186: June 2025 Q&A

 

Welcome to the June Q&A episode! Topics discussed include:

  • my favorite podcasts 1:20

  • the writing advice that was a turning point for me 3:58

  • my typical writing timeline 6:09

  • finding your voice as a writer 9:59

  • advice for writers who used AI and regret it 15:22

  • if a social media following matters before querying 21:43

  • what I look for in an agent 23:39

  • what takes a book from good to great 26:34

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JUNE Q&A

Welcome to our June Q and A episode. If you are new to the podcast, first of all, welcome, thank you for listening. Second of all, we have a Q and A podcast episode that happens every month. The last Tuesday of the month is when it comes out. And so questions are due by the third Tuesday of the month, because that's the day that I record the video, the podcast, everything, and then it goes gets released the next Tuesday. Reminder, you can ask a question on writing, editing mindset, querying my business, being an editor, personal stuff about me, social media, whatever you'd like. We have eight questions this month. A couple of these, I think, are questions from last month that I just didn't have a chance to answer. So we're gonna dive into those first, and then I'll get to the other ones. Okay, so let's dive in.

 

Number one, what are your favorite podcasts to listen to, or YouTube or slash tiktokers, Instagram, writing related or otherwise, I can answer the writing related one first, because it's very easy in that I don't watch writing related content, really on social media or YouTube or listen to writing podcasts. And the big reason for that is just that I create my own stuff and I feel like it kind of clouds my own thoughts in the way that I express advice or tips or things that I've learned, and I want to try to steer clear of that and not like take on what other people are articulating on their social media accounts or their podcasts or YouTube. So I just try to steer clear of that. I do sometimes see videos if like one comes up a writing related video comes up in my FYP, and I have some authors that I follow, like friends or or authors that I read their books and I admire them, and they will occasionally share about writing content, like writing tips, but that's pretty much it. So I can't really answer that one. Unfortunately, sorry. I podcast that I listen to, I go through big I'm a big like, I go through big phases with podcasts, I guess, where I will listen to a ton of one, and then, like, almost burn out on it and then move on. But there are a couple of podcasts that I've been consistent in listening to for a while.

 

I used to be very into true crime, and I used to listen to a ton of true crime podcasts, and I've been off true crime for a few years now, so I don't listen to that so much anymore. I really like interview style podcasts with celebrities. It's just like a niche that I like enjoy. So I listen to smart lists, I listen to armchair expert, and then I also listen to maintenance phase. And if books could kill, if books could kill, actually, might be interesting to y'all. If you haven't listened to that one. There are two co hosts on maintenance phase, and one of them, Michael Hobbs, started his own podcast with this other guy, and they talk about nonfiction, basically just tearing apart, tearing apart nonfiction books that they think are poorly written and harmful and have inaccurate like misleading information, and they just really analyze these books and tear them apart, which is great. It's really entertaining. Let me think. What else I'll listen to, like a few episodes here and there of other things, but those are a couple of the big ones that I'm listening to right now.

 

Question number two, what writing advice have you learned that was a turning point for you in your writing journey, by the way, I actually just apologize. First of all, if it sounds like I'm losing my voice or kind of sick I am, I'm trying to get through this episode without coughing. Um, okay, the biggest piece of advice, writing advice that I heard that was the the biggest turning point for me in my writing career was a piece of advice that I got when I was first starting to write a book. So for context, I don't have a background in writing. I was not like someone who was always writing as a kid. I do have a degree in English Lit, but not in creative writing. And so when I decided that I wanted to try writing, and I wanted to write it a novel. Specifically, I started and very quickly felt like I was out of my depth, that I didn't know what I was doing. And also the process was going so slow because I was editing as I was going through the process of writing, of writing. I. Um. But I was also just trying to get everything perfect as I was writing.

 

So it would take me, like, sometimes, five minutes to write one sentence, because I was thinking of how to articulate things and how to, like, find the perfect word. And it was just it was going so slowly, um. And so I signed up for a Saturday writing class at this literary center. It was like a two or three hour thing, and it was basically novel writing 101, or like, how to write a novel, something like that. And the guy that taught it was a Name the author. And to be honest, I don't remember much else about the class. I don't remember it being super helpful, outside of this one piece of advice that he gave, which is to not edit as you go, and to let the first draft be very messy. And I had never heard that before again, because I didn't come from a creative writing background. And it was like earth shattering to me, because I realized that that's what I was doing. I was just being a perfectionist about it, and I was going back to look at stuff that I had written before, and like tweaking it instead of moving forward to my draft. So I took his advice, I just focused on getting the rough draft out.

