How To Edit Your Own Book w/ Allison K Williams
Allison Williams is an editor, book coach, and speaker, and she’s the author of Seven Drafts, Self-edit like a pro from blank page to book. She has edited & coached writers to publication with Big Five, literary, and indie presses. Her own writing has appeared in the New York Times, and on National Public Radio and CBC-Canada. A former circus acrobat and fire-eater, she still loves to travel, and hosts writing retreats virtually and around the world.
In this episode, Allison talks about her journey from the circus to writing and coaching others to write. As she dives into Seven Drafts, she teaches how to edit your own book and the different drafts to create as you work from your “vomit draft,” the first draft that is a big mess, to your final copy. She also talks about hiring editors and ghostwriters and at the end of the episode shares some tips for those listeners interested in writing memoirs.
Allison's Links:
Twitter/Instagram: @guerillamemoir
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Josh Steimle: Today, my guest is Allison K Williams. Allison is an editor, book coach, and speaker, and she's the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. She's edited and coached writers to publication with Big Five, literary, and indie presses. Her own writing has appeared in the New York Times, and on National Public Radio and CBC-Canada. A former circus acrobat and fire-eater, she still loves to travel, and hosts writing retreats virtually and around the world.
Allison, welcome to the show!
Allison Williams: Hi Josh. It is fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me.
Josh Steimle: Now, as we were talking before we hit record, I think you're the first circus performer that we've had on the show. So we've got to hear your life story.
We've got to hear how you ended up in the circus. That's every kid's dream, right?
Allison Williams: It totally is. And when I was a little kid, my birthday is at the beginning of January and I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida. And that is where Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, may they rest in peace, started their tour every single year.
And so for 19 years, my grandmother took me to the circus on my birthday. And in my teenage years I started thinking, “Oh, I really like this acting thing, this theater thing.” My English teacher told me I was wasting myself if I didn't start to become a writer. My drama teacher told me I was wasting myself if I didn't stick with drama.
And I ended up starting with my local Renaissance festival, which is where I got into improvisational theater and stunt performing. And I started eating fire. And the first time I ever successfully ate fire, I was on stage in front of an audience because I had booked myself as a fire-eater, but I had not yet successfully eaten fire. And I thought, “ Well, if it's in front of an audience, I will have to do it.” And so I did.
And then I paid my way through college being a professional fire-eater in like nightclubs and corporate parties and that kind of thing. And I married a man who was also a professional fire-eater. He had gone to school in Las Vegas and paid his way through school being Caesar's Palace, Royal Jester, and the two of us put together a comedy fire-eating, bed of nails act. And meanwhile, we were also teaching university and teaching mask and movement theater, which was a very special and hard to hire for thing back then. And I started to think, “Okay, I'd still like to be on the road.” And my then husband was ready to not be on the road and teach full time.
And so I met a couple of students who had aerial equipment, like aerial silk, which is that long piece of fabric that hangs down and you climb and wrap up. Aerial hoop, which is like a hula hoop, but made of metal and you hang in it and spin around. And my students had equipment and I had keys to space. So we started putting together some aerial acts and that grew from being a Renaissance Festival act to being corporate performers. We traveled around the United States and Canada and Europe. We went all over the world. We went to Singapore. We did everything from hang over the buffet while people eat shrimp and ignore you to being the entire focus of attention at Chrysler's family day. And please stay just two full circus tents full of acts all day long and everything in between, including a lot of street performing, which is really where my heart lies.
And I think it's one of the things that you and I have in common, Josh, because one of the major messages of street performing is you give away the show for free. And then the people who can afford to, line up to hand you money, if you have done it correctly. Even though they could walk away with no penalty. And the people who can afford to pay you subsidize the people who can't and every everybody gets to enjoy the show. And I think that's very similar to what you do. You have this podcast that spreads your words, that gets it out there to as many people as possible. And not everybody is going to be able to do, more one-on-one time with you. Not everybody's going to be able to do something more intense, but everybody gets the benefit of your knowledge and experience.
And that's what I loved about street performing. I love that we gave the show away for free and then the people who could afford to pay subsidized the people who couldn’t.
