Episode Twenty-One: What “Who Not How” Can Teach You About Writing
When I’m not reading fiction or books about writing, I’m reading business books.
A recent favorite, Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Now, I want to tell you all about it. Why? Because there are so many gems in this book that also apply to the writing fiction.
And no, I don’t mean the business side of publishing (but you should totally check it out for that aspect as well, especially if you’re self-publishing). These insights also apply to the process of writing fiction.'
Here are four insights from Who Not How that will help you write a better book:
You Will Need Feedback to Finish - unless you’re solely writing for yourself, you need to make sure that your writing works for other people. How does that happen? Feedback!
Know What "Done" Means To You - give in to perfectionism and you’ll end up tweaking your novel for eternity. Call it done when key elements still aren’t working? You’ll fall short of your goals. Finding the happy medium means knowing what done means to you and holding yourself to that standard.
Don't Struggle Alone - writing a novel isn’t just hard on a craft level, it’s grueling on an emotional level. When you’re feeling stuck or just plain hopeless about your book, it’s time to call on writer friends for support.
Stop Striving Solo - other writers aren’t your competition. After all, you can’t possibly write enough books to fully satisfy your readers. Trying to do everything on your own is a recipe for toxic thinking that keeps you stuck.
If we haven’t met, I’m Olivia, a developmental editor & book coach who helps genre fiction writers master a repeatable writing process so they can create books their future readers will love without overwhelm.
Here are the resources mentioned in this episode:
Learn more about Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy here: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54018473-who-not-how
Want to be the first to know when Reader Ready Revisions opens? Join the waitlist here:https://www.oliviahelpswriters.com/reader-ready-revisions
Want to be the first to know when I open to sample edits on June 9th AND get a head start on the first phase of the revision process? Grab my FREE Revision Kickstart Guide right here: https://olivia-helps-writers.kit.com/revision-kickstart-guide
Have a response to this episode? Hit me up on Instagram @oliviahelpswriters https://instagram.com/oliviahelpswriters
You can listen in your favorite podcast player here.
Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
Disclaimer: I am not at all affiliated with Dan Sullivan, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, or Strategic Coach.
Transcript
Olivia Bedford (00:00)
If you're working on your first book, you have probably asked countless how questions. How do I write a book? How do I create conflict? How do I know that readers are going to like my characters? How, how, how?
In this episode, I'm going to argue that you're actually asking the wrong type of question. Instead of asking how you should do all those things, I want you to start thinking about who can help you figure those things out and so much more.
Welcome to episode 21 of the Better Writer podcast. I am so excited to talk today about a book that I read recently that I think is incredibly relevant to writing fiction. The book is Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. And it was written for business owners, entrepreneurs, that kind of thing, which many authors do put themselves in that category, especially once they start publishing.
But I think that it's relevant for the entire writing process, not just that end goal. So today I want to share four insights that I found while reading this book that I think are incredibly relevant for writers and that can hopefully help you overcome some of the mental and emotional roadblocks that keep writers stuck when they are trying to finish their books. right.
Insight number one, you will need feedback to finish your book. Obviously, I am an editor. I am biased, but I will die on the hill that you are going to need to get feedback from someone before your book is ready to go out into the world. That person could be a beta reader. They could be paid or unpaid. I'm not going to argue that every single person who is writing needs to spend money on a developmental editor, but you do need feedback from someone. That is just it because you have to make sure that your story actually works for other people and the only way to do that is to have someone else read your book. But I think sometimes writers wait too long to get feedback. They want to get it as perfect and polished as possible before showing it to anyone and I think that actually does a disservice to you because you're not going to get feedback that helps you develop your story. We're not going to get feedback that helps you solve plot problems or figure out that you have a massive character arc flaw or hole that is not being resolved, you're going to need feedback along the way. And Sullivan Hardy talked about this in such a perfect way. And I'm going to actually read kind of a long quote here, but I think it's super relevant and super important. right. They say, rather than sitting by yourself, trying to perfect the idea without feedback. It's far more effective to throw your ideas out there fast, get feedback from your team, and then adjust as you go. The faster you get at throwing out incomplete work, the faster it will transform into something great. Dan calls this the 80 % rule. You can get to 80 % of a project very quickly, such as writing a rough draft. However, going from 80 % to 90 % is exponentially more work than going from 0 to 80%.
Going from 90 to 100 % is a mountain. You just need to do what you can do as the who and then quickly pass it off to the next who. The longer you try to perfect your idea before feedback, the slower the transformation process. Get your who's involved. Stop trying to do it all yourself. The sooner you get teamwork involved, the faster and better your work will be. Also, with encouragement, you'll work through challenges instead of procrastinating as you would naturally.
