Links Mentioned in this Episode:

Emma Dhesi’s Website

Emma Dhesi’s Youtube Channel

First Book Finish Program

4 Pillars of a Successful Writing Practice, with Emma Dhesi: Full Transcript

Intro:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love. 

Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page. 

This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state. 

Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community, in this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, Writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show. 

Rhonda:

Well, hey there Writer, and welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio show. I'm excited today to be talking to my friend Emma Dhesi.

Emma is a certified book coach and a bestselling author, and she's spent most of the last decade helping debut novelists bring their first manuscripts to life. She specializes in working with fiction writers across all genres to shape and structure a compelling beginning, middle, and end to their novels. 

Emma does the kind of developmental editing and mentorship that helps take your manuscript to the next level. And she works with writers one-on-one to guide first-time authors through drafting and polishing their debut novels with a combination of craft, brainstorming, cheerleading, and accountability that gets people to the end of their manuscripts and into publication. 

Welcome, Emma. So glad you're here. 

Emma:

Yay. Thank you, Rhonda. It's lovely to be here. I always enjoy our chats together.

Rhonda:

Yeah, me too. Me too. So today I wanted to talk about how we get in our own way, how we get stuck. When we're trying to finish a novel. So I was talking to someone this week, and she has worked on her novel for over a decade, right? 

And it's like, I think of it as like binge writing. It's like a few months of like, yes, I'm writing my novel. And then, oh, no, I'm not writing my novel. And then a few months of, I'm writing the novel and then backing off and you know, so that's why it takes, you know, it's not 10 years of daily writing, it's 10 years of, I can do this, no, I can't. 

So what do you see as the main, let's just call it mindset, like how you think about your work, what are the main mindset issues that you see writers coming to you with? 

Emma:

It was making me laugh because that was exactly me. I can all through my sort of late teens and 20s, that was entirely me. I'd go and do a class and I'd get all excited and think, yeah,

This is the book, this is the one, this is the one I'm going to finish. And then a few weeks after the class had finished, life would take over. My excitement would wane. And I think that is one of the key mindset issues that we do have is that idea of consistency and maybe actually it's going further back than that is that we think it should be easier than it is.

Rhonda:

Oh my god, yes, we think it should be easy because all in the movies and TV shows, it's so easy. They just type and then they run a spell check and they're done. 

Emma:

I know. I'm thinking of one of my favourite movies, Romancing the Stone and Joan Wilder, as she's typing and she's weeping and it's just wonderful. And then she goes and has this adventure. We don't see the six months prior to that where she was pulling her hair out and she was going.

And I think so I think particularly for us newer writers, people who are just coming to this, maybe writing their first book, but even maybe their second or third manuscript as well, that there's not yet that understanding that awareness that it's hard, it's super, super hard. And just because you've read over 1000 books doesn't mean you can write a book, it's two, two different skills. So that's certainly something that I have seen and experienced myself. I don't know if you've had that experience as well, Rhonda, that you used to feel that way. 

Rhonda:

I mean, I did early on. I definitely did the like, now I'm a serious writer. Oh no, now I'm not a serious writer. Now I'm a serious writer. Oh no, I'm not, you know? And it was, I mean, it was just fear. I was just afraid. I have this dream. I wanted to be a writer so bad.

And I wanted to, of course, you know, nobody wants to be a bad writer. We all want to be good writers. And so I put so much pressure on myself. And like, if I wasn't writing something that was going to last through the centuries, why was it even bothering to sit down? You know, like it was, I was under real pressure. So for sure, it just generated all of this fear and anxiety and, and there's no way I could write. Yeah.

Emma:

Yeah, and that's an interesting point that you bring up, I think, that idea that this has got to be absolutely perfect and the novel of a generation, the idea that this is going to go down through the generations. 

Rhonda:

Bestseller, right? Yeah. 

Emma:

And it's a funny switch that happens. And I think I experienced this myself when I was writing for fun. And I was writing for enjoyment. It was fun. I did enjoy it was a way of switching out of day to day life, which particularly when I was writing my first book, it wasn't brilliant, I was in a bad patch, but it was that release, it was that kind of meditative state that it could bring me into, because I wasn't thinking about my life, I was thinking about the life of my characters, and that took me out of my day to day, and that's one of the lovely things I get from it. 

Rhonda:

Yeah, me too, I think about writing a sanctuary, right? Like from all of the nonsense and all the errands and all of the life that… gets thrown at us, all the things we have to do and all our anxieties. And now I'm just gonna go over here and make up the story. Like how great is that? 

Emma:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so it's fun. And then somewhere along the line, we decide, oh, I think I'd like to publish this book or I'd like to become a published novelist or this might be the one. And so then that, the way we view that particular manuscript shifts and it becomes this very serious very earnest endeavour that we no longer enjoy, but we must do and we grind our way through it. 

