings. But as I got older, I realized that these structures are in place because they work. Because they’re tied to what make us human – to our very natures (more on this later). So why not steal?

When you boil any story down to its most base parts, you could describe it as a descent and then an ascent. A journey into the unknown and then back to the known. A trail to shadow and then back to light. Really, it could be argued that every story is just a theft of nature. So yes, this is my encouragement of theft.

Now there are a few ways of doing story theft. The one I’d like to focus on is using that theft to add flavor and depth to your story by taking things from your life and passing them through a filter of abstraction. I know this sounds like a no brainer, but it took me a long time to figure this out. When we steal from significant moments in our lives, it would be dumb of us to make them a mirror of exactly what happened. Not only would that cause hurt feelings, but it would likely land you in a J. Peterman and Kramer situation from Seinfeld.

Some of the biggest burglaries I’ve done from my life have shown up as texture in a story beat to add a sense of emotional realism to the moment. The confrontation between Mr. Steel and Miss Murphy at the end of my first Mariana the Moon Girl book isn’t like anything I’ve gone through before, but the emotions of anger and longing in the texture of that moment was burgled from my life. I like to think that mining from past experience and injecting that emotion into the moment made it more relatable for a plot moment that at the surface might not feel relatable. The best part about stealing from your life this way is that the people who helped create these moments you’re stealing from don’t ever have to know. There was once a woman I sort of dated who asked me if she’d ever make it into one of my books. Truth is, she already has – not as a character or a reflection of our story, but little moments, little emotions used as texture for emotional realism.

When it comes to stealing from other writers and stories already told, again, it doesn’t need to be beat for beat what you stole (that’s what we might call homage). It can pass through the same filter of abstraction, or you can use it as a jumping off point. Dave Wolverton, the late author I truly admire and respect spoke often about the power of resonance in stories. Taking from other stories and echoing them within your own can add a layer of depth and meaning you might not expect. In book two of Mariana the Moon Girl the careful reader might notice lots of references and sometimes even direct quotes from Moby Dick and other Romantic era stories. While this isn’t exactly theft, one could argue that it is. But there are many ideas and themes explored in Romantic literature that when you view Mariana through that lens, you might get some insights into what I’m trying to do with her story.

Tolkien famously disliked Shakespeare, but was still guilty of theft from the Bard. One of the more famous instances of this was a reaction to something Shakespeare did that Tolkien hated and wanted to do better - but it was still theft. That moment? When it was prophesied that Macbeth would only be conquered when the Birnham forest moved to Dunsinane hill. Of course in Macbeth, that prophesy was fulfilled when soldiers used branches as camouflage - something Tolkien found disappointing. But in Lord of the Rings, Tolkien lifted that and turned it into the Last March of the Ents. A literal forest moving to conquer Saruman.

These are simple ideas, but for the budding writer who is cautious of being a hack, the idea of story theft can cause hesitation. I know it did for me. But just remember that your author friend Jacob said theft is okay.

-Jacob

“Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.”
-T.S. Elliot

“I’ve Always Thought About Being a Writer”

Whenever I tell people I’m a writer I generally get pretty similar reactions from people. Most people are supportive and think it’s pretty cool. But there is a not insignificant percentage who will tell me that they’ve always thought about writing. They all have similar stories, they always loved movies and books growing up, but then one day they had an idea.

Their eyes light up when they talk about how they wrote down the idea in a notebook years ago and how they occasionally get more ideas to add to the story. Over the years, they’ve added characters, plot twists, and sometimes even the beginnings of an actual story structure. I love hearing people tell me about this, because it mirrors the experience I go through when I come up with ideas. It feels like magic sometimes as all these nebulous ideas start to form in your mind, slowly taking shape over time.

The part that bums me out though is how often I hear them say they’ve never done anything with it – that they “wouldn’t know where to start.”

I don’t want to trivialize that thought. Not knowing where to start is a rough place to be. I get that.

We look at novels that authors produce and even having written a handful of those myself, I sometimes look at a project I’m working on and get overwhelmed with how much work it’ll take to take an idea I have and then write the 200+ pages of story needed to do it justice. That’s not nothing.

I had an experience once in college where I was in a class full of really talented writers. I had just come out of a creative writing class the semester before having gotten pretty dismal feedback from the professor about my writing, and I was feeling very insecure about my abilities. It was rough coming into class with pages to read and then having to compare them to the pages these other writers had written. Whatever they came up with was excellent, I was always so impressed. It usually took me multiple drafts to get to the quality of writing that they were doing naturally.

Further into the semester, I noticed that these brilliant writers weren’t getting very far with their stories. They’d write twenty pretty great pages, get feedback from the class, and then rewrite those same twenty pages again with that feedback in mind. They’d get more feedback, then repeat. It was honestly frustrating because I wanted to read what happened next!

Then one day I had an epiphany.

I was reminded of a time I spoke to an author I admired who told me that something like 90% of people who think about writing never really do anything about it. That’s a pretty big percentage. He further said that of that 10% who do try, 90% of them never finish whatever project they started.