Josh Steimle: I love that you put that in, because I don't think that message can be given enough to authors, because it's one of the main questions I get is, “Oh, if I put all this stuff into my book, then nobody will hire me because they have the book.” And I'm always telling them nobody wants to actually do this stuff. They want you to do it, but they need to trust you first. And you gain the trust by giving all the information that builds your credibility.
Allison Williams: Exactly and receiving the information one-on-one in a workshop or in my case, when I'm working with an author in a retreat or for a professional edit, it is a different experience than working through the process by yourself. I work a lot in the literary circles and people are like, “Oh if I publish these essays from my memoir, will anybody still want to read my book?”
And I say, “Here's the thing, I wrote this book about how to be a better writer, both like on the page and in the world. And a lot of this book comes from blog posts that I wrote for the literary site Brevity. And if anybody wants to go back and print out every single one of those blogs and bind them into a pretty book, they deserve their free book.”
Josh Steimle: Yeah, I see people get worried about that as well. And I think, the cost of a book, $20 or something, that convenience of having it all in one place, people are willing to pay $20 for that convenience to have it all in one place.
Allison Williams: It's satisfying to hold it in your hand. And I think the same is true for authors who are speakers or teachers or facilitators, the experience that someone is going to get by summing up your information in a book, that's going to excite them about your ideas. That's going to make them think, “Oh man, I can't wait to hear more.
I can't wait to learn how to apply this. I can't wait to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” And I think it creates the aspiration for people to work with us one-on-one when they've had a chance to see, “Oh, this is what this person's talking about. I'm going to get something of real value if I spend my time with them.”
Josh Steimle: Exactly. Educate us a bit on the transition from being a circus performer to becoming an author and getting reimursed in that writing world.
Allison Williams” So I've written, ever since I was a little kid. My first book was about Angus, the Scotty dog, dictated to my mother who very kindly bound it in cardboard and shelf paper for me. And I've written my whole life, but never particularly seriously. When I was in middle and high school, I started doing a thing with my own work, and this was before word processors or at least before they were available to the general public, now I'm showing my age, and I would copy my poems over and over again by hand taking out every word that didn't belong until they were good enough to be put in my heart back blue journal with the silver unicorn on the cover. And that has stuck with me as an author and as an editor. Does every single word belong?
And so I spent a lot of time performing as an adult. I wrote plays, I did a lot of theater. I did straight theater, like classical Shakespeare in the park kind of stuff, as well as street performing. And towards the middle of my street performing career, I participated in an online writing contest. And this was on an old school blogging site called Live Journal that is now owned by the Russians, but at the time it was a thing. And the format of the contest was that there was a writing prompt every day. You could respond to it in any way you wanted. You could write a song, you could write an essay, you could write a diary entry, whatever you wanted. And then everybody voted. And the people with the lowest votes went home. You know, “went home.” And when I started this contest, I thought, you know what? I think I'd like to win this contest.
And so every single week, I read and commented on every single entry and we started with 365 participants. And we were writing one thing a week and it was getting narrower and narrower. And as we got closer to the end of the contest, which ended up lasting 10 months, and I would not have participated if I had known that from the beginning. And at that point, I had read in comments probably 3000 pieces. And many of them were beginning writers, many of them were inexperienced writers or writers who were still building their skill level. And there was a real art to giving a comment that genuinely praised something good, gave them something genuinely helpful that could make their writing even better and still made them like me enough to want to vote for me at the end of the week. The other thing that's helped me too was I started building my own list of readers because you would need votes from outside the competition as well, if you really wanted to win. And so I developed this giant Excel sheet of all the people I knew who had ever expressed any interest in my writing at all. And I rotated through them so that nobody got sick of being hit up for votes. Week one, Group A, gets the, “Please go read my piece and vote on it.” Week two, Group B, gets it, and I rotated through until the big push at the end. And I did win the contest, which was pretty cool.
I generated 65 pieces in 10 months because near the end, we were writing like two pieces a day, which really helped me get over the idea that writing has to be inspired. No, the only thing that needs to start writing is butt in chair, fingers on keyboard, and then you start. And it's going to suck at first, but you can't fix a blank page. You can only fix a rough draft. And so it really built in me some strong habits. I had a ton of work now that was ready to be polished up and sent out to literary magazines, sent out to mass media, and much of it got published other places.