And so all the stuff that we came to it with, and actually I think back now, it's what gave us our authorial voice, is just the freedom that came with it. But as soon as we put this idea that we're gonna publish it and maybe find an agent, we feel that we've got to change all of that. 

And we've got to become this serious person and very earnest about it and we start to lose our voice or question our voice and sanitize our voice because we've read so many guidelines and so many rules and so many books that we question ourselves. So I think that is another element of the mindset side where people get tripped up a lot. 

Rhonda:

Yeah, I think that's true. And I kind of refer to it as proCRAFTination. And it's like this little cycle where I'm afraid, so I go do another workshop or read another book on writing.

And that just makes me a little bit more afraid because now I'm like, how am I ever going to do all the 15 things that this book says I have to do when I sit down to write, you know, and so we kind of go round and round in this little circle. 

And we're always looking for the next workshop or the next book to be the silver bullet, the magic thing that shows us the path to writing our particular book. And of course, no such thing exists, right. And I say that as somebody who gives workshops. 

Emma:

It's a caveat I put into all of my workshops as well as remember, everything that you learn, you're for sure going to find a book that doesn't do that. So everything is a guideline. It's not a hard and fast rule, but these guidelines are useful to have when we're learning the rules so that once we're familiar and comfortable with them, then we can start to bend them and shape them to fit the book that we're writing. 

But you know, it's actually something I say to a lot of people that I do calls with, particularly if it's a one-off call. They tell me, I've been reading this and I've been listening to this podcast. I've been doing that book and I went to this workshop. And do you know this person? They do a great course. And often my sole advice to them, and I think the most useful thing I can say to them is stop, switch it all off, put all the books down.

It's all in your head. So now just take what you already know and put it into practice and go and do the writing so that you can implement what you're learning and put it to use. Because sometimes there's just too many voices going around, isn't there? And you don't know which one to listen to. 

Rhonda:

And also we, you know, in terms of applying things we've learned, the only way you do that is sitting in your chair and writing, which allows you to integrate all these things you've just learned. 

Emma:

For sure, for sure. I think one of the sort of questions that you were asking a little bit earlier is why, you know, why isn't it easy? And sort of talking around that. And a lot of people would say, and I've heard people say it back to me, or I must just not want it enough. And it's funny, and I think I'm maybe going to be unpopular by saying this, but I think there is an element of truth to that. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. 

If I think back to myself, in my 20s, particularly, where I was single, no dependents, my time was my own, out with my working hours. If I had wanted to write that book in those years, I 100% had the opportunity to do that. And I did attend the classes and I still never finished it. And so I think there was definitely a bit of me at that time that didn't want it enough to say, I'm not gonna go to the pub tonight, I'm not gonna go to the theater tonight, I'm gonna take this weekend to go and do my writing, I'm gonna push through with it.

It's not because we don't want it, but I do think sometimes there's an element of we don't want it enough that we will kind of say no to other things to allow ourselves to do the practice that we've just mentioned. And I get on with it. 

Because everybody feels fear. Everybody has it. And it doesn't matter what stage of your career that you're at, whether you're just picking up the pen for the first time or you are Stephen King. 

There's an element of fear and you hear them talk about it all the time. They're always scared. Is this the book they're going to find out? Everyone's going to find out. I don't know what I'm doing. 

Rhonda:

Yeah, exactly. And I, you know, I would love it if we publish the first book and all your fears go away, but they don't. So we just have to learn how to work with them, how to keep going in spite of it. 

Emma:

Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think, I mean, I'm in the middle of a manuscript now.

And I think the shift that I have had over the last few years is that now that this is going to be my fifth book to hopefully publish, I now have evidence that I can do it. Doesn't mean I'm going to write the best book ever. 

But now I know if I just stick with it, if I keep going, if I keep working on it, go back and do those revisions, then I'll get there eventually. If I get that feedback and I know, swallow my pride and listen to what they're saying. I will make progress and I will get there and then I'll be able to have this book at the end of it, of which I'm proud. 

But I think until you've done that, you don't have the evidence for yourself that it is worth doing and you will get there eventually. 

Rhonda:

Yeah, and that you'll get there one, like books are written one writing session at a time, you know, because I think sometimes we also think it's never going to be done.

Like it's taking forever. I often have folks in First Book Finish, especially when they hit that revision stage, they're like, oh my God, this is so long, it's taking forever. And then someone just finished their revision this week and sent it off to beta readers. And I was like, so how long did it take? 

She was like, four months. Like, and she's not writing every day, it's four months of writing a few times a week. And it's done, you know? 

So it's, we make it huge in our head, right? Oh, never will be done, you know, like the drama of it. And I just think there's a lot to be said for just dialing down the drama. 