It seems obvious now, but back then this was a life changing realization. The fact that I could separate myself from these other, much more talented writers, just by making sure I finished projects was a huge confidence boost. Who cares if my first draft wasn’t as impressive in my writing skill as these other guys, if I had a finished project and they didn’t? Besides, it’s always easier to make a second draft better than a first, right? This idea has served me well – that if I can outwork those who are more talented than me, then it doesn’t matter if they’re more talented than me or not – I’m the guy with the finished project.

Are you starting to see my point here?

You, the reader, who has a story idea and doesn’t know where to begin. You have more in common with every other writer out there than you think. But just as you’ll never build a brick wall without laying those first few bricks, you’ll never finish a writing project if you never start, and then never keep going. It doesn’t matter if what you write is brilliant or if it’s garbage, because at least you’re writing and working on it, and hopefully, finishing.

The magical thing about storytelling is that it comes pretty naturally to us (more on this idea later). So even if you’re reading this and thinking, “but I don’t know anything about story structure, or what makes a good character arc, or how to write dialogue.” You’ll learn as you go. You’ll find that your mind starts to note how others do it. You’ll start seeking out books and people and other resources for learning and getting back. So just remember that the very act of starting is a pretty powerful act. You’ll find that the more you slough through the mud, the more your mind will make the connections you need and the story will take shape. But none of it will ever take shape if you don’t ever start.

Sure, it took me years to learn story structure. Sure, it took me writing five-ish novels before I ever felt like any of them were any good. And sure, I still really struggle with starting sometimes. But desire carries with it great power – if only you follow through.

So this is my encouragement to all the writers out there who want to write. Just do it. Yes, in all likelihood, whatever you write first will be a hot pile of garbage (if it’s not, screw you). And yes, this will all be very difficult. But wouldn’t you rather start now and be writing the books or screenplays or poems that you envision in your mind in a decade? Or would you rather find yourself a decade from now still wishing you’d started? Do yourself a favor and google authors who didn’t start writing until their forties or fifties. While I firmly believe it is never too late to begin, regretting not beginning sooner will only get worse with time.

Besides, you just joined a writing newsletter where a really cool author who has learned a lot of stuff the hard way is going to talk about everything he’s learned. So maybe now is a good time to begin, right?

-Jacob

Welcome to the Writers Roost!

Thanks for subscribing and welcome to your first entry in the Writers Roost. As an introduction, here’s a bit of background on what this newsletter is and what you can expect from it.

So why, “Writers Roost”? Well, Writers Roost is a play on words with Robbers Roost, the famous hideout for outlaws in the American Wild West. Notably, it was a hideout for the outlaw Butch Cassidy, someone I’ve been obsessed with since I was a kid. Since in my experience, creative writers are a bunch of chaotic rule breakers, this seemed fitting.

This outlaw connection seems to fit with what I plan on writing about too, since Butch Cassidy’s gang was known as the Wild Bunch, and a lot of what I have to say is a wild bunch of tips and advice, some of which you might be familiar with, but some of it will be fresh. I’m going to talk a lot about what I view are the fundamentals - but because it’s me, and because there’s always going to be a part of me that rebels against anyone saying “this is the only way you can do things,” I’m going to teach those fundamentals, but hopefully with a different flavor than you’re used to.

I’ve been very lucky in my journey of creative writing to be mentored by and taught by some people with very impressive resumes. I’ve learned a lot and would love to pay that forward. You can expect a lot of my newsletters to focus on distillations of the advice I’ve gotten over the years, mixed with my own perspective on everything from act structure in stories, to even being mindful of some complex philosophical ideas and how to implement that in your writing.

I hope that there will be a level of collaboration to this newsletter too. I like the idea of the Writers Roost being a place for creative writers to hang out, so even though there isn’t really a way for that to happen currently, every newsletter I send will come from an email address you can respond to. This way you can give me feedback, ask questions, and expand on ideas you thought were interesting. I might even feature something you say in a future newsletter.

Depending on the success of the Roost, I have further ideas for content that could be valuable. I’d love to create a handful of short podcast type content pieces that go into deeper depth on topics people have questions about. I’ve thought about writing some ebooks on fun topics I’m sure I’ll cover briefly in this newsletter, but people might want more of (expect several entries on how the Ninja Turtles are a masterclass in storytelling). We might even see opportunities in the future to watch my writing process and see how I outline, how I draft, and my process for completing a story. I’ve got a lot of ideas, but I’m only going to pursue those if it seems worthwhile to people.

I’m sure this will evolve as I go, but you can expect an entry once every week, or every two weeks at the very least. Also, since we are a bunch of outlaws, forgive any grammatical issues, as at least initially, I don’t plan on having an editor take a look at these before sending them out. Feel free to point out any mistakes so that I can revise them for the archive, but also let’s just relax and be grateful copy editors exist. Thank you for joining me on this journey!

Welcome to the Writers Roost.

-Jacob