The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How can you audit your writing process so you get more words on the page and finish your books? How can you network at author conferences, even if you’re an introvert? T.D. Donnelly shares tips from 30 years as a Hollywood screenwriter and his book, Superdraft. In the intro, memento mori, and updated dates for AI webinars. This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  T.D. Donnelly is a bestselling thriller author, and he’s been a professional screenwriter in Hollywood for 30 years. His first book for authors is Superdraft: The Art and Science of Better, Faster Writing. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How to network at author conferences, and why it works for introverts The difference between craft and process, and how to audit your own writing process Balancing the creator and the critic at each phase of writing Dictation tips for getting words on the page with AI tools What the rules of improv can teach you about writing How to bring a professional mindset to your writing You can find Tom at TDDonnelly.com. Transcript of interview with T.D. Donnelly Jo: T.D. Donnelly is a bestselling thriller author, and he’s been a professional screenwriter in Hollywood for 30 years, which we talked about on our previous episode in March 2025. His first book for authors is Superdraft: The Art and Science of Better, Faster Writing. So welcome back to the show, Tom. Tom: It’s great to be here, Jo. Great to talk to you again. Jo: Yes, indeed. Well, give us a bit of an update, because when we spoke last, and it was only, I guess, 18 months ago, you’d just launched Year of the Rabbit. I read it, and it was a fantastic book, but it was your first novel even though you’re so experienced. So give us an update. How has your career developed, and what have you learned about launching and books? Tom: Oh God, what have I learned? Have I learned anything, I think, would be the fairer question. So I’m still a screenwriter. I still have a day job in Hollywood. It’s been a rough time in Hollywood, but I still get the occasional job there. So my plan, in the first two or three years of my novel career, to put out six books has not quite gotten to six. I do have three out. I have Year of the Rabbit, I have Year of the Horse, and I have Year of the Serpent, and I should have Year of the Dragon out by Christmas. So that part has gone well. Now, I have a lot of people that I’ve met through this community that know a lot more than I do, and I have to rely on them for learning about marketing, things like that. In Hollywood, nobody wants to ask a screenwriter about marketing questions. They have a whole department with hundreds of people in it that are in charge of all of that sort of stuff. The advice that I got overwhelmingly was, “Don’t even bother doing paid ads until you have three books out.” Because the odds of them being able to pay off and make sense aren’t there. So I have just started advertising this year, and everyone has said this is a really, really bad year to be starting advertising. Everything is in flux. Everything is in question. What is going on with Facebook? What is going on with Amazon? Why are the things that we were doing not working anymore? I have found a modest level of success with my ads, which I’m very, very happy about. I’m happy that at least I’m doing slightly better than breaking even on the ads, and I’m getting a lot more signups to my newsletter, which I have to admit has been… how would I put this? Inconsistent. I will say I have an inconsistent newsletter. My New Year’s resolution for this whole year is to get more consistent with it. I am loving it. The books have been very well reviewed. Year of the Rabbit was the one that I spent so much time just making it perfect. Then the next two I was able to do a little bit faster, and people seem to really love the series and to see these characters evolving. So I’m having a great time. That’s all I can say. Jo: Well, I think you’re doing the things that are the right things to do. You’re writing books in a series, which is one of those things that everyone says you should do, and in fact, many of us do. I’ve certainly never been very good at doing multiple books in a series one after the other. I tend to start a series and then start another series, and then another series, and then maybe write a second book. So you’ve done things in a really good order, and I hope people are encouraged. I mean, you have 30 years, like we say, in Hollywood. I’ve read Year of the Rabbit. I know you can write. But that’s not the only challenge, and I think that is so important in an age of AI, because whether or not anyone agrees that AI could ever write a book, the writing of the book is only one part of the journey, right, as you have discovered. Tom: Absolutely. Jo: Actually reaching readers is a real challenge. Tom: Oh my God, it’s so hard. Just read a gosh darn book. This book’s great. You’re going to love it, okay? I have a once-a-week golf outing with some old friends of mine, and there’s three of us, and the golf course we play on likes to go out with fivesomes, so they generally pair us up with one or two more people. The number of times we have finished a round and I have not sold a book to one of the poor two hapless people that are paired with us… my friends are just like, “Oh my God, there he goes again. Oh my God. What, did he make it to the third hole before he started pitching them the book?” It is one of those things, and it’s not easy to be good at writing a book and good at writing ad copy. These are very different hats you have to wear. Not everybody can be great at them. That is why I think your advocacy for “let’s see what AI can do for us in these realms”, to maybe help us with the things we’re not so good at, I think is really key. Jo: Oh, good. Right. Well, one