And I discovered I was an editor. I really knew how to make people's writing better. And by reading so much beginner work, it gave me a lot of practice spotting problems in more advanced work, more intermediate work, and eventually more expert writer work. And so as all this is happening, I am also doing my trapeze act and I start to think, “I'm not getting any younger, but I am getting a little too old to stand between two 25 year olds. And we're all wearing identical spandex outfits.Maybe I should start doing this writing thing a little more seriously.”
And so, I came to Dubai for shows. I was brought here by an event planner and the event planner said, “Hey, I know you want to focus on your writing now. You're looking at getting out of circus. Why don't you come and manage a gig for us at this shopping mall? It'll be six months of work. You get a job, you get a work visa, you get a place to live. All you have to do is set up the sound system in the morning, be there in case of emergencies, sit in the coffee shop that looks at the stage, and write all day. It'll be great.”
I'm like, “This is fantastic.” And over the course of this, I have also met the man who is now my husband, who was already in Dubai. He works as a consultant, which I didn't really understand what he did for quite some time. It was like, “What does your husband do?”
“Oh he wears a tie. I don't know, a time and attendance management.”
And I'm like, okay, great. This is fantastic. I told all my partners go find other gigs. I'm not working the rest of the year. I put roommates in my house. I got ready to move to Dubai. I bought a one-way ticket. And I didn't have a contract, which is not unusual for this part of the world. A lot of deals here are handshake deals, even quite large ones. And seven days before I was supposed to leave, my event planner boss calls me and he says, “I'm sorry, the contract with the mall fell through, you don't have a job or a visa or a place to live.”
And at that point, I also had no work and I thought, “Okay, I have been putting out to the universe for some time now I would really like to focus on my writing. I would like more time and space to focus on my writing.” And the universe has chunked that into my lap. And so here it is, let's go. And I called my then boyfriend, now husband, and I said, “Here's what's happening.” I said, “I'll still come. I've got a one-way ticket. I'm just not sure what's going to happen after that.”
And he said, “I guess you better move in here.” And I have lived in Dubai ever since. I still travel a lot. I lead travel writing retreats, when it's safe to travel. And I've been writing and editing full time ever since, which is a really lucky and privileged place to be in. And yet I don't think I could have had it if I hadn't done everything else leading up to this point. It gives me stuff to write about. It gave me a way to talk to other people about their writing and it gave me a deep understanding of the audience and what the audience wants and what the audience needs and what you have to do on paper to keep the audience turning pages and have them walk away feeling like they had a fantastic time.
Josh Steimle: So what was your first book that you published?
Allison Williams: My first book was Get Published in Literary Magazines. And it was basically advice on how to do just that. That one I self published. I needed something to sell at conferences where I was speaking as a writing teacher. And I was like, I need a little bit more contribution to my plane ticket. I'm not famous enough to get that contribution directly from the conference yet. I had better make something to sell.
At that point too, though, I had also been published as a playwright quite a few times. There's a weird little market which has high school theater competitions. And if you can write plays that are exactly 30 minutes long, so they fit in a competition slot, more parts for girls than boys, lots of little parts so that everybody can have a line, no cursing, no drinking, no sexing. You can sell many copies. And so in the world of high school theater, I am a rock star. And when I go to child theater conferences, kids like have inside jokes and give me boxes of donuts because it's related to a joke in one of my shows. But it's this world that nobody outside of that world has ever heard of anybody who writes for that world. So even though Get Published in Literary Magazines was my first like “book” book. I had seven or eight plays out at that point.
Josh Steimle: You really had done the work before you wrote that first book. You had a lot of writing experience behind you, right?
Allison Williams: I did. And theater is an incredibly helpful market to write for because you do get actors who get up on stage and act out your work and your rewriting and rehearsal, and you see what's not working. One of the things I often say to people writing fiction is you've got to imagine the real people playing these characters, because if you have a character who has no reason to be in a scene, the actress will stop in the middle of rehearsal and say, “Um, I'm sorry. I don't really know why my characters in this scene.” And you have 24 hours to fix it before the next rehearsal or she will stop in the exact same place with the exact same question.