 

And I got so much faster with writing, which is such a relief, because I when I first started, I felt like it would take me 15 years to write a novel at the rate I was going and once I implemented that method, it sped up quickly. Now it's it's not like it's wrong to do it the other way, but it's just not the advice that that. It's just not a way that works for a lot of people. I think most of us just have to get the first draft out quickly. We have to let it be rough and messy and not edit as we go, and that was certainly the case with me. So that was truly life changing for me to hear that advice. I had never heard that before. Next up, what is your typical timeline for writing your books? Like timeline from first draft to revision to on submission? It's going to be slightly different for everything that I've written, I've written three books, and my first book took me two, two and a half years to write, and I queried for a couple months, and we did revisions for probably five months, and then sent the book out on submission, and That one did not sell. It was right before COVID Well, and then during COVID also. And then my second book. I actually started that book when I was writing my first book, when I got stuck, but I ended up scrapping a lot of what I had and just starting over. And I actually don't really remember how long it took me to write that one, maybe a year. Don't quote me on that, because I'm sure I talk about it at some point in the podcast or on social media, and I say an exact answer, but yeah, I just don't really remember that one I queried for.

 

Let's see, may maybe four months, and found my agent, and then we did edits for maybe six months on that book, and then sent it out. And then this book, the one that I'm editing right now, that I'm hoping, will be on submission soon. I had the idea for it, and I started working on it a couple years ago, and I got like, 510, 1000 words in, and but then I finished, I jumped ship. And, well, not jump ship, but I pivoted and worked on my second book, and decided to see that one through. So when I by the time I finally came back to it, it was last fall, and I got really serious about it, and I decided to get the draft done in 30 days, so it took me 30 days, and then I took a couple of months to edit after that on my own before I sent it to my agent. And then we've been working on edits for maybe four months at this point, and I'm working on a not huge edit, but like kind of a bigger edit that I'm actually going to update you all about. And I'm going to record an episode right after this that'll come out the week after this one comes out that's on, like an update episode. And one of the things I talk about is my book.

 

So you can check that one out if you want the full details of what I'm working on. But yeah. So it varies. And the thing with an agent is like, you're waiting on them to review your book and give you notes, and so that always gets held up a bit, and you can't really predict the timing, because they have tons of other clients that they're doing the exact same thing for. So when I say like, oh, we were editing for six months. It doesn't mean, like, for six months straight, I was editing and going back and forth. A lot of that was just waiting for my agent to read and get me notes back and like, for us to discuss. But yeah, that's kind of my what my experience has been so far. Next. Question.

 

You always hear that agents slash editor slash publishers want voice put in quotation marks. How do you know when you found yours? How did you find yours? Any advice surrounding finding your style? Yes, and the advice is maybe not going to be what you want to hear. But this is the honest truth of how I think about style and voice. Embrace what comes out naturally on the page the way it comes out. Meaning, if you think too hard about your voice, and you try to force it, and you try to make your writing sound a certain way, you're thinking too hard about it. You're doing too much. Do I need you to do less? Voice is just the way I think about voice and style is like we all have a natural way that our writing just happens to come out on the page with a minimal amount of shaping and guidance, because we always have to edit our own work. But some writers are naturally very succinct. They have very crisp sentences, very basic, not a lot of detailed, detailed descriptions. Their storytelling is kind of simplistic, not simplistic meaning, like in a negative sense, I just mean, like, the structure of things.

 

And then some writers are the opposite. Some writers have a lot of banter. Their writing is very witty. Some writers don't. It's a lot more serious and like, they're just, it's just a spectrum across all kinds of different adjectives, and your voice is just really how things come out naturally. I do remember wondering about my voice when I first started to write, and feeling like I needed to make myself more literary, because I had this I was coming in with the background of English Lit, and thinking that literary fiction was always superior and that I needed to write in a very kind of like, flowery prose in order for it to be, quote, unquote good. And I've since completely rejected that and gotten over that belief, thank God, because it's just not true. But it did take some unpacking of that. And so when I was first starting to write, I did feel sometimes like I was forcing myself to write in a way that just didn't feel authentic to me, because it was so much more work I was putting in so much effort to trying to make myself sound a certain way. Now I what helped me my first book was women's fiction, and when I started to get the idea for my second book and started trying to write it, I knew I wanted to write something with a bit of suspense. Of suspense, and that was a bit thrillery, and I wasn't sure how much.