thing you have been incredibly good at is pitching and speaking and networking at author events. You’ve spoken at lots of author conferences over the last few years. I’ve seen you speak. You give a lot to authors, but also you’ve done a really good job at networking and becoming part of the community. There’s a lot of writers who feel like that’s something they want to do. Maybe they’ve written a book that would help other authors, but they just don’t know how to break in. Now, I realise part of that is personality. You’re a friendly guy, right? What tips do you have around networking and pitching, and how has that helped you? Tom: It’s really funny. I’ve been talking to some writers. I was just speaking at NINC, and then before that at SPS Live in London, and at both conferences it came up. “You’ve only been in this business for two years, Tom, and you know everybody, and everybody knows you. How did you get to do that?” Then I start talking to people about networking, and it’s like I’m speaking a foreign language to them. I guess in Hollywood you kind of have to. You’re trained up. It’s a relationship business. You have to have the goods. You have to be a great writer, but that alone… great writers fail in Hollywood all the time because they can’t do that. So eventually I will have to do a talk at one of these conferences about networking. So here’s one thing that I do, which is going to sound mental. First of all, every conference I go to, I come up with three goals. What are my three goals? What are the three things that I want to accomplish going to this conference? In the beginning they were all very me, me, me goals because I needed a lot of help, and I still do. So I went to a conference, a conference where I met you actually, and said, “I’m going to find writers that are in my genre, and I’m going to pitch them and ask them if they would consider reading the book, and if they like the book, to blurb it.” I wanted to get professional blurbs, and you were very kind to give me a fantastic blurb that is on the cover of one of my books. Jo: Only because it was a good book, by the way, for anyone listening. I don’t normally do that, and I said that to you. Tom: No, and I said it in the pitch. I said, “Listen, if you don’t love it, do not even worry about it. It’s going to be absolutely fine.” Jo is not a blurb factory, people. Do not bother her, okay? Anyway, so I put together these three goals, and then once I have those three goals I think, “Okay, how am I going to approach those goals?” So before I’ve even gone to the conference… and what I do, it’s a weird thing. Do you know the app called Anki, A-N-K-I? Jo: No. Tom: It’s this tiny little free app that basically allows you to make flashcards for yourself, and you can test yourself with these flashcards. People use it for language learning all the time. I get pictures of people that are speaking at the conferences I’m going to that I don’t know, and for about a week or two before the conference I flash those pictures twice a day on the screen, and I have to be able to identify who they are, something interesting about them, and something that they’ve written. It’s one of those repetitive things where if I got it right away, then I don’t need to see that card again for the next 10 minutes. If I didn’t get it, that card goes right back into the slot. So I get to be on a first-name basis with a person I haven’t met yet. So when I go to these conferences, I feel more comfortable because, oh, I know you, and oftentimes they’ll be like, “Have we met?” I’m like, “No, we haven’t, but I think you’re fantastic. This book looks really interesting. I haven’t read it yet, I’m sorry to say, but I’m dying to take a look at it.” That helps break the ice. I’ve tried this with introverts—I am not an introvert—and

How can you sharpen your craft when the self-critical voice gets louder the more you learn? What kinds of literary devices might enhance your prose? And how do you write an ending that pays off the promise you made to your reader? Amy Jones shares her writing tips after 15 years of teaching storytelling. In the intro, Kindle Unlimited rebranded as Kindle+, How to Market a Book Fourth Edition, and AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Amy Jones is a writer, lecturer, and researcher who has designed courses and lectured for over a decade on literature, linguistics, and the craft of storytelling. She is the author of multiple books on writing craft, and today we’re talking about The Story Book: Plot, Character, Setting, Genre, Narrative and Literary Devices. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why writing is like being an athlete, and why struggle is a good sign The differences between academic writing and writing for a commercial audience Endings, killing your darlings, and not underestimating your reader Why Dickens could waffle and modern writers can’t What Gen Z storytellers on TikTok can teach conventional fiction writers Literary devices as a toolkit, and why reading aloud matters in a world of audiobooks You can find Amy at WoodenBooks.com. Transcript of the interview with Amy Jones Jo: Amy Jones is a writer, lecturer, and researcher who has designed courses and lectured for over a decade on literature, linguistics, and the craft of storytelling. She is the author of multiple books on writing craft, and today we’re talking about The Story Book: Plot, Character, Setting, Genre, Narrative and Literary Devices. So welcome to the show, Amy. Amy: Hi. Thanks, Jo. Thank you for having me. Jo: Oh, lots to talk about. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Amy: Okay. So, I grew up in Somerset, which is where I live again now. There’s a strong literary history here, I think. I went to primary school in Nether Stowey, and was introduced to Samuel Taylor Coleridge very young. So I think that’s had a strong effect on my interest in writing, which has really always been there. As soon as I finished my undergraduate degree, I went into teaching, which has now been about 15 years. As you said, I’ve taught across A level and then undergrad. I started a course for undergraduates with a very good friend of mine with the University of Plymouth, and covered literature, linguistics, creative writing. So I have been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades in the writing world, and loved it. My connection with writing has really been… it’s a lovely opportunity for me to download all of that teaching knowledge that I’ve had over these years. I was in touch with John Martineau, who is my publisher at Wooden Books, and he was interested in creating a series of storybooks, or story writing books. I was originally starting that with that friend, my good friend Emma Craigie, who is a writer. But she had other projects in mind, so the six small books and then the large Story Book all came to me, which has just been a delight. So it’s been one a year for the last seven, eight years, and that has culminated in The Story Book now. Jo: Yes. So we’ll come back to The Story Book in a minute. In terms of your writing history, has it all been non-fiction, or do you also write fiction? Amy: I do write fiction, but I don’t tend to put it out there. I find the more that I have expertise in the craft of storytelling, the more I’m self-critical of my own work. Jo: Oh. Amy: I’m a really big fan of Horace, and especially the Ars Poetica, and he has a wonderful line in there about how he considers himself to be a whetstone, upon which, largely, fiction writers sharpen their craft. So I use that model for myself. I spend a lot of time these days—as well as academia, which we’ll talk about—doing consultancy work for scriptwriting, media companies, but also novels and fiction at the same time. So that’s where I’ve found myself. Jo: I think that’s really interesting, because that whetstone idea, and if people don’t know, that’s W-H-E-T-stone, right? Where you can use it to sharpen a knife. So essentially you’re helping other people sharpen their skills. I actually really love that metaphor. I guess essentially you’re a teacher, but also a form of editor in that way. That is a role that editors play too, isn’t it? Amy: Exactly, yes. It is a gorgeous quote, and that text is one that I come back to time and time again if I’m ever in doubt about my feedback. Horace is my guy. Yes, I especially love that whetstone metaphor. Jo: That’s great. It’s interesting. You mention there the self-critical thing, in terms of the more you learn, the more self-critical you become. So how do you balance that for your students then? Because I know I recognise that, and I’m sure many people listening also recognise that. It’s like you see your flaws more easily. Amy: Yes, exactly, which is very valuable. I think what a lot of creative writers are looking for, in my experience, is someone to be that kind of critical friend. You never want to rip somebody to pieces, but if you can put your finger on the one particular element which is bringing their story down, or which they haven’t recognised as an integral part which they need to blow up a little bit more, it’s a wonderful symbiotic relationship between that role and the writer themselves. Jo: How do you encourage writers who want to publish more of their work? How do you encourage them past that point? Because let’s face it, the manuscript is never finished, just abandoned, right? Whoever said that. I mean, that’s true of so much of art. How do you help other people get over that critical voice? Amy: Mm, yes, the self-critical voice. I think to say, “Just get it down. Get it down.” It’s your idea, it’s your baby, and then use the critical friend. I think it’s hard to entirely do that on your own, because we know that old adage of the need to kill your darlings, and a big part of my job is building that relationship with writers or creatives, to the point where it’s very easy to be defensive of elements of your story that you feel are integral or you’re really attached to. If you have an outside voice which says, “I understand, and these are your great strengths, but this one thing just isn’t working,” that can be really valuable to the final piece. I know the critical voice is always there when you’re creating, but—I’ve just said I’m a victim of it myself—as much as possible to ignore it, I think, and push through. I think a lot of the time I find myself saying… people often think that writing should be easy, but it’s not. It’s like being an athlete. You may be, I don’t know, naturally flexible and therefore a good gymnast, but if you don’t train, and you don’t know that mistakes are a really positive thing that will eventually lead to you improving your performance, then it’s not going to get there. So I always say struggle is good. If you find you’re struggling and you’re wrestling with that critical element, that’s a good sign. Just push through it, keep doing it. Let the mistake be there, and then you can come back and revisit it, or someone will help you to address it. That’s my take. Jo: I’m glad you said that. I mean, this whole “think it should be easy” thing. I feel like some people, as you say, they think it should be easy, and if it’s not easy, then they think they’re doing it wrong. Whereas what we’re basically saying is— Writing is hard. Writing a book is really, really hard. It’s hard work, and people are like, “Oh, well, if it’s not easy, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this.” I’m like, yes, it’s good work, but it is work. I mean, there’s these moments of happy flow or whatever, but to be honest, they’re quite few and far between in my experience. Amy: Yes, exactly. There’s a lot of walking and thinking on your own, which is part of that