And it lets you be less precious about your work, whether you're writing for a specific format, like it's gotta be 30 minutes long and G-rated, or whether you're writing for, it's going to be a beautiful, twisted drama that's going to be playing at the Shakespeare festival. You're writing to a specific venue, you're writing for a specific market. And so it's much, much easier, I find, to be like, this scene's not working, chuck that out and do something else. And that has helped me a lot with coaching other writers and letting them know, “Hey you've got some good stuff here and you've got some great stuff.
Cut the good stuff.” Because you get to that stage where you're not cutting stuff cause it's bad. You're cutting it because it's not as good as the other stuff.
Josh Steimle: It reminds me of the advice that some people give that before you do your final edit on your book, you should read the whole book out loud because you'll notice things by reading it out loud that you don't notice when you're just typing it and it's in your head.
Allison Williams: I, 100% agree with that. I think read it out loud into your phone and then play it back to yourself. And I also advocate for a paper draft that should be close to your final draft, where you print out the entire manuscript, you read through it, marking it up as you need to make any corrections. Maybe you scissor out a section that actually belongs somewhere else and staple it into place over there. Maybe you rearrange things and then you sit down and you retype the entire document into a fresh, new blank document. Not copy pasting, not just editing, but actually retyping from the beginning, because your body will tell you when something does not belong in the book.
If you find yourself going, “I don't want to type that.” Then nobody wants to read it.
And every author I tell that to, looks at me like I am absolutely bug nuts out of my gourd and every author who actually tries it, emails me a couple months later to say, “Oh my goodness, it worked. It was incredible. It made my book so much better.” It's hard. You have to be really brave to do it, but it really makes your book better.
Josh Steimle: Now in your bio, you mentioned that you've helped people get these book deals with traditional publishers, big publishers, and other smaller presses. How did that start? Were you working as an agent or was this just through the coaching?
You able to coach people to that.
Allison Williams: So what often happens is an author will come to me, either a beginner author, who's starting with, “I have this idea, I've written 65 pages. Please tell me, am I wasting my time? Or should I keep going?”
And very often I'm able to say, “No, this is a great idea. You should totally keep going.”
Sometimes, also, I'll have an author come to me because they've been querying and they're not getting requests for pages because something's wrong with their query or they're getting requests for pages, but not for the full book, because something's wrong with their pages, or they're getting rejections on the full manuscript. And it very often takes an outside eye. Someone who is thinking of the market and thinking of what's in it for the reader beyond just, “Hey, I want to write a beautiful book. I want to share my ideas with the world.” Even for a novel, there's gotta be something in it for the reader, whether that's entertainment or escape or the feeling of horror or catharsis or whatever.
And if you're writing business or wellness or self-help, there obviously has to be something in it for the reader. And it sometimes takes an outside eye to go, “Oh, that thing you think is on the page, it's only in your head, it's not actually on the page.”
The other thing I find that has helped people get a lot of deals is cutting the first 50 pages. Very often when somebody is writing a book, first, they need to tell the story to themselves. They need to lay out here's the world I'm talking about, or here's the situation that we're all dealing with. And very often you can go, “Oh, okay. This first 50 pages, you don't need it. You're getting turned down because people are reading your book and going, when does the story start? Where's the story? When does the good bit start?” And as a fairly ruthless editor, I call myself the unkind editor because praise makes you feel good, but criticism makes your book better.
I am often able to give people advice based on knowing a lot of literary agents, knowing a lot of publishers, knowing what they're looking for, being aware of market trends, staying up to date on what's getting published. And not only what's on the shelf right now, but what has just been purchased by a publisher and will be on the shelf in two years, because you can find that information too. And it's in publishers weekly, you watch agents Twitter feeds, you keep track of what's getting sold.
