204: October 2025 Q&A

 

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

  • balancing social media with work & writing 3:40

  • a scene vs. a chapter 7:45

  • how many pages I review as an editor 11:55

  • using AI for inspiration 13:48

  • my thoughts on recently published fanfiction 20:14

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- The last Tuesday of the month is a Q&A episode! Submit your questions for me HERE.


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OCTOBER Q&A

Hello, welcome to Your Big Creative Life Podcast and welcome to our October Q&A episode. Just a reminder that the last Tuesday of every month is a Q&A episode where I answer questions from y'all on writing, editing, mindset, querying. social media, business, really anything and everything that you would like to ask. There's a link to submit a question in the show notes of this episode. And so, you can submit a question if you'd like, it's anonymous, and then I will answer it on next month's Q&A episode. Okay, I have to switch gears a little bit in my brain. I've been focused on my own book. I'm doing a small pacing edit right now where I'm just moving a couple of scenes around and shifting, just shifting a couple of things, basically. And it's requiring a lot of mental work because this thriller that I wrote takes place over a few days at a conference. And it's like very tightly, the schedule is very tight because it just, it doesn't take, it takes place over a couple days. And so, I'm really having to think through the connective tissue between these scenes and like, okay, if I move this thing to happen on day one instead of day two, what does that mean for everything else? And how can I connect these things?

And really the purpose of me moving up the scenes, like, is just to get, to have some momentum early on in the book to make sure that there is enough momentum that the things don't lag. And also, to get one character investigating what happened to her friends sooner. And it's just like, I don't know. Yeah, I spent like 2 hours this morning. Maybe not two hours, maybe that's. maybe an hour procrastinating this morning. I'm at my co-working space today and I was just like doing everything possible to avoid actually getting into it. But I created a little, I just organized all my thoughts and all the stuff I have to do into four. tasks, essentially. So that helped. And I'm working on the first one right now. I'm moving a big scene that happens on day two where a bunch of characters who are going to this conference get drinks together and they have like important conversations. And I'm moving that to happen on day one of the conference instead of day two. And I'm working on that right now. I shifted it over and it's like, I don't know why this is so hard.

I guess it's just like, what I said about everything is so tightly scheduled that it is requiring some creativity in order to shift things around. But also, I think it's just hard maybe because I'm like so, I've just worked so much on this book and I'm ready for it to be at the next step and I'm not quite there yet and it's like frustrating me. But you know, I know that the book's going to be better because of this. So, I just have to get through it. Also, it's Friday. I don't know. something about working on my book. See, I'm like making all these excuses in the world, but I'm sharing this to hopefully normalize it for you. If you're a new writer and you're like, oh, something's wrong with me. I don't want to work on my book or it's hard or I'm procrastinating. It's normal. Like it is very normal that I'm feeling this way and fighting it. It's fine. I will do it and get over myself. Like this is just part of the process. So, I'm not letting it mean anything about like me as a writer or the quality of my work or whatever. Just Yeah, it's just part of the process.

Okay, so let's dive into our first question. Number one, do you have any advice on balancing social media with writing? Social media is important for writers, I know, and I'm trying to do it as much as I can, but it feels like so much to balance between working 50 hours a week and now editing my book. So yes, I get it. can feel like A lot. You're like, okay, I'm already expected to write and manage that with a job and working 50 hours a week. Like how am I expected to add this whole social media thing onto my plate? And I'm going to give you a couple of tips, but I also have a two-part social media episode. two social media episodes that I did earlier this year that I would encourage you to go check out if you haven't listened to those yet. One is on the strategy piece of it and one is on the mindset piece of it. And I feel this because I have two social media accounts, 2 Instagram, 2 TikToks. One is personal and author related. One is for my editing business and it's a lot. But here's what I'll say. I'll give you a couple of tips. Number one, often from talking with people and even my own experience in the past before I really developed a love for social media, I found that what was hard and exhausting and like overwhelming about social media is all of the planning and the brain space it took up.