training. Again, it’s that athlete metaphor, with the very best writers making writing look easy. I’ve written in the introduction to this book that there is that common trick that Truman Capote used to say a lot, which was that he just started. He didn’t train. Jo: Mm-hmm. Amy: Which is part of an illusion that perhaps writers like to build around themselves. Truman Capote definitely did train, partly through reading a lot, and getting things wrong. We see the best athletes at the Olympics, and they look fantastic. We see the best writers in their final products, and we don’t see the struggle, and that’s part of the skill. The struggle is there. It’s just silent. Jo: Yes, and we’re comparing our first draft to somebody’s finished, edited, complete book. So it is really hard. Then I also wanted to talk to you about the academic side. So you’re working in academia. You’re working on a PhD in English. I recently finished a master’s, and I was like, oh, my goodness, this wrestling with academic writing, it’s very, very different to commercial mainstream writing. Now, I would say that The Story Book and your books on craft are pretty, well, literary and verging on academic, but still are commercial, right? There aren’t footnotes on every page and all of that kind of thing. What do you find are the main differences between academic writing and writing in a more commercial way? Amy: Hmm. In

How can you move from the starving artist mindset to becoming a creator CEO with multiple streams of income? And how can you get traction on Substack if you’re starting from zero? Amy Suto shares her tips as a former Hollywood TV writer turned author, Substack creator, and ghostwriter. In the intro, Novel November with ProWritingAid; Book Marketing in a Changing World [ALLi Podcast with me and Orna Ross]; Navigating tough times in indie publishing [Wish I’d Known Then]; watch out for fake agent emails [Write Beware]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars for beginners and advanced. Today’s show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Amy Suto is a former Hollywood TV writer and the bestselling author of books around freelance writing, as well as romance, fantasy, and detective fiction. She’s also a ghostwriter and a top 25 ranked Substack creator. Her books include Write for Money and Power. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes How to take back power when your dreams are in the hands of gatekeepers Moving from the starving artist mindset to creator CEO The income flywheel of freelancing, a paid newsletter, and book royalties How serialising fiction on Substack can build true fans and supercharge pre-orders Getting traction on Substack, and how to manage comments and Notes Using AI tools like a scalpel, and how to move past the fear of backlash You can find Amy on her Substacks, Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience. Transcript of the interview with Amy Suto Jo: Amy Suto is a former Hollywood TV writer and the bestselling author of books around freelance writing, as well as romance, fantasy, and detective fiction. She’s also a ghostwriter and a top 25 ranked Substack creator. So welcome to the show, Amy. Amy: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here. Jo: Yes, lots to talk about. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Amy: So I came up in Hollywood as a TV writer, and I was climbing my way up the ladder, starting as an assistant, working in Los Angeles, and then eventually, finally got to start to write episodes of TV. When I hit what I thought was my peak, I was working with a CIA agent on a spy show. It was literally my dream, to be able to pick his brain about all the conspiracies that were actually true and be able to write TV around that. I found myself a little bit disillusioned with the way the system was running. I found that I really wanted to spend more time writing my own original work instead of being work for hire on other people’s shows. So when 2020 happened and everything shut down, I ended up being able to travel the world, ghostwrite memoirs for Olympians and CEOs, and have some crazy experiences as a digital nomad, which then inspired my first fiction book, The Nomad Detective. From there I continued writing novels and also non-fiction books about my experience as a freelance writer, to help other authors and writers figure out how to have this balance of both being able to pay the bills as a writer while also having creative freedom to put together your own work. Jo: I love that. I guess just to address the dream—so you hit this dream of Hollywood TV writing, which of course for some people, that’s their dream and they never got there, and then you left it all. I mean, the strength to walk away from that. So if people have that dream, or there’s the dream of the eight-figure movie deal for a novelist and all this. So can dreams end up not be the thing we really want, I guess? Amy: This is a great question, and I think that the thing that I was running into is that I was putting my dreams in the hands of gatekeepers. I think that when you hand over that power, then suddenly you are left without agency and you are finding yourself working for free or doing work for producers that maybe you didn’t sign up for. People are dangling your dreams in front of you to get you to do what they want you to do. That was a little bit of what I was beginning to experience, and seeing in other writers that I was talking to in the industry. So I knew that I wanted to take back that power for myself. I also love books. Writing novels is something that is very close to my heart and part of my own dream as a writer as well. So when 2020 was happening and everything was shutting down and the writers’ room that I was in went to a Zoom room, I thought, “This is a perfect opportunity for me to explore some of these other areas of