And that's how you can go, “Okay, teenage vampires, they are definitely out, nobody is doing teenage vampires these days, but if you want to do ogres, it looks like ogres and trolls are going to have a moment, or vegan cookbooks are no longer happening, but migraine cookbooks are going to be a thing. So why don't you get on that? Refigure your book a little bit, and then head in that direction.”
Josh Steimle: Very interesting. So bring us up to your book, Seven Drafts, I'd love to hear how that book came about. And then let's talk a little bit about what the book is about.
Allison Williams: So it's called Seven Drafts: Self-Edit like a Pro from Blank Page to Book, and it is a manual for writing a book from beginning to end. It gets you through the very beginning of feeling brave enough to sit down and tell your story, whether that's fact or fiction. It gets you through the common hurdles of getting to the end of a first draft, which I like to call the vomit draft. Just get it out. It doesn't have to be pretty. There's a wonderful saying actually, Jenny Elder Moke, who wrote the book Hood, which is a Disney Hyperion book for young people. She calls it the grocery draft. You've got to get all those ingredients on the counter before you know what you're going to make. And that's a little daintier, vomit draft, get it out.
Then I go through the story draft where I take people through, how do you know that your story works? How do you know that it's interesting, exciting? That it resolves in a satisfying way? Try blocking it out against a dramatic structure, which your book doesn't have to formulaically follow a structure, but it can be really useful to go, “Oh, typically there's a climax here and in my book, there's not. What am I doing instead that's even better? Or that's working for my book.” It gives you a metric to go against and go, “Okay, yes, I want to follow this tradition or no, I'd like to break away from it, but I'm not ignoring it because I'm ignorant. I'm choosing not to use it because I've made another choice.”
Then we get into the character draft. Does everyone have a reason for being there? If you're writing nonfiction, one of your major characters is the reader of the book. What kind of a journey are they going on through the course of the story? And are they going to feel like they have experienced the kind of climax and catharsis that the hero of a fantasy novel would experience as they complete the quest and step into their beautiful new life?
Technical draft, clean everything up. Are all your sentences working? Is everything functioning? I usually say do a personal copy edit just before you send it to your friends so that you're sending them something clean and pleasant to read. Quick side note, one of the easiest ways to get drafts to your beta readers is to put it up on Amazon, but don't put it up for sale. Just print proof copies. You can send them directly from Amazon to your friends. They get what feels like a “real book.” And it's a really easy way to get them to give you solid feedback on something that feels like they pulled it off a shelf.
I then advocate a friend read, and then I say your seventh draft is your professional read. Whether you're spending money on an editor, which can be big bucks, and you don't have to spend big bucks to have a book. Or whether you're just picking a writer who is substantially better than you or somebody who is tops in your field, and you really respect their advice or somebody who's a strong reader and gives excellent feedback. You want that last kind of someone who doesn't love you and is giving you feedback that will push you rather than pat you.
Josh Steimle: Now, some people might say, “I just don't have time to do all these drafts. Can't I just jump straight to the professional editor and just give them my vomit draft, my big mess. And they fix it up. Isn't that what I'm paying them to do?”
Why would you say you could do that? Or why shouldn't you do that?
Allison Williams: I think that is also a really valid choice. And some of it depends on how much is your time worth relative to your money? If you are someone who is a public speaker, your a business person who already has a mailing list that you're reaching, you already have audiences who are eager to hear what you have to say, then, yeah, don't spend your time writing the book, get your ideas out as best you can. Work with a quality ghost writer, which is not going to be cheap. I have had a fair number of I guess civilians is a good word, but like people who are not necessarily business professionals who are aware of the speaking circuit and yet they're not professional writers either.
They want to have written a book, rather than to write a book and they do not understand that ghost writing is often in the mid five figures. Sometimes it's higher. Because if you want a really quality product, you've got to pay somebody to be you. They've got to take on your voice. They've got to take your ideas, polish them up, add some icing, make them even a little bit better so that you can then grow from your book as well. So that in a way, your book is you on the page coaching you with whatever services or speeches or courses you deliver so that, you can go, “Oh, wow, that's right. This is what I mean when I say that.” And ideally it helps you move forward as well.