All right, a quick note, they use the term who's to essentially encompass the person who is helping you in whatever capacity, whether that's a mentor, employee, something like that. I cannot read that without thinking of the Grinch and like Cindy Lou Who, but when they say who's, essentially they are referring to the person who is working with you and you can be a who to someone else while also having who's helping you again.
It really makes you think Dr. Seuss, but that's their language and we're just going to roll with it. All right, so there was a whole lot in that quote and let's unpack. Let's talk about how this relates to your writing process. First off, they even mention writing in the context of a rough draft and I could not agree with that 80 % rule more. Comparatively, it is so much easier to bang out a first draft than it is to turn that first draft into a solid publishable book.
And I'm not saying that the writing process is easy. I'm just saying that relative to each other, revision is harder. Even if it doesn't seem that way at first glance, I think if revision feels super, super easy, it's probably because you are not getting deep enough into your story and actually analyzing what's going on.
Obviously, I work primarily with pantsers with people who tend to write messy. I work a lot with beginning authors. If you are an experienced author, if you are an effective plotter, so you have a really solid outline, maybe you even got feedback on that outline, this does not apply to you. If you write super clean first drafts, this does not apply to you. So it does take a little bit of self-awareness to know, are you in that bucket of people who write clean drafts that are already well plotted, that developmentally probably don't need a lot of work, versus are you a person who made up the entire story as you went along and needs to do some significant developmental work to make sure it actually functions.
If you are in that second category, you are my person. I would love to help you. But you just need to know which side of the divide you want. Are you somewhere in the middle where maybe we do a little bit more of that work on the drafting and the revision process. It just depends on who you are. I'm not going to say that no one out there is going to have a harder time drafting than revising. It just depends. I work with the people who need to more work in revision. So that's my bias. ⁓ But essentially what they're saying is that you need feedback to make that jump from 80 % to 100%. And it's going to be difficult. But with feedback, it is possible. It's going to be so much easier with feedback. Because the thing that makes the jump from 80 % to 100 % so difficult, in my experience, is that you cannot see your work objectively. You know what you intended to do in your head. You know what kind of character transformation you're trying to convey. You know why your characters are doing what they do or why the plot unfolds in a certain way. What you may not know is whether or not those motivations and character change moments are actually translating on the page. And you might realize that something just isn't working, it just isn't working, and you have no idea what, that is the time to bring someone in. Don't try to fix everything before you show it to anyone because nine times out of 10, showing it to someone else, getting their feedback is going to give you clarity, even if that person is not a professional. Just the types of questions that they're asking can give you insights. Obviously, you might also need to do some additional learning. You might not yet have the knowledge or skill to do these things on your own. And again, that is likely going to come from a who. And DIY classes are great. DIY classes are not who's. Because DIY classes don't often involve feedback.
They don't give you a sounding board to talk about your specific story. So it would be careful that even if you have done those self-paced classes, even if you have read a ton of craft books, that isn't quite the same thing as having another person look at your work, evaluate it, and help you find the gaps and the solutions that are going to make that story even better. So the sooner you get feedback, the sooner you have someone else look at your story and look for the gaps, the sooner you are going to be able to cross that line from 80 % to 100%.
And like I've said before in other episodes, I even offer outline critiques so you don't even have to have a complete story in order to get feedback. I know other editors do the same thing. So if you're one of those people, you're a plotter, you hate revising, you would rather just make sure your story works before a single word is written. Outline critique is the way to go. There are tons of options for getting feedback at literally every stage in the process. You do not need to wait until you have a finished draft. And you definitely should not wait until you have what you think is the final draft before getting feedback you should get help way before you think you are completely done because most likely 99.99 % of the time when someone finally looks at your story they are going to have critical feedback that will make it better and if you have spent years of your life polishing it before you get to that point it's gonna be really hard to start making changes then and we don't want that to happen.
All right, insight number two, done is a decision. And for this one, we've got a quick quote that actually follows right after the part about getting feedback. And it says, get used to publishing or sending out imperfect work. Nothing is ever truly finished, only done. Done is better than perfect. And I think that quote is so important because you will always be able to tweak or fiddle with or keep revising some aspect of your story.
I hear all the time from published authors who go back and look at their book and even though it has been published for 10 years, they look at it and there's something that they still want to change. And I think that really speaks to the importance of having a clear vision for your story, setting a standard for yourself before you start revising so that you know what done means for this particular project. And that is why my program, Reader Ready Revisions, starts with visualizing your finished book. Phase one of my program is all about setting a standard for yourself. We're setting a vision for your finished book. That means figuring out who you are writing for, figuring out what those readers actually care about, figuring out what experience you need to deliver in order to make sure that those readers are satisfied with the book you've created for them. So we want to go into the revision process with that pre-work already done, a vision for what the final draft will look like that we can hold ourselves to along the way. And that also means making sure that once we hit that, we're actually taking the next step forward, whether that's querying or self-publishing or whatever it is for you, set the standard, do the work to hit that standard. But then once you get there, it's time to move on and just ship it out into the world. even if it is terrifying and you don't feel ready, It has to happen.