writing.” So basically there is this experience that I was having of remembering all of these novelists who started off as journalists, and they started off as journalists because some of the best inspiration for fiction is actually in non-fiction. When I was starting to moonlight as a memoir ghostwriter in between projects in Hollywood, I found myself completely captivated by working with these incredible clients who’ve had lives that were beyond anything I could have ever imagined. So my work as a memoir ghostwriter ended up feeding my creative work, not only being able to pay the bills with these really cool projects, but also being able to interview people about their lives and being able to understand humanity through a completely different lens. I never would have had the experience to get flown out to Vienna and sit down with an entrepreneur who had changed the direction of the way that technology had been built in his industry, and be able to ask questions about what it was really like to be these types of people and to be in their lives and to grow up in Austria or Singapore. So I think that memoir ghostwriting ended up being the perfect primer for me to continue to develop my work as a fiction writer, because I was able to meet so many different people I never would have had the opportunity to meet or work with or ask questions of before. Jo: Yes, I love this empowered attitude to making your own career. In fact, when you pitched me—and I’ve told you this, but for people listening—I had already bought your book, Write for Money and Power, and the reason I had bought it is, obviously, I’m a 20-year writer at this point, but it was your use of the word power. I have not seen another writing book that says Write for Money and Power: The Anti-Starving Artist’s Guide to Becoming a Seven-Figure Writer. And again, the subtitle, other people have done that. Let’s talk about power because why did you use that word, and what kind of power are you talking about? Amy: So when I was coming up in Hollywood, a lot of the writers around me, we were all being funnelled into the gatekeepers’ world for us, and the vision that other people had for us. That meant that we were giving up our power. So when I went on this journey of being able to travel the world, and ghostwrite memoirs, and being able to write my own novels and connect with readers directly, I discovered my own sense of power. I think that for writers, you’re not really allowed to want to be able to have power over your career because it’s so discouraged by gatekeepers and society. You’re supposed to be a starving artist who is grateful for anything that comes your way because you get to make your art. So I think that there’s a shift happening in culture where writers are being treated not just as artists that are expected to starve, but also as creative entrepreneurs, where we’re learning how to own all parts of our creative journey. Both the creation of our books artistically, but also the marketing of them, and how we get them out into the world, and treating that like one whole entity. I think that there’s a shift happening where writers are no longer wanting to write what gatekeepers tell them to, and are wanting to be able to have unburdened creative freedom. That’s why so many authors like Brandon Sanderson end up self-publishing or independently publishing, because they want that creative power to be able to serve their fans and their readers better. That’s so cool, and it also proves the fact that even with people like Taylor Swift buying back her masters, so many people who are at the top of their game are outgrowing the gatekeepers. If they’re not finding use for these older systems, then that also brings them into question for the rest of us. Jo: I love that. Coming back to the book, so you mentioned the starving artist mindset, and in the book you also talk about the creator CEO, and I love that. I feel like I can claim those words, but I know some people listening will just find that pretty intimidating, I think. So what do you think the process is for moving from scarcity to the more empowered author mindset? Amy: When I first was starting my career as a writer, I never wanted to be a business person. I didn’t want to look at spreadsheets, I didn’t want to deal with accounting. The thing is, if you want power over things like what does your book cover look like, or how is your book marketed, or how does your book enter the world, and even just what are the contents of what you’re writing, what are the subject matters, what is actually something that gets to reach your readers? If you want that power, then it does come with some of the other elements of being an entrepreneur, which is understanding how to price your book. There a

How can giving your characters two bad choices raise the stakes in your stories? And how do you ask for the feedback you need from a critique group, and disregard the rest? Erin Dionne shares her writing and publishing tips after more than 20 years as an author and professor. In the intro, The Future of Listening Audible survey [Publishing Perspectives]; Spotify expand audiobooks globally; Audible announce immersive new AI features [Publishing Perspectives]; Writing Storybundle; SPS Live USA conference; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars in November. Today’s show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Erin Dionne writes middle grade novels, picture books, chapter books, and nonfiction, as well as cosy mysteries under a pen name. She’s also a college professor, and her latest book for writers is Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Conversations About Writing. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why two bad choices beat an easy choice and a hard one How pre-writing in a notebook builds confidence in your characters before you draft Giving characters dimension beyond the bubble of their story How to ask for the feedback you want, and protect the core of your story Forming an indie press with your critique group How to get school visits through librarians and conferences You can find Erin at ErinDionne.com. Transcript of Interview with Erin Dionne Jo: Erin Dionne writes middle grade novels, picture books, chapter books, and nonfiction, as well as cosy mysteries under a pen name. She’s also a college professor, and her latest book for writers is Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Conversations About Writing. So welcome to the show, Erin. Erin: I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. Jo: There’s lots to talk about. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Erin: Sure. Like some of the other people that you’ve talked to on the podcast, I’ve been a huge reader and writer ever since I was a little kid, but when I was about seven, I realised that it was people that wrote books. I thought that they came out of a machine or something. When I found that out, I thought, oh my goodness, I love reading stories, so being a writer must be the best job in the world. So I was single-mindedly focused on being an author as a career after that. I wrote off and on in school. I wrote short stories and things. When I went to college, I got a degree in English and communications, and then I went and got my MFA in creative writing. While I was in school, I also decided that I wanted to learn about the publishing industry, so I worked as an intern for a local magazine. Then after I graduated, while I was in grad school, I actually worked in publishing for Houghton Mifflin in their marketing department. I became an editor for a magazine, and then ultimately, I became a professor, and I work at an art school. It was at that point, finally, when I was surrounded by other creative people, that I thought, “Okay, I’ve learned all this stuff. I need to actually put it into practice.” So I got serious about my work in 2005, and my first book came out in 2009, a traditionally published children’s book, and I published in the children’s book field for the next 11 years. I released my first indie book in 2021, and now I consider myself a hybrid author. I do some books traditionally published, some books indie, and I really like being able to have control in different aspects of my career. Jo: Well, that’s great. Wow, you’ve just done so much across the whole industry. That’s fantastic. I do want to ask you then, before we get into the book, you did an MFA, and obviously you love studying. I also love studying. I understand that. I wonder where you stand now on whether people need to study so much. I found personally, as someone who also enjoys studying, that sometimes I make myself not do the practice. I’d rather sometimes be learning than doing. So how can people balance learning a lot with actually writing the book? Erin: Yes, I think that’s a great question. For me, my undergraduate degree in English was not creative writing focused. We didn’t have that. So I thought, “I need to learn how to write.” What I really learned in grad school was how to revise and how to teach. I think now, 20 years later, with the cost of education, you don’t have to have a master’s degree to write. You don’t have to have a degree in English to write. You have to read a lot, and you have to write a lot. I think the MFA is great for deep study on your particular genre if you feel like you need to learn more, and I think it’s great if you want to teach, but it’s not necessary to be a writer. To be a writer, you have to write. So sometimes we can hide behind learning and hide behind all kinds of things to avoid doing the work, but what it comes down to is you have to put your butt in the chair and you have to write at some point. Jo: It’s funny, isn’t it? I like the “hide behind the learning.” I still struggle with it because I love learning so much. I also just finished another master’s degree. I can’t help myself. I do a lot of research for all my books, and I almost have to just pull myself up sometimes and say, “Look, do you really need to do any more research in order to write this novel?” Erin: Exactly. Jo: Okay. Well, let’s get into the book. So you start writing with characters first, and other people, like me, often start with a theme or a question or a place or something. So talk about your process of creating characters and this bad choices idea as well. Erin: Sure. Most of my books start with a character. Like you, I’m a discovery writer, but I love to do all my discovery work in pre-writing phases, and I pre-write by hand. I’m a big proponent of using a notebook. I carry a notebook with me wherever I go, and I have specific notebooks that are for specific projects. Most of my pre-writing is character-based. I really want to learn about who this person is, what do they want, what are they going after in their life and in the story, and what do they need? Wants and needs are always a big one for me, because I feel like a character should be able to articulate their want, but they don’t always know what their need is. That’s up to us as the author to identify that. Then through the course of the story, I always think about it in terms of the character is going after what they want, but they’re going to get their need met by the end of the story. That brings satisfaction to the reader when a character gets their need met. So I take a lot of time to try to figure out what that is, because for me, that’s going to drive the story. I really have to understand the character’s world before I begin. When I feel like I have a really good handle on who these people are that the book is about, I’ll do a beat sheet, like what Jessica Brody was talking about on your show earlier in August. I’ll do a beat sheet to get some general ideas of plot