Published 9 Books in 2 Years While Running Two Businesses by @vscampbell on 3Speak
Most people think writing a novel takes years of free time you don't have. I wrote 9 full-length novels in 6 years while working full-time and running two businesses — using a repeatable system, no...
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Nine novels in six years and seven more in development, all while working a full-time job and supporting my consulting business. My name is Val Campbell, and when people hear that, they tend to assume that I don't have a life, I don't have kids, I don't have job, or whatever, I just focused on writing. That's not true. But when I got started, I realized that I needed to be very efficient and make good use of my time, and I needed a system. and I couldn't find one, so I created one, and I'm going to share part of that with you for free today. You know, when I was developing this system, I wondered, how good is it? So I went and did some test posts on some of the free-to-post, free -read sites, and I got upwards of 50 ,000, I think one was 54,000 views, and it got, you know, 4.6, 4 .8, 4.93 stars. So that proved my system worked really well. It made a good story great. I'm not bragging. I just want you to understand that I've done this, and I want to show it to you. So in October of 2020, I sat down and started writing a book, and I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't really very good at that, and I needed some help. I'd done a lot of technical writing and my consulting practice, but that's a lot different from writing fiction. So I went looking, and all I could really find were things about how to diagram sentences and how to conjugate verbs and things like that. I couldn't find anything that was a system to take you from the start. write the start of a concept of a story all the way through to an audio production. So I created that for my own benefit, and then I decided, you know, I should share this with some other people. There might be some folks interested in how to save money and how to do this. So I put it on you to me, and that's what I'm sharing part of here today with you. Most new writers start with some kind of a concept, and then they sit down at their computer, and they just kind of start banging away at it, picking at it, trying to figure it out. And while you certainly might be able to do that, it's going to be slow, and it sometimes doesn't hold up in the long term. So, instead, I created a four-step method to go from a spark of an idea to a story that actually holds up. I call it facts, presumptions, questions, and then premise. And this is how it works. First, you start with facts. Not facts about the world, facts about this story. Who's the person? Where are they? What's about their situation? What's true here? What do we know? And this isn't creative yet. It's just laying the bricks. She's 34. She just left her job. She hasn't spoken to her sister in three years. That kind of stuff. Quite simple. The next piece is, I go to presumptions. For instance, What is the reader going to assume is going on? If she just left her job and hasn't spoken to her sister in three years, a reader might presume there's tension, maybe regret. Maybe she's about to reach out. You're not deciding the story yet you're mapping what a reader's brain naturally fills in around the facts. Now we want to talk about questions, that this is a part that most authors miss when they're starting their process. We want to turn these presumptions and these facts into some questions and then answer those in our story. Why'd she leave her job? What happened with her sister? Is she going to reach out or run further away? These questions are gold. They're literally your plot, job security. Every scene you write from here on is either asking a new question or answering an old one. Last step, you turn all of that into... a premise. One or two sentences that define what the story actually is, not the plot, not the ending, just the core tension the whole book is going to live inside. Something like, a woman who walked away from everything has to decide whether going back means healing or losing herself all over again. See, that becomes your compass. Every chapter, every scene gets tested against that premise. Does it serve it, keep it, or doesn't it? And if it doesn't, you cut it. So let me explain to you why this works. It turns a checklist into facts, presumptions, questions, and a premise, and that's the difference between starting at a blank page for three weeks and having a working starting point in one sitting. It's not magic, it's structure. It's a system. And that structure is repeatable. which is exactly why I was able to do this nine times, not just once, nine times, actually seven more, four of them are almost finished in six years. This four-step process and a lot more is explained in detail and demonstrated in my Udeme class. There's a link below here, you can find it. Now, I also get into editing, and editing is, I think, one of the biggest parts of this that changed my whole career as a writer. as an author. And the reason for that is that in my first three books, I used a human editor, and I learned a lot, and she was phenomenal, but humans miss things. They get involved in the story, and I explain this all in the class on editing and why this happens. I'm going to teach you a system that avoids all of that and saves you thousands of dollars. And my whole class, my coupon that I've been willing to give you, my whole class only costs about 20 bucks. 20 bucks to save thousands, I think that's a pretty good value structure. This is Val Campbell. See you in class.