Eventually you have to publish and there will always, always, always be something else that your little perfectionist brain says you could fix or change or do better. But there is such a thing as good enough and ready, even if that done standard isn't absolute perfection, which is impossible anyway.
Insight number three is to be honest when you're struggling. Too many writers believe in this myth that a true writer struggles alone. And that's just not true. Getting help is good for you. It's true in life and it is true in writing. Because just talking through a problem is going to make it so much easier to solve, to address, change. And sometimes all we really need is one good conversation to unlock something that we didn't realize we already knew or for someone to say just the right thing that gives us an insight that we can then run with and start moving forward again.
But don't take my word for it, I am going to read from the same chapter that I've been covering from Who Not How. At some point or another, on the way to achieving your goals, you'll get stuck. The how's you're doing might be too challenging. Side note there, how's is also being used in a very particular way, just like who's. And in this context, how's are the tasks or goals that you're trying to accomplish. The how's you're doing might be too challenging or life will happen. The sooner you can be open and honest with those around you about how you're feeling, the sooner things can start moving forward. The worst thing you can do when you're struggling or stuck is keep it to yourself. By being vulnerable and honest about your feelings, you'll immediately be less overwhelmed. You'll be able to see your emotions differently once they are communicated openly. But also, you'll begin making progress toward the result, because rather than avoiding painful emotions, you'll be committed to moving forward.
I think that right there is one of the most important things that I do in my coaching program. It's not just about the technique. It is not just about the revision process. And I do deliver on all of those things. You will get step-by-step guidance. You will get craft advice. All of those things are part of the course. But I think the true power is in the coaching element and the fact that you are getting support as you go through this revision process. And I think we don't always talk enough about the emotional side of revising or the fact that life will get in the way. And I have gotten so many emails from people saying, you know, I wish I was further along the course, but this X, Y, thing is happening in my family and they are real things. They are painful things. They are things that need attention. And I designed this course with flexibility for that exact reason. You have two years to submit after the course ends. But I think it's also the power of coaching is that it is so valuable to have someone on the other end of the line or email, in this case, who's there to say, it's okay, writing shouldn't be the priority when that is happening to you. Focus on that. Let life happen because it will not stop. And then the writing will be there. I will be there when you need me later on. And just saying that these things are happening, I think it's helpful. Just having that reassurance that this is normal, it is what happens because for many of the people I work with, writing is not yet a full-time job. It may not ever be the full-time job. It might not be your goal. And that's okay. You can still get your book done, even if it is not a linear and super neat process from point A to point B. I think also that, when we are working alone, it is just as easy to hate everything in a good book as it is to think everything in a bad book is great.
And I think that's another thing we don't talk about enough is people throwing the baby out with the bathwater when they look at their draft and they think everything is awful and I'm a horrible writer and there's nothing that I can do. You might need someone to come alongside and say, hey, actually, there are things here that are really working. You don't need to toss out this entire draft. We just need to make some targeted changes and it's going to work. think just the perfect example, I just got feedback from some of the students in the first round of Reader Ready Revisions and one person said, you know, usually I would want to take a sledgehammer to my book.
But this course helped me from wanting to completely destroy it and throw it away because they were able to work through the revisions in a systematic way. They were able to get questions answered and they were able to get the help to see their book with clarity, both for what it could be, the positives, and for what needed to change. And I think if you are in either of those camps where you have a hard time seeing the flaws in your book or you have a hard time seeing what's going well, feedback will help. Support will help because so much of revision is really mental and having someone help you through those mental blocks, the mental aspect is key.
All right, and finally, insight number four, stop trying to reach your goals in isolation. I actually touched on something very similar in episode two of this podcast, but Sullivan and Hardy talk about the way that Western education teaches us to work alone. We are taught that if you get help, it's cheating. If you collaborate, it's cheating, that that is bad and that you should be trying to do every single thing by yourself when that is not how it works in the real world. When we start working in jobs or even in higher education, a lot of it is collaborative and writing is no different. And if you are someone who believes in this idea that true writers sit alone in little attic offices writing by themselves, it is a myth. It is not true, it is a lie. And they have a really great example that actually comes from the world of fiction writing, which I found very entertaining. They talk about the relationship between
CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, which if you didn't know, they were actually friends in real life. They were actually in the same writing group called the Inklings. And you know, I this is another thing where people kind of think of the critique group as like this modern invention, but it's not. People have been in writing groups for a long time and writing groups have been helping people for a long time.