points, and then I’m ready to write. Then that’s where the bad choices come in. If you think about a character and they get to a crossroads in a story, lots of times the first thing that we think about are an easy choice and a hard choice. So for example, if we have a character who’s 16 years old, and she’s grounded, and there’s a party on Friday night that she wants to go to, one choice is for her to just stay home and then hear about the party. The other choice is for her to sneak out and go to the party, and obviously sneaking out and going to the party could have higher stakes and better consequences. But that’s also an easy choice, and both you and your reader know where the character’s going to go. If you give your character two bad choices, that character is going to go to the party no matter what. So are they going to sneak out and have a friend pick them up, or are they going to sneak out and take their mother’s car and go to the party? Now we have two bad choices, higher stakes, and more potential for story drama if they take that bad choice. So I’m always looking at ways that I can have my characters get into a little bit more trouble, make things a little harder. For me, that comes with those decision points, and giving them two bad options so that the reader knows, ooh, they’re going to do something wrong. It’s just a matter of what wrong thing are they going to pick? Jo: So it’s interesting, because you said you’re a discovery writer, and then you talked about your pre-writing phase and the beat sheet, and now these bad choices. So are you coming up with these bad choices at the pre-writing, at the beat sheet phase, or do these emerge once you’re actually into the drafting process? Erin: They come out in the drafting process. I have a general idea by the time I start writing of some of the highs and lows of the book, but I don’t know how the character is going to get there. Because I know my character really well, I can write with confidence, and I know that I’m going to figure out the path that they’re going to take. Jo: The word pre-writing, maybe you could talk more about that, because I feel like some people listening are like, “I don’t even know what that means.” So what is pre-writing for you? Erin: Brainstorming. I just throw down in my notebook all kinds of things about my characters. Everyt

How do you find and notice story ideas, and how do you turn those into short stories, novels, or as anecdotes for your non-fiction or memoir? Why is an author’s note so important in an age of AI, and what might it contain? Joanna Penn shares her thoughts, and her short story, The Black Church, along with its author’s note. In the intro, Ebook Preorders on Smashwords; Two titles per week on Amazon KDP; AI-related Digital Publishing Awards at Frankfurt Book Fair [Publishing Perspectives]; AI webinars in November; JFPenn YouTube; This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F. Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes From story seeds to stories Writing an author’s note The Black Church, a short story, available as a stand-alone or as part of The Buried and the Drowned collection. Author’s Note for The Black Church You can find How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories on all platforms, in all formats: www.TheCreativePenn.com/shortstorybook From story seeds to stories One of the most common questions that writers get asked is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ This is a strange question for many of us, since we are often so deluged with ideas that the difficulty is sifting out which ones to turn into a story.  The trick is to tune into your curiosity and start noticing what grabs your interest. As Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic, “The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.” What do you see that others don’t? What turns your head while others pass by? What do you want to learn more about? What questions come up for you? What obsessions do you keep returning to? Each of these may be a fragment, a word, or a few lines. I call these story seeds. An idea, in its earliest form, is like a seed. It’s small, easy to miss, and nothing like the thing it might grow into. You literally can’t tell what it will look like when it’s grown, but there is potential in it.  A seed isn’t a plot, or a character, or a full setting. It might be a line in a book or a film, a headline in the news, something you see in a museum display, or a place that made you feel something. It might be a question that bubbles up, or a feeling that won’t let you go. You just have to notice these seeds and, importantly, write them down! Capturing your story seeds Thoughts and ideas and story seeds will flit through your mind all the time if you let them, but they are fleeting, so you need a way to capture them before they leave once more. It doesn’t matter how you do this, but you need some kind of simple process. I use the Things app on my iPhone, which syncs to my Mac so I can always access it. Other people use a note-taking app or a physical notebook. It doesn’t matter. You just have to get it down.  My story seeds are often one-liners, quotes, or links to articles I’ve seen that I want to investigate later. They might be passages from books I have underlined, or places I visit, or questions I have while out in the world. Here are a few examples from my Fiction Ideas file that might even spark ideas for you:  United Arab Emirates plans world’s first underwater bullet train connecting Dubai to Mumbai L’appel du vide. The call of the void. The compulsion to jump. “Vengeance of the lost garden.” Ben Okri. A Fire in My Head Noah’s Ark on the moon, like the Svalbard seed bank The Wicked Bible. Printing error. Thou shalt commit adultery. 1631. You can see that these are not fully formed ideas. They are just seeds. Most will lie dormant, but some will sprout, appearing in stories or books years later.  