If however you are earlier in your career, you maybe don't have five figures to Chuck at a ghost writer. You could instead get a professional edit that is a developmental edit feedback on, “Hey, this chapter actually belongs near the end. This one belongs near the beginning. This concept isn't clearly set up. You have a problem with dialogue tags. They all need to be punctuated like this.” And you can then take and incorporate those changes.
Or if you really have lots of time and not a ton of money, get an editor to edit your first 25 to 50 pages. Because the problems that you have in those pages are the problems you have in the entire book. You can then fix those yourself, again putting in your time, if that's what's worth more to you. And then you can later go to a full professional edit.
But I think it really does come down to how do you want to spend your time? Do you want to be a writer or do you want to be a person who has written a book that bolsters up other things you do? Because both of those are really valid paths. And it's going to make you a lot happier if you know which road you want to walk down. But what do you think, Josh, does that ring true for you?
Josh Steimle: Absolutely. And having recorded about a hundred of these episodes, including interviews with editors and ghostwriters, it definitely rings true. I remember when I first learned about what ghostwriters charge and I was shocked because I found out that an entry-level ghostwriter will charge $20-25,000 to ghostwrite your book.
This is somebody who's just getting started. And I thought, “How in the world can they charge that much?” But then I thought if they're only doing two of these projects per year, that's their entire income. They're not even making that much. If they're only charging $25,000, that's a salary of $50,000. They're not getting rich off of this. And so now I understand a little bit better where they're coming from.
One of my clients is working with a ghostwriter and she's a New York Times Best-Selling ghostwriter, she's written 60 books and she charges about $60,000 to write a book. And so now I've seen this range that, “Hey, if you want entry-level 20 or 25, if you want New York Times Best-Selling Ghostwriter, you're looking at about 60 or like you said, it could even go higher.
I think the author of a Shoe Dog, Phil Knight's book, the founder of Nike, is I can't remember his name, but he's one of the highest paid ghost writers. And he also wrote the tennis guy. What's his name? His book. But he charges something like three or 400,000 or half a million to ghostwrite a book. So if you're the CEO of Nike or the founder of Nike, you go and you get that guy to write your book, and you're paying a ton of money. But there are a lot of ghostwriters that I think are operating in that hundred, hundred and 20 range. But, hey, if you're making $2 million a year, you're a big time executive or something, that might be a small price to pay. For most of us, even the 20 grand, we're looking at that and thinking, “Oh my goodness, I can't spend that much on a ghostwriter.”
Allison Williams: Yeah. And if you want to just get a developmental editor, you can get a very quality developmental edit for anywhere between about $1800 and $3,500. I would say most developmental edits are under $10,000, unless the person has a really specialized skill set, like you're writing a medical memoir and they need to be familiar with medical terminology. But like with ghostwriters, you're buying someone's expertise, who is good enough to write a best selling book, and yet is choosing to spend their creativity on your idea instead of their idea. And a lot of what you're buying with ghostwriting is you're getting someone to go, “You know what? I'm going to shelf my own dream.” You're buying their dreams. They are putting their dream on the in order to help you pursue your dream. And that's why it's expensive because they've got to be good enough to write a book of their own, if they're going to be good enough to write a book for you.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. So now with your book, Seven Drafts, you host retreats, you do writing workshops. Tell us a little bit more about the business side of this.
Allison Williams: So Seven Drafts codifies a lot of the advice that I give to people in general. It's the entry level version of what you get if you come and work with me as an editor. I edit manuscripts for people in that format of, they send me the manuscript. Usually it's a couple drafts past the vomit draft because I am at a stage where I'm no longer really interested in putting together someone's book that is really, really rough.
I would rather help them be a little bit more finesse-y.
And then I also hold both virtual intensives, like coming up in January, I have a five day virtual workshop taught by myself and another memoir guide, Dinty W. Moore. And we have five days where there's writing time, there's networking time, there's craft lessons, like learn to focus specifically on dialogue. Let's try this exercise, focus on setting, try this exercise.
And we're also doing publishing seminars. We do two of those a year where we talk about the business and the craft of writing.