Emma:

Yeah, yeah. And I'm dialing down the expectation of what you can achieve in your first book or in one session. But just knowing that it is one step in front of the other and eventually you do get there. But it is work. Like there's no there's no doubt about it. It's not something, you know, you might be able to write a 5000 word short story in a weekend, but you're not going to write a full length novel in a weekend. 

That is you have to acknowledge and be aware that it takes time and give yourself the grace to know that it takes time as well. 

Rhonda:

Yeah, I think there's a Cheryl Strayed quote of like writing is hard work, but so is coal mining and you never hear coal miners complain they just dig.

You know, and like, mine the coal, you know, so yeah, just show up on the page and to some extent the rest takes care of itself. 

Emma:

And I think that is the benefit of finding a coach or finding a teacher or a mentor in the way that we do with people is because it gives that accountability and it gives people somebody to show up for when they don't feel like doing it for themselves or they're scared to do it for themselves.

And certainly in my own practice, I feel that that is one of the biggest benefits that I give to my writing clients is I give them that deadline, that accountability, they know someone's waiting for their pages, they know someone's waiting on the other end of that Zoom call. 

And so that kind of supersedes all the fear and they get it done. And then they're so pleased and proud of themselves because they got another bunch of pages done and they've written forward in there closer to the end. 

Rhonda:

Like you say, it's just more evidence. Oh, look at me, I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I can see myself doing it. I mean, that's been invaluable to me as a writer, like over the years of whether it's been like a group program for three months or having. I've had several different writing coaches, book coaches, including you, which was great. And it's just been, it just keeps you going.

It keeps you going feedback and deadlines, feedback and deadlines. I feel like it's the magic elixir somehow. If you're looking for a magic elixir, feedback and deadlines, you know, absolutely. Yeah. 

Emma:

And because knowing too, that someone's in it with you, because as much as our friends and family love us and they want us to do really well, nobody really cares about our books as much as we do, but they don't get it. 

Rhonda:

They don't understand the agony of not being able to figure out Act Two, you know? 

Emma:

Yeah. Yay. So when you've got someone who is in the trenches with you and does care and wants you to succeed and wants you to do well, there's something gratifying about that and encouraging and motivating about that just in and of itself. 

So I always love to know that there's someone with me and I can have a good moan about the book and even say I'm fed up with this story. I never want to see it again. And they go, yeah, I get it. I get it.

So next week, we're going to do this. And they know just to ignore me. 

Rhonda:

Yeah, it's so true. So true. So you talk about four pillars. Can you kind of walk me through what those are? I would love to hear about those. 

Emma:

Yeah. So I love these four pillars because I really feel that they encompass every writer from every genre, every stage of their career. As I say, right from the first person picking up their pen for the first time or their keyboard for the first time, right up onto our Stephen Kings and our JK Rowlings. 

And we rotate through these pillars constantly throughout our career as a whole, through the different stages of our career independently, through each book independently that we're writing. And so we can be jumping from one to the other sometimes within a day, depending on what we're working on. 

But the first pillar really is awareness. So just being aware of where you are in the landscape of writing as a whole. I think we often tend to get very bogged down and it's just us, we are alone, it's just this manuscript, that's all we've got. But actually, if we lift our head from the page, we see that we're part of this wonderful community and everybody's at different places along it. 

And it's just trying to be aware of where you are on that path and in that landscape, are you at the starting block? And if you are, what an exciting place to be. Are you sort of 10 years in and X number of books behind you and that is very gratifying to know that you've been able to do this all this time, all the way up to your Stephen Kings who are like, wow, what an amazing journey this has been. So just having that awareness of where you are is the first pillar.

The second pillar is acceptance, accepting that you are where you are. And this is one I have trouble with sometimes because I'm always looking to the next thing, the next thing. I've not finished this manuscript, but I'm already thinking about the next manuscript. And so having to kind of just rein that in sometimes and just be okay. This is where you're at. You've, you've written five books, which is amazing because look at where you were 10 years ago and you hadn't written any.

So that's phenomenal. But I can also look down ahead of the path and go, but yeah, but I want to write another 20. So it's just awareness of where I am in the landscape. And I think every writer needs to do that. Just be okay with where you are. It's part and parcel of this journey of life, you know? It's not sitting on your laurels and saying, well, you know, if it was meant to happen, it will happen, or when it's meant to happen, it will happen. But it's being at peace with where you are and not berating yourself not being as popular, as successful, as further along as you hoped you might be by any given time. 

Rhonda:

Right. Okay. So awareness and then acceptance and what's number three?

Emma:

Number three is the toughest one and that's growth. So this is where the growth happens, where we do the most learning. So that's where we switch off the podcast, we close the books and we do the writing. We start writing that book and as painful as it is, that's where our growth comes in. That's where we learn the most. We've got to do the do if we want to know how to do the do.