 

And I remember bringing a chapter, an early chapter, of this book, to my writing group, and one of the people in this group said, you know, you're you're doing something here that's really working with the tension in these pages. Like, I can't put my finger on how you're doing this exactly, but there's an undercurrent of tension in this entire, like scene here. And I remember just thinking, Oh, yeah. Like, of course there is, like, it was just so obvious to me. And I don't even know if I would be able to, if I would have been able to articulate it, but that comes easily to me. So that's something I really have been leaning into as a writer, my voice my style, because that's just something that comes naturally to me. So yeah, that's what I would say. And as far as like agents and editors and publishers, when they say they want voice my interpretation of that because keep in mind, I'm not an agent and I'm not an editor at a publisher. I'm a freelance editor. My interpretation of that is always there has to be a clear authorial voice, meaning that there's some kind of uniqueness or clear direction of things. It's not just flat, lifeless, boring prose or Characters or plot or whatever that it feels distinct. It feels memorable. It feels like there's passion in the in the actual writing. That's what I think it means that it's not just like flat characters.

 

Honestly, the opposite of this, I've seen people share on social media little snippets of AI generated writing. And to me, AI generated writing is remarkably flat and lifeless, like all the words might be in the correct order, the punctuation might be correct, but it is so soulless and flat and boring. So that's like the opposite of voice, yeah. Okay, that actually kind of leads into our next question, which is about AI. I'm gonna read this full paragraph because I do think it's it's important. I'm gonna get a little drink first. I'm drinking out of my I have to do dishes. I'm drinking out of my daughter's Tommy Tippie cup like just that, not with the lid, just the cup itself, and it has her name on it, because those are the little labels we have to put when we send a cup with her to take care. Oh, okay, here's here's the question you mentioned, getting pushback in your comments, indicating many people disagree with your stance on generative AI usage. Let's see people come around to your perspective. What would you say to an aspiring writer that used AI for feedback, editing, etc, but as of now, they don't want to be feeding into the AI machine? What would you advise an aspiring author do in order to course correct?

 

For reference, I work as a writing instructor for a college, and I see rampant AI usage. When I catch this usage, I contact the writer student and the conversation and end the conversation by directing them to scrap the entire document and start fresh. A student and aspiring professional writer are different, but I would also argue they share similarities. Thank you. I can definitely, definitely give you my opinion on this, because I do have one. And this is actually a question that I had to sit with a bit before I started recording, and originally my answer was going to be slightly different. So just for some context, I have a podcast episode that I did kind of recently, like in the last few months, that you can go check out if you're curious what my stance is on AI, and spoiler, it's I don't think you should use it at all generative AI. So we're not talking about like speechify or Grammarly. I'm talking like chatgpt or any sort of generative AI tool. It's a big no for me, and not just me, because a lot of publishers and agents and people are saying in their submission guidelines, like, you can't query me or submit to this press if you've used AI if it's aI assisted or AI generated. So it's not just me personally saying this, like, it's just a big I mean, I have a lot of other reasons you can listen to the podcast episode if you want the full breakdown, but okay, I am in agreement with you completely about starting over, scrapping this. And here's why, initially, when I was thinking about this question, and I was putting myself in your shoes, because you're right in that there are some differences between students and aspiring authors or writers who want to publish their work, whether it is a press, an agent for traditional publishing or just self publishing. There are differences, but there are similarities.

 

So okay, initially I was thinking like, yeah, you could just, like, scrap the you could just go back to the version of your manuscript before you got feedback. So let's say someone brainstormed the book on their own. They wrote the book on their own. They developed the characters on their own. Every every part of the rough draft was theirs, and then they just submitted it into like, they put their whole manuscript into chat GPT, and they were like, Hey, give me feedback on this, and then use those suggestions. Initially, my thought was like, Well, you could just go back to the version of the manuscript from before, like before you had any AI input. But then I sat with that for a second and was like, wait, no, that's not enough, because let's let's follow this through. Say, this writer gets the feedback and then they make changes to their book that are based on suggestions that chat GPT, let's just say chat GPT, because that's the most common AI tool in a generative sense, they implement the suggestions that chat GPT gave them.