And then I also host retreats called Rebirth Your Book, which are for people to make substantial progress on a draft in the way that you really need to be in a location that is not your home, away from your laundry, your darling children, your lovely pets, your fantastic and supportive spouse. But you are away from all of those things. And so you can give all of your emotion and your energy and your time to your book while somebody else cooks the meals, takes you on an excursion to see a pretty waterfall, ask you questions about your book. And with those, I read a chunk of the book before the person comes. We talk specifically about, “Okay, what are you going to work on this week? How much are you going to accomplish? What kind of check-ins are we going to do throughout the week?” They write all week long. And then at the end, they go home, and we have another couple of meetings and look at more of their book to really sustain that momentum.
And I really like this style of retreat. As a writer, I've been to a lot of writing workshops and I've been to mostly the kind of writing workshop where you're each going to read 25 pages of everybody else in the classes work and give each other feedback and talk about everybody else's work. And those are beautiful workshops and they are absolutely useful at a certain stage. But I got to the point where it's like the workshop I want is somebody giving me personal feedback on my book while I focus on my book and use this time to write my book, instead of focusing my emotional energy on critiquing other people's books. So it's just a different experience and it's the kind of thing that I wanted for myself and so I created it for other people. We do Costa Rica in March. We do Tuscany in October. And then there'll be another one in the summer probably Lancastor, Pennsylvania, because there's a nonfiction conference there and I usually butt it up right next to the nonfiction conference. Does that answer your question?
Josh Steimle: Yeah, absolutely. So what's the best way for people to get involved with this and sign up if they’re interested?
Allison Williams: They can find me at rebirthyourbook.com. The memoir intensive for January is currently enrolling. I think we have 10 spots left. It's only a 35 person event. The retreats are much smaller. The retreats are between 5 and 10 authors. And that information is also at rebirthyourbook.com. And I just love that I get to work with authors in these so many different ways, so that yeah, somebody who has more disposable time, more disposable income, maybe they come meet me in Costa Rica and get that one-on-one help. Somebody has less time, less income, they listen to your podcast and take notes and figure out how am I going to make my book better from what this guest says? How am I going to make my book better from what that guest says? Because you really can educate yourself for free, if you take advantage of all of those resources that are available out there.
Josh Steimle: Yep. It's just a matter of time, like you were saying, where do you want to focus your time?
Allison Williams: Exactly. Exactly. And I think that's the nice thing too, is there's no sin in having a ghost written book or having even a heavily edited book. And it's like, I wouldn't plumb my own bathroom. So if I wanted a really beautiful bathroom and maybe I'm the one who's clipped out from the decorator magazine, “Oh, I want the Japanese soaking tub. And I want the floor tiles to look like this. And I want these taps and everything.” I don't need to spend my time on my knees, grouting tile. It's better for me to then go and do the other stuff that I'm good at and that I make money doing and let someone who is an expert, assemble my ideas into something that is the beauty I envisioned, rather than what I am actually capable of in terms of plumbing bathrooms. And I think that's the nice thing about working with a coach or a consultant or a ghost writer, is that you're getting the benefit of expertise to help you achieve a little bit more than you can probably achieve on your own without putting a lot more time into being a writer.
Josh Steimle: So most of the people listening to our podcast are entrepreneurs who are writing a How-To nonfiction book that they can leverage to grow their business. And so with Published Author, we typically are steering people away from doing memoirs and such, because that's not the book that's going to launch their business. It's going to be more a book like your book, like Seven Drafts type of a book. However, a lot of these entrepreneurs, someday, do have a desire to write a memoir and talk about what they've learned and give all their information back, but put that into their life story. With your experience working with people writing memoirs, what are some of the top tips or top mistakes to avoid that you would give to somebody who's interested in writing that memoir today or perhaps in the future?
Allison Williams: So I would say there still has to be a takeaway for the reader. There still has to be something where you're saying to the reader, “Okay, I am an example of something that you can also do or that will inspire you in your life.”