The actual social media part didn't take me that long to do, but it was just like, it took up so much brain space. So, I felt exhausted by the time I actually went to create an Instagram post or whatever, because I've been thinking about it so much. So, I would examine how much brain space it's taking up for you. And if you haven't tried batch creating, try batch content creation. This is where you take 30 minutes, an hour, once a week, whatever it is, and you just make a couple of pieces of content then. five pieces of content then, whatever you want to be posting for your week, basically. You just brainstorm, you think about your pieces of content, you make them, you record the videos, whatever, you just do it all. And then that way it's done for the week and you can schedule your posts, you can schedule your videos, and it doesn't, it's not a time suck. And then you can just go in a couple of times throughout the week to, you know, if people have left comments, you can engage back with people and all that kind of stuff. Maybe post some stories occasionally, like that's it, you're done. And another tip I have is in terms of like balancing it is make it as easy as possible for yourself. And that might sound obvious, but there are, we're all different when it comes to social media. Some people love typing out long form Instagram posts. Some people love just taking a series of aesthetic or like artistic pictures and then doing a very short caption. Some people like doing threads. Some people like doing vlogs or videos and posting those on TikTok and Instagram, right? There are all kinds of different methods of content creation.

So, pick what feels most enjoyable and easiest for you because that's gonna lower the resistance and maybe lower some of that mental chatter that you have that does just feel like it takes up energy and makes it feel overwhelming. So, whatever you can do to make the process easier, just do that. And one final tip, I guess, is just, there's this saying in the social media world of document, not create. And I find that very helpful with content on my personal account, on my author account too, where it's like, if I'm working on my book, I will document it. I will share what I'm working on. And that's content right there. I don't have to sit and think about what to post because I'm just sharing. I'm just documenting what I'm doing already. So that can be part of your process for content creation. Just share what you're doing. If you have a thought about the creative process or you have a thought about a book you're reading, share it, document it. That helps when it comes to like coming up with ideas too. Okay, so hopefully those tips help, but again, you can go check out the social media episodes if you want some more strategies or mindset tips as well. Next question. I was wondering if you could speak towards a scene versus a chapter. I'm a first-time writer working on my first draft and I'm currently writing scene by scene. I plan to later go through and break up some scenes and combine others to create chapters, but I think I am still a little unsure how to know the best way to do this. So first I just want to say that that's the approach that I take as well. I don't write chapter by chapter because I'm not a big outliner and I know that things are going to change.

So, I don't go through, when I'm actually writing the rough draft, I don't do like chapter one, chapter two, chapter 3. Some writers do, especially if they're big plotters and they kind of like have an idea of what happens in every chapter. That's great. That's totally awesome to do that. But I've just found, again, for me, I don't have that sense yet. So, I just write with no chapter like breaks in the whole thing. It's just one big document. That's exactly how I write as well. And then I go later to break it up. So, scenes, I mean, I don't want you to get too caught up in what scenes are because you probably have an intuitive sense of what a scene is already from writing, from reading. you probably understand like what a scene looks like. But at a minimum, a scene is just a building block to the larger story, the larger chapter. Usually there's dialogue, there's some sort of mini conflict or tension point that happens in that particular scene. There's a beginning, a middle, and end. It's very clear about when the scene actually ends and starts. So, and every scene serves a purpose, if you can think about it that way too. Purpose doesn't always mean a big dramatic plot point happens. The purpose of the scene can be a character processing something alone and like dealing with the emotions of something. That could be the purpose of the scene. But really, it's just like this micro kind of moment in the larger story.

So, think of them as just the building blocks. And so, when you're writing your first draft, I think it's totally fine to just get everything out and then go back later. And what I do to break it up into chapters is I'm mindful of word count and looking at a natural kind of ending point for a scene. Now some chapters can A chapter might end with a character kind of making a big statement and then the next chapter opens and it's the same time. Like no time has passed. It's just a different, you know, there's some kind of shift. So, a scene can definitely span multiple chapters. But when I mention word count, this is going to depend a bit on your style. It's going to depend a bit on your genre. For example, if you're writing like contemporary romance or just contemporary YA or something, your chapters might be a bit shorter. If thrillers, mysteries, they might be a bit shorter. If you're writing epic fantasy, your chapters might be a bit longer. Just to give you a range, I don't know, 2,000 to 5,000 words. That's a very rough range. That's not a rule. Don't quote me on that. But that's like a rough guideline for chapters if you really want to think about it. But even outside of that, there are some writers who have like thousand-word chapters. So, it's not a rule. But so, you can think about natural kind of ending points where it feels like you could put a period on this moment in time that is happening and then pick back up in the next chapter. Maybe cliffhangers are going to be important for you if you're writing a thriller or a mystery. And then just looking at word count again.

So, I think it's great that you're just doing this to get out the scenes. And again, I think a lot of us, even if you can't fully articulate what a scene is and what it means. I would guess that you just kind of have an intuitive understanding of it from reading and from writing. And if you feel like you don't, look at books. Look at published books as examples to see how long scenes last, because some scenes might only last half a page. Some scenes might last three chapters. You know, it's very, it varies. But those are, that's just some kind of general guidance to keep in mind. Okay. I did get a question from someone about editing that I went ahead and emailed with this client about this, but I'm gonna just read it here because they did submit it and talk about my answer to this person. So, they were wondering about, I have a first chapter review that I, where I can review your first chapter and I leave notes and then I write a, or I leave comments in the manuscript for you and then I do a video that kind of summarizes my recommendations. And they said, a developmental editor reviewed my manuscript, and I'd like to show the new page one to someone with fresh eyes. Would you be willing to review just the 1st 250 words? And I said that I wouldn't. Just be, not that I don't want to be helpful, but it's just very, it's very difficult for me to just review one page and evaluate the effectiveness of it, because one page, 250 words is just not enough. It's not much at all. In the first chapter review, you can submit up to 5,000 words. And if your first chapter is only 3,000 words, that's fine. You can just submit the first chapter. You can also include a bit of the second chapter if you want.

But I really like to have a minimum of a first chapter to review because that gives me a sense of the entire like opening of the story. And also, there's also the issue just from a practical logistic standpoint in my business, 250 words would probably be like $4. Like I would have to invoice someone for $4 to review 250 words. And there would be all the emailing back and forth and then doing it like it would just be a lot for one single word, one single page for me to review. So that's So, why I do have an editing minimum in terms of projects, but really, it's beneficial for the client because, again, I just don't feel like it can really give you a ton of actionable feedback on one single page of a book. Okay, next question. Hey, Katie. So my question is, while I know you've made it abundantly clear you will not edit AI generated work, which as a creative person and more than just writing, I completely understand. I was wondering how you deal with writers who used AI for inspiration or to help with part of the story. Example, if someone wrote a good chunk of the story and get to a scene that's new to them, like a spicy scene or a fight scene, et cetera, and they search on ways to write that specific type of scene in ChatGPT or something and read through examples and then still write their own, would something like that be detectable by the scene still feeling like AI? when only inspired by AI examples. I, okay, to hone in on, to zero in on your specific question, like would it be detectable by the scene still feeling like AI? I don't think I can really answer that because it's gonna depend. Like if you, if you true, I'm trying to give this person the benefit of the doubt and like ask, like think of this as a hypothetical scenario.