When I’m thinking about writing a new short story, I sometimes go to a cafe and sit with a coffee and scroll through my seed folder and notice patterns and see what strikes me as interesting. Sometimes I won’t even know an idea came from a seed I once found, but I look at my list later and discover I had thought about it once before. It’s a wonderful way to plant ideas and later find they have grown into something wild and curious.  If you haven’t already got a way to capture your story seeds, establish a simple process now. Don’t overthink it. Just start noticing and writing them down. They might not make sense at the moment, but they may flower later. Searching for story seeds Julia Cameron discusses the idea of an Artist’s Date in her book The Artist’s Way, and this practice has always been important to me. It involves taking time out on your own to go somewhere and fill your creative well, whatever that means to you. For me, it’s often travel to interesting places or visiting museum exhibitions that I know will have nuggets of fascination that may result in full blown story seeds.  On the morning of my fiftieth birthday, in March 2025, we woke up in Iceland next to the Black Church at Búðir on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, a few hours’ drive northwest of Reykjavík. The small church and graveyard sit on a bed of ancient lava under the gaze of a glacier and there is a sense that time has stopped in this place. As we walked around the church that morning, the place itself became a story seed, and I later wrote The Black Church from that spark. On the cheaper end of the inspiration spectrum, I often go to the British Museum in London seeking story seeds and over the years, it has provided much inspiration for fiction of different lengths.  An exhibition on religious relics inspired Crypt of Bone, a Viking collection appeared in Day of the Vikings, and one of the main characters in Desecration works as a researcher there. In terms of short stories, a sunken Egypt exhibition inspired The Dark Queen and I saw the actual Bronze Age wooden spars of Seahenge at an exhibition on the ancient world. If you follow your curious impulses, you will find story seeds everywhere. From seed to story Now that you have a load of story seeds, how do they become stories?  For me, it’s usually about a juxtaposition of multiple seeds that suddenly coalesce into something coherent. With a Demon’s Eye came from my own experience of laser eye surgery, which was unsettling in so many ways, but a feeling is not enough for a story. Some months later, I read It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by combat photographer Lynsey Addario, and I suddenly had a character, someone whose life was defined by their sight, and who might indeed choose a dangerous path to keep it. Questions: Where do you find your story seeds? How can you make time to tune into your curiosity and discover more of them? How are you saving your story seeds? Can you open up time to revisit your seeds and see what might take root as a story? The Author’s Note As a reader, I love an author’s note, and as an author, I always include one in every story, of any length. I want to share the spark that started my thought process and I love to include my research trips and links to photos, as well as a bibliography if I’ve gone deeper into any subject. In an age of AI, when whole stories can be generated with a single prompt, the author’s note is a way to double down on being human and include your fingerprints on your finished work. What is an author’s note? An author’s note is a separate chapter, long or short, at the beginning or end of a story. It’s from you as the writer addressed to the reader who might be interested in what inspired your fiction. As an example, you can find my author’s note for The Black Church below. It can be simple, even just a few lines. At the end of Blood, Sweat, and Flame, I note that the story was inspired by watching the Netflix series Blown Away, a reality show where glassblowers compete in a hot shop filled with furnaces and molten art. It can also be far more substantial. My author’s note for Between Two Breaths is a mini essay on how I left London in 2000 to go travelling after the stress of working in the city in the ’90s and found peace diving beneath the waters of the Poor Knights Islands in New Zealand. Later, that led to diving alone and a moment where I made the choice to carefully ascend when everything in me wanted to stay down in the blue. That author’s note also includes recommended books on free diving as well as a documentary, and links to a solo episode of my Books and Travel podcast where I talk more about why I loved scuba diving. While the two notes differ greatly in length and emotional depth, and they shouldn’t affect whether the reader enjoys the story or not, I feel like they provide an element of humanity that adds to the experience. So, what should you include in an author’s note? Start with the seed I love to include my story seeds, the initial impetus for how the story was born.  In my author’s note for Seahenge, I explain that Seahenge itself is real and did indeed emerge off the coast of Norfolk, but my own experience of it began in 2022 when I stood in the British Museum in front of the actual blackened Bronze Age timbers and imagined a sacrifice laid across that upturned trunk. Standing there, I knew that I’d write a story inspired by it someday, I just didn’t know what that would be at the time. Then I talk about how the seed expanded after a rainy visit to Ely Cathedral two years later, as I considered rising seas and drowned land and how the ocean wants to take it all.  A curious reader can almost understand how the story came to be, and that may change how they regard it, and perhaps, how they