“Without proper context, it's easy to assume that Tolkien was a lone genius, and that the Lord of the Rings books were always somewhere buried within him, their publication inevitable. But that his fanciful and ignorant thinking, Tolkien's thoughts were heavily influenced by Lewis's. And without that meshing of ideas and the confidence that ensued, Tolkien wouldn't have, he couldn't have, written those books.
A keystone concept in psychology is known as the fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias or over attribution effect, which is a tendency for people to overemphasize dispositional or personality based explanations for how a person acts while under emphasizing situational explanations.”
All right, isn't just such a great image that the Lord of the Rings did not come about just because JRR Tolkien had this beautiful, wonderful idea.
It also came about because he had a writer friend collaborating with him, supporting him, encouraging him, talking to him about his ideas, reading early drafts. Think about how powerful it could be to be that person for someone else or to have that kind of writer friend in your life. That is the beauty of collaboration. And I don't want you to think of collaboration as just co-authoring or just hiring someone to work with you on your story. It is so much more expansive than that.
It is literally just having a writer friend that you can sit down with for coffee and rant about writing or rant about a problem in your story or complain about bad advice you got from a other critique group. There are so many ways for writers to support each other. And you never know if you're going to end up being the person who helps someone create their masterpiece that people are still talking about years and years and years later. So don't think that doing it all by yourself is some sort of accomplishment to be celebrated. Writing is collaborative, publishing is collaborative, and the sooner you open up to that the better off you'll be. And something else that they talk about that I'm not gonna read anymore from the book, but they also talk about this idea of competition. And when we see people as our competition only, it changes how we approach our goal.
We limit ourselves by focusing only on what we can get out of other people, what is being taken from us when someone else is successful. And that kind of mindset is just toxic.
I think it's especially toxic for writers because our output is so much smaller compared to the input of a single reader. think, you know, for example, for myself, I wouldn't say that I spend a ton of time reading for fun. I'd spend a ton of time reading for my job, but I read maybe at minimum 50 to 60 books a year, probably upwards of over 100 in a good year. And unless you are spitting out crap books with AI, in which case I will not be reading your work, you are not going to be able to write 50 books a year. You're not going be able to write 120 books a year. So no one author can write enough books to fully satisfy me as a reader, even if they are the best author in the world. So that's not your goal. Your goal is to be one of the 60 or maybe two of the 60 if you write super fast. And then those other 58 authors, the other, you know, 100 authors, however many, those are your peers. They're not competition. Because if someone writes something that's very similar to you, maybe I discover them first, and then I discover you through them. Or maybe that author turns me on to a completely different genre, and then I'm going to find your book next because I'm going to be exploring for more books in that genre. So I think, yes, there are realities of the publishing world where there are not enough publishing deals for every single person out there who wants them.
There are so many millions of books out there and some people are not going to get the reach and attention that they want or even deserve. But that doesn't mean that you should look at other writers solely as competition because that is only going to limit your reach further because it is going to close you off and you are not going to find your people in the writing community, which is just so important and you cannot move forward without people in your corner, people to support you. And I hope this episode has really convinced you that if you didn't already know it, you need help to write a great book. All right, I said I was gonna read anymore, but I lied. I'm gonna read one more quick quote, to close this out.
“The fact of the matter is this. You don't have to feel guilty for not doing everything yourself. You're not less of a person for getting help. You're not cheating. Even more, there are hordes of brilliant and talented people out there who would love to help you with your goals and objectives and get your help with theirs. Rather than spending your day feeling guilty and frustrated and limited in what you can do, you could feel incredibly grateful that you have amazing people who not only will help you, but want to help you.” And I am one of those people who would love to help you.
I am an editor and a book coach. My program, Reader Ready Revisions, is literally all about helping you tackle all of the hows that go into revising. I am going to help you on a technical level with the craft stuff, but I'm also here to support you on an emotional and mental level so you can put out the best book possible. If you are curious about working with me, there will be links in the show notes.
I'm currently closed to sample edits. I talked about that in the last podcast episode, Reader Ready Revisions my group coaching program is going to open for enrollment very soon And I have some other services available as well, which you can find out all about on my website All right, and if this episode resonated with you, I highly recommend checking out who not how by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy it is a great book. Yes, it is geared toward business owners, entrepreneurs, but especially if you're self-publishing, you are on the path to becoming an entrepreneur as an author. ⁓ It's essentially running a business. So highly recommend that you check that out. I will also link to the book in the show notes.
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Better Writer podcast. If you have a writer friend who needs to hear this message and you want to be the CS Lewis to their Tolkien, then please just please share this episode with a friend or post about it on social media. You can feel free to tag me. I'm at Olivia Helps Writers. And if you want to chat with me about how I can work with you or just ask me a general question about this episode, revision, anything else, you can DM me at Olivia Helps Writers. I would love to help. All right. Thank you again for listening. Have a wonderful week. Keep writing. Keep getting better. One word at a time. See ya.