I think also my next tip would be: Remember, it's not an autobiography. It doesn't begin with your conception and project towards your eulogy. It's gotta be the most exciting and most relevant part of your life. So start at that moment of change, wherever you were when you realized, “Oh heck, I have to make this decision.” If I'm going to be where I am now, the successful me who is looking back and writing a memoir about this, think about wherever you are now, your job, your family, your life, your ideas, where were you at the opposite of that place? If you are now, rich and apparent and really successful. Where were you down and out and lonely and broke? And start from there. And the decision you made that was that first domino taking you towards the success you're experiencing now, because everybody wants to be successful and it is inspiring for people to see how you maneuvered from not successful to successful.
The last thing I would say is: Don't be afraid to be a bit of a villain. Memoirs are much more likable and much more entertaining if we also get to see, when did you make a bad choice? When were you a bad person? When did you hurt a friend out of ambition? When did you neglect your family in a way that you later had to fix? We need to see the hero you in your memoir get into trouble because it is entertaining to watch people get out of trouble. It is pretty boring to watch somebody go from success to success. And there's no takeaway for the reader because what we're learning is, “Oh, you're perfect. And everything you do is great.” It is so much better for the reader to learn from your mistakes and to share those honestly, and somewhat humbly, on the page, can be a really effective writing technique and make your memoir much more compelling.
Josh Steimle: These are great tips and I'm working on a memoir right now and you've already given me some great takeaways. I mean the chop off the first 50 pages and how people often are writing for themselves to explain it and make it make sense in their own minds. I totally have that in mind. So as soon as you said that, I was like, “Alright, I already know exactly what's going to go. I know what I'm chopping off.” And I think the hard thing for a lot of writers with that is, they say, “But that's an important part.”
Well, great. I can save that for later. It's not like I'm going to delete it. I'm just going to create a copy. I'm going to chop that part off. And like you said, the memoir then needs to focus in on a certain, most relevant, most interesting part of your story, I also know what that's going to be from my memoir, which already results in me cutting out probably more like 70% of what I've written at this point. But I'm not going to throw it away. I'm going to keep it. Maybe I'll use it someday for some other project. And I don't feel like it's a waste. My family can read it, if they want to get all that autobiographical stuff. But when it comes to my focus, my purpose with my memoir, I know it's this part. It's not the whole thing that I've written.
Although I feel like writing everything out, helped me make that small part better. Because it helped me formulate my ideas.
Allison Williams: Exactly. You have to write through the stuff that doesn't belong, to get to the stuff that does belong. And this is something too that might be useful for you and it's something that I bet a lot of your listeners already know, which is the idea of the case study in non-fiction How-To. Let's see this principle in action. We can also distill this down when we're writing memoir, this idea of taking the abstract and making it concrete.
So for example, if you're trying to explain: My family was really poor. We grew up really broke. We didn't have any money. We were scrounging in the sofa cushions. It was not a great situation. You could probably sum that up with: “Every Friday night, we would look for change in the sofa cushions and go down to Marcel's dollar and buy a box of no brand macaroni and cheese and make it with water instead of milk.”
And right there, that is 50 pages of poverty. Everybody knows exactly how broke you are. And there's going to be people who identify with that. There's going to be people who empathize with it. There's going to be people who pity it. But your concrete is your case study that’s showing your abstract family history.
So like, for example, my dad was an alcoholic. I don't need to write 50 pages of dad was an alcoholic. I can write about, as an adult, I have a hard time recognizing when people are drunk, because I just think they're jolly. And that says so much more than spelling it out. We are so close to other humans in the commonality of our experience. And that's one of the things that makes writing such a beautiful way to reach people. Whether that's memoir or whether you're addressing a problem they have, or whether you're expressing the beautiful world that you're creating in fiction. Somewhere out there, there are people who have a hole in their heart that your words are going to fill and make them whole.
Josh Steimle: Great. Thank you so much, Allison, for being with us here today. Once again, what are those websites in case people want to reach out, work with you, find out more about what you do?
Allison Williams: The easiest way to reach me is through rebirthyourbook.com. And if you Google Allison K. Williams, I pop right on up. You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram. I'm @guerrillamemoir. Like Che Guevara, not the ape.
Josh Steimle: Perfect. Thank you so much, Allison, for being with us here today on the Published Author podcast.
Allison Williams: Thank you, Josh, for having me. It was really great to meet you.
