John Adamus – On Writing, Publishing and Interactions

I interact with writers on a daily basis, whether it is about their writing, genres or for fun. As a student of writing, honing my craft by having these conversations and writing regularly on my blog, writing is one of my passions. I have John Adamus with me today and he is passionate about getting writers to take the next step, whether it is finishing a draft or querying to be published. 

Welcome to Creator’s Roulette, John! Why are you passionate about writing and helping authors? You were the editor in residence at the Write Hive and that speaks volumes about your passion!

Thank you for having me. 

I’m absolutely wildly passionate about helping authors and writing because I believe strongly in the power of writing as a tool not only for communication but also for reaching and connecting to other people. Writing and storytelling are our modern vehicles for teaching, inspiring, and challenging people, I don’t think there’s anything greater than art that moves people. 

I think writers have a responsibility to make the best art they can, so that other people can be affected by it in some meaningful way. Good writing and storytelling breed imagination and it was from imagination that we went to the moon, learned to fly, and are able to host blogs and pictures of our cats. What could be cooler than that?

On Giving Actionable Feedback

When we were coming up with what we will discuss here, you mentioned that writing isn’t about gatekeeping or mystifying secrecy. Tell us more about this concept. 

I worked in traditional publishing a long time ago, back when phones had corded and people still sent manuscripts by physical mail. It was a really formative time for me, and I saw how the book sausage gets made. There was a lot of gatekeeping, a lot of editors who were wholly dismissive of writers without ever bothering to help them. It set up an atmosphere of us-vs-them, where the writers had to try and jump through hoops they didn’t know about and wouldn’t be told about. I found that whole process discouraging, especially when the same people would try and try again without ever getting told what wasn’t working and how they could do something to change their results. 

When I left that job (I got fired for giving people notes on how they could improve their manuscripts), I got into coaching (though back then I knew it only as “helping writers”) and found that if you have the ability to help people you have a responsibility to help. I learned that what people were lacking wasn’t interest in the end result of book contracts and advances, it was the knowledge on how to get there – they wanted to know how to jump through the hoops or how to make sales happen or how to write a better plot or character so that they take their story and their planned career farther. 

I am surprised that feedback on how to make the manuscript better wasn’t already part of the system. 

A lot of how to do that wasn’t then and still to some degree isn’t now, explained in actionable and practical ways. You get broad advice about things like “show more