 

Okay, so chat GPT could say this character needs some work, like look at the character missing. Make this change, have their dialog be this way. Maybe their romantic relationship could be this way. If you go in and then make changes to your book, make those changes AI's fingerprints are now on your manuscript. Even if you didn't have chat GPT write the book for you, you are still using ideas that were suggested by an artificial intelligence tool. So your manuscript is not it is AI assisted, because AI assisted you with ideas for your book. So it's not enough to just go back to the version you had before, because that knowledge is in your head. You know what AI has suggested for you, what feedback it's given to you. And also, I mean, just to be perfectly honest, like, how the fuck do you know that chat GPT is going to give you an honest analysis of your book? We all know that chat GPT skews to the side of praise and flattery and more positive feedback that's like been proven. So chat GPT could very well be blowing smoke up your ass and complimenting your manuscript and saying it's amazing when it's not.

 

You might have intended to do something and it's not coming across but chat GPT isn't flagging it because they don't know your intent. There's so many things that it could miss or that it could wrongly say are working and aren't working. Chat, GPT is not an unbiased tool. So honestly, the and if you're if you're like, if you're in this situation and you want to query your work or submit it to a press, and they have guidelines that say, No, AI generated or assisted work, you can't submit that manuscript. You have to scrap it and start over, which might sound extreme if you're listening to this and you're like, wait, what? Ethically and morally, that's the only way you can do it. Because, again, even if chatgpt didn't actually write the book for you. You still got suggestions and ideas from a tool that is not your own brain, an artificial intelligence tool that reminder was trained off of the ideas of other authors. So that's what it's going to spit back out at you. I just don't know how you can ethically and morally submit a manuscript that was edited based on feedback from chat GPT.

 

So I think you do have to scrap it and start over with a different idea. And again, it might sound extreme, but like you did an extreme thing by asking chat GPT for feedback and then implementing those changes, like, if we're going with it, this hypothetical scenario. So, you know, that's my that's my answer. It's my opinion. Obviously, this is my podcast. The person asked me this question. You can disagree with that, but AI's fingerprints are on it, so there's no way to remove that, except for scrapping it. This person, whoever asked this, I'm with you. I support you 100% Edie, my cat. Okay, did you set a next question? Did you set a goal for yourself with social media followers to hit before you queried your book? No. And in fact, you don't need to do this. I don't think it's a good use of your time. I mean, like, let me walk that back slightly. I don't want to say it's not a good use of your time. It's just like, you don't need a big social media following.

 

You don't need a big platform to get a book deal for fiction, to get an agent for fiction, that's not something that's a requirement. I signed with my first agent when I had like, a few 100 Instagram followers. It's just not so I don't think there's a metric that you have to hit. And honestly, there's not that much difference. Like, if you're at 1000 followers and you want to try to get to 5000 followers before the time that you query. Like, sure, if that's just an outside goal that you have, like, okay, but that's not going to be a meaningful that's not going to make an agent sign you even, I mean, when I queried the second time around, I had, I'm guessing 30 something 1000 followers on Tiktok, maybe 40,000 followers at most, which is a tiny platform. It's not nothing, but no agent signed me because of that. It's about the book. I mean, if you have like, 5 million followers, maybe then that would sway things slightly. But yeah, for most of us, it's just not a it's not gonna matter. So I don't think you need to have a follower count. I do think you know, showing that you know how to post on social media like is a good thing, because even if you do get a book deal in traditional publishing, you're gonna have to promote it somewhat yourself.

 

So I don't think it's a bad thing, and it also just gets you comfortable posting and gets you practice being seen by people and like showing up and sharing your writing or whatever. So it's good for those reasons, but not because there's some metric of how many followers you need to have for fiction. Next question, based on your experience with your agents, what do you look for now in your agent author relationship, the big thing is communication frequency and style, meaning how frequently we communicate, cutting, some kind of setting, some expectations around what that would look like If I you know, were to sign with someone. And I think that's important for anyone querying. If you get on a call with an agent, ask about communication style, and also, like being on the same page, I think that's important. Being on the same page about their vision for your book, like the book that you're querying and that they're signing you and offering to represent you for, but then also just being on the same page about, like, your career and how they see things and their plan, not that you have to get super specific with that, because if you're submitting a first book, you know you're not going to have like, your entire 25 year career mapped out or anything.