But it is hard and I'm in that right now. I'm in revision stages and I'm still kind of growing in this book and it's still painful but as I was saying before I've got that I know I can do it. I just gotta keep going. So it's the hardest and often it's the longest pillar that we sit in but it's well worth it because that's where we see the real achievement success for ourselves as individuals, but then also perhaps for our writing and for with our readers. 

And then that kind of has a nice tag into the fourth pillar, which is fun. So we've got to remember to have fun with all of this. This is one of the reasons we came into this in the first place. And so the fun is just celebrating the small things like, Oh, I've just got a new idea for a book, or I just had a great writing sprint, that went really well, or I just got some feedback and I got a great idea for how I can progress the story all the way up to I got an agent, I got a publishing deal, I published my book, I got my first review, did my first podcast, whatever it might be, ran my first ad, all of these things through the writing, the craft, the learning, the publishing, the marketing, the advertising, all of these things that are part of our author career, our author journey, they all jump around in these different pillars.

But everyone's been through them, including your favorite famous author. They have for sure been through all of these different things. 

Rhonda:

I love that. I'm often saying to folks like you can take so much of the pressure off yourself if you constantly say to yourself, I'm learning and growing as a writer, because we're always learning and growing as a writer, right? 

No matter how much study you've done, how many workshops you've taken, how many books you've published. The new book is a new thing. And so you are growing and learning, learning and growing as a writer, as you do the writing. So I love that. 

And, and the fun I literally just picked up a new set of stickers, I'm holding up, I can't see this, but I'm holding up my my little puffy bird stickers, to like, every time I do a session on my book, I get one and when I get six, I get a cupcake, you know, this is how my life goes. 

So yeah, I'm making it fun. And what are all the ways you can make it fun because I don't think you're like, your brain is not going to let you do the thing that is hard and difficult. 

So if you're constantly telling yourself, this is so hard, it's so difficult, it takes so long. Your brain is like, yes, we want to avoid that. You know? 

Emma:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. As a puzzle, I think that's a nice way to think about our writing for just piecing a puzzle together. It just happens to be not a jigsaw puzzle. It just happens to be a word we're in charge of it.

If we've got time, I'd love to just give an example of how at the top end, you know, if we're thinking about very famous people who are at the top end of their career, and we think don't go through these phases. 

And Harlan Coben is a crime writer, thriller writer, who's at the top of his game, huge bestseller. So he is aware of that. And he enjoys that I can see that in their personal appearances that he makes and the social media that he does. He is loving life right now.

But he's also growing, we see this growth in him. So he not only is he writing the books now, but of course he's got these Netflix shows that he's doing. 

Rhonda:

Oh boy, do I know about his Netflix shows. Yeah, they're very bingeable, very bingeable.  

Emma:

And so what a wonderful kind of new challenge and new bit of growth for him to, I think he's involved in the production side, but also involved in the script writing side.

And they're not just in the US, they're based in the UK, they're also based in other places in Europe. So there's a whole new challenge there. And now he's getting to have the fun of going out and promoting these and talking about them. The other thing that he does in terms of growth is he's now teaching. So now he does the BBC have got one of these subscription classes, BBC Maestro, and he's done a how to write a thriller course on that.

So again, you know, he's stretching himself, he's growing. I'm sure there were bits that he would have found challenging and difficult and maybe didn't enjoy, but he's produced something at the end of it that he can be proud of. And now he gets to have an awareness about, okay, well, did I enjoy this? Was that something I want to do more of or that's okay. 

Once was enough and I'm ready to go back to doing my thrillers, but it doesn't matter what stage you're at, we're all growing and we all need to make that fun aspect of it as well.

Rhonda:

I love that. I think that's a great example, you know, and then, you know, there are all these writers these days, who write genre under a pen name and then also do literary work and you know, because so much is possible these days with indie publishing and, and traditional, you know, depending on what route you want to take. So yeah, that's so good. 

Well, thanks so much for being with me today, Emma. It's been so great to talk to you. I think I really do think that how you think about your writing is like you and I were saying like 90% of the battle like we think it's about the next craft workshop but it's actually about getting your own head straight about the writing you know the writing process and your role in it so I love these four pillars of awareness and acknowledgement and growth and fun. Thanks for sharing – that's really great. It was great to have you. 

Emma:

Thank you.

Outro:

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes. 

Your ratings and reviews tell the podcast algorithm gods that yes, this is a great show, definitely recommend it to other writers. And that will help us reach new listeners who might need a boost in their writing lives today as well. So please take a moment and leave a review. I'd really appreciate it. And I promise to read every single one. Thank you so much.