If you were to do this in ChatGPT, I don't know if it would be detectable. But that's not really the issue. That's not really the question or the thing that I want you to focus on. Because I want you to zoom out and focus on the larger issue or the larger question that you're asking. What you're asking is, If I'm stuck on something and I don't know how to do it, and I'm writing a new kind of scene or component of the story that's new to me, and I ask ChatGPT for examples, or I ask ChatGPT like how to do it, is that okay? And my answer to that is no, because you asked my opinion. I'm not saying this to be disrespectful. This person, that was a perfectly valid and polite question, so I'm not going to be like, I will treat this in good faith. But if you're asking for my permission to do that, I'm not going to give it to you because I don't think that you should do that. What you're asking is, it okay if I outsource this to an artificial intelligence because it's hard and I don't know how to do it? That's essentially what you're asking. Again, I'm not trying to be mean, but just take a step back and think about this larger issue. It is one thing for you to read in your genre and outside of it to understand how different authors are approaching scenes like fight scenes or spicy scenes and to analyze it and do the job yourself of kind of looking at different ways just to wrap your head around the construction of a new type of scene. right? That's one thing. To go to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to do that for you, you are using a tool that was trained off of stolen work, that scraped books from authors who did not give their consent, and then it is using all of those millions of pages to spit out examples to you.

That's not ethical, number one. Number 2, I've talked on social media and on this podcast about how I have read AI-generated work, AI-assisted work, and how incredibly bad it is and how incredibly obvious it is that it's AI-written. So, I would not trust what ChatGPT gives you as examples. Let's just say a fight scene. You're like, hey, ChatGPT, give me an example. Give me 4 examples of fight scenes because I'm struggling with this. I don't know how to write this. I would not have any trust or faith that those examples that ChatGPT gives you would actually be good examples. You don't want to look at bad examples. You want to look at good examples because that's what you're hoping to achieve in your own work, right? You want to write a compelling, effective fight scene. So, I would have no trust that ChatGPT could give you a good fight scene or good fight scenes to look at. I would not trust what ChatGPT is telling you. Not just because it literally hallucinates stuff, but because it's not good. The writing is not good. So yeah, I would really encourage you to step back and think about what you're asking. This is just a part of writing. I mean, think about writers before ChatGPT, before, even before the internet. If you were a new writer writing your book, All new writers are learning how to write these kinds of scenes for the first time. You're not alone. All new writers are figuring out how to write conflict and tension and a catalyst and a climax and a spicy scene or a fight scene.

Every single new writer is learning how to do those things for the very first time. And the way that they would learn how to do it is practice, look at examples, take writing classes, get beta readers. There are so many ways to accomplish this that don't involve looking at stolen work, looking at artificial intelligence examples that are probably going to be very bad and not give you good ideas to draw from. So that's what I'll say to it. Detectable, yeah, I don't know. But again, if the stuff that's written by ChatGPT is terrible, why would you want to use it? And it is, to be clear. I made a social media post recently about how I read the first chapter. I read my first AI generated writing. I read a first chapter of something. The person said it was AI assisted in that, oh, they just, you know, ChatGPT just helped them and then they edited it. They put their own spin on it, but they didn't because they don't know what, they don't know how to make what ChatGPT gives them. Like they don't know how to make it better because they're just outsourcing all of that. They don't actually have a skill set to be able to do those things.

So, it was so obvious that it was AI written and it was not good. Okay, so that's what I'll say to that. Again, I'm not trying to be rude here, but I just really would encourage you to examine your usage of this. I don't think there's a valid use case for you going to ChatGPT. Okay, next up. Oh, this is our last question. I'm just checking my time here. I have 30 minutes in my pod today. Okay, we're good. Have you had a chance to read any of the published fan fiction that's come out and what did you think? I know you're a Hermini fan. What's your take on the fanfic to publication pipeline? So, I am a big Hermini fan. I'm a fanfic lover, have been for years. And I only, I'm not a big Harry Potter fan. I only got into Hermini because of TikTok actually, like three or four years ago. It was totally new to me. I'd never read Harry Potter fanfiction and got just obsessed with it because I'm a big enemies to lovers fan. I have read all three of the Hermini books that were They were originally fan fiction and then got published as regular books. So, if you're not familiar with this pipeline that the person is talking about, there have been a number of authors, and this is not just unique to Hermini, there are other fanfics to traditionally published books, other fandoms where this has happened. But basically, a fanfic writer writes this book in a particular canon, in a particular fandom, sorry, jumbling all my words together. In a particular fandom, it gets very popular and then agents, editors, the traditional publishing world kind of sees that and they're like, oh, this is very well written. Would you like to pull this, make some changes and then publish it? But the problem is they can't publish it as it currently is because the material is all copyright. Like it's copyrighted material.