 

But if the agent has a different vision, then. Than you do, that's going to cause some tension, and that's probably not a good decision that to sign with them then. So I think that's important. Um, honestly, I also just look for someone that I feel like I can talk to, not that's gonna, not someone who's gonna be a best friend that I can, like, gab on the phone with for hours, because it is a professional relationship. They're, they're they're, like, a business partner, in some sense, but just someone that, like, I can carry on a conversation with that do, doing a tiny bit of a vibe check, um, is important. And then for me, personally, I wanted someone who was ambitious and driven and like, could hustle. And was, was, yeah, I don't know, not that they have to be doing 50 deals a year, and like, the most active agent on the planet, or, like the top agent, whatever metric you're using to even, like, quantify that, but yeah, I just wanted someone who was who had access to, you know, good working relationships with editors at big five publishers. I didn't want to sign with someone who only did one deal every other year, and it was to a medium sized press where you didn't even need an agent to submit to. That's not what I was looking for in an Asian author, you know, relationship like I wanted someone who was driven and had experience making big deals.

 

Edie, this happened a couple weeks ago. I was recording an episode up here, and she just was downstairs I would not shut up. Hi, you're being a nuisance. Yeah, I think those are the big things, communication, being on the same page, feeling like I can talk to them and and the driven and the ambitious and the big deal thing that's somewhat personal to me, like that's just, that's just something that I felt strongly about the second time around. Okay, I think our next question is our last one. Let me check Yeah, from your editing experience, what takes a book from good to great? This is a really difficult question to answer succinctly, because there are a lot of different answers I could give, or a lot of different like roads I could go down because, yeah, there are a lot of things, and some of this is situational.

 

But when I think about my experience working with clients, my the manuscripts that I've worked on that were fine, that were like decent when I got them, taking that, taking it from fine or good To great, is often a matter of just amplifying what's already there, meaning dialing up the characters, making them even more present on the page and fully fleshed out and dynamic, making the conflict even more big, maybe tightening the pacing so that there's not extra scenes that weigh the book down, that aren't needed, taking out extra words and extra sentences that are just weighing things down, whether it's in in sentences, in the dialog, whatever, making sure that every scene serves a purpose, that kind of thing. And yeah, it really is just making sure that, like, everything is exactly where it needs to be, and then amplifying what's already on the page. So a lot of times, taking it from good to great is actually pretty simple in terms of what you're doing. The execution might be a little bit harder on the author side, because that's that gets into specifics about how you amp up your characters, how you amp up your conflict. But that's really what it comes down to, is, like, all of the elements are kind of there already. It's just a matter of bringing those things out. It's like, when you're cooking with something and, like, it's a little bit bland, but like, there's promise, you know, could be good, and you have to, like, season it, add a few new things, stir it up, let it simmer a bit longer, and then, like, it's amazing, you know, it's like, it's that kind of thing.

 

Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's anything else I can share about, like, I guess this is more of a this sometimes comes, comes in to my work with authors as an editor, but also it's it's sometimes a reader response. Like, if I'm reading a book for fun that I just pick up at the library or bookstore or whatever, there's always an emotional component to it, like I am emotionally invested in a more serious, intense way, where I am so immersed in the story. I love the characters, the world, there's something so compelling, like I have a it's almost like a physical pull into the book that I'm so immersed in it because I'm forming an emotional response to it. And like, if I read a good book that's like, maybe technically fine, and like the author. A good writer, and it's a good story, but there's not that emotional component to it. I'm just not as invested, and it's not as memorable to me. Whereas the books that are memorable, that are really great, I feel an intense emotional connection to the book. So that's something too. Okay, those are all of our questions for this month. Reminder to go ahead and submit, there's a link in the description of this episode that you can use to submit questions for next month. Thank you to everyone who submitted. I hope this was helpful, and I will see you next week. Thank you so much for listening for more tips, advice and motivation.

Katie Wolf