So, they can't, they couldn't publish it in the Harry Potter universe because J.K. Rowling wouldn't approve that. And so, they have to like create new character names, new descriptions, a new world, a new magic system, like everything has to be new, but the essence of the book can remain. So that's what this person is talking about. And I've read all three. I read Rose and Chains. Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy and Alchemized. I just finished Alchemized. I've been really hesitant with talking about it on social media. I just like don't know how to talk about it, partly because I don't talk about books I'm reading a lot. I'm not a book review account. I don't normally share what I'm reading. But there's this weird, it's this weird gray area for me where I don't want to support JK Rowling. She's a horrible person. And I don't want to like support her. And the fact that these are originally Harry Potter fan fiction, like, could indirectly throw more money her way or support her, but also... Harry Potter's not going anywhere. It's an enormous franchise. There's a new TV show that's coming out soon. So, I don't know. I feel like the people who are very outraged about anyone talking about Hermini or anyone talking about these published books should also redirect some of that outrage to HBO, to, or Max, whatever the hell it's called now, to the people, like to the things that are still actively supporting JK Rowling. But that's a, anyways, anyways, I have read the books, yes. I really loved Rose and Chains.

Like, I'm gonna be honest with y'all, I cannot look at these books objectively. Like, if any of these authors had come to me, which of course they wouldn't, but if they came to any, to me and said, hey, Katie, we wanna hire you to edit, to help us like edit these books, can you do it? I would say no, because I cannot look at them objectively. I read all the original fanfics and loved them, so I can't be objective, but I loved Rose in Chains. I also really liked Irresistible Urge, not quite as much. I thought Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of being in love was better, but I did like Irresistible Urge And Alchemized was also very good. I think Rose in Chains is probably my favorite, though. But yeah, Alchemized. It's over 1000 pages. It is incredibly dark. I was in a funk reading it. is so bleak. I just, I really have a hard time getting through. I had a hard time getting through Manacold. I was emotionally devastated and wrecked it is the most bleak, depressing, hopeless war story I probably have ever read. And I thought the same thing with Alchemized, which means Sen Lin Yu is doing something incredible with the storytelling. But I don't know, I don't really know what my broader take is on the fanfic to traditional publishing pipeline. I mean, I think it takes an incredible amount of work. to transform something into its own world. And I think to varying degrees, all of these authors have done that successfully. I don't, yeah, I don't know if I really have any broader thoughts beyond that about this whole pipeline thing. I mean, this is just what traditional publishing does.

If they get wind of, you know, if a book idea goes viral on TikTok, they're probably going to be interested in, like, maybe want to offer that person a book deal or an agent will want to sign them, assuming that the book is good, obviously. So, this is not a new concept that traditional publishing gets wind of something that's popular online and then wants to like capitalize on that and have a book. So of course they're doing that with fan fiction. Yeah, I guess that's all I'll say. I don't, again, I don't really know if I'm the right person to kind of comment on it more broadly. I really enjoyed all three of the books. And yeah. I was worried. I was worried as a Hermini fan, but it was very satisfying, I will say, to read all of them. So yeah, that's my thought. Okay, thank you for listening. Again, if you want to submit a question for next month, you can do so in the link that is in the show notes. And I think that's everything. I'm going to go try to work on my book for another like, okay, it's 12, almost 1230. I'm going to try to do another 30 minutes and then go break for lunch, I think. I can get through this. I will get through this. Here's my little pep talk. I can do this. I can do hard things. I've done them before. This is a cycle with me. I always get overwhelmed with notes from my agent. I'm like, oh, **** I don't want to do this. And then I always do it. It's not as bad as I think. And then I'm like, oh, okay, fine. It's not a big deal. But this is always what happens. So, I've just got to get past this mentally. All right, see you next week. Thank you so much for listening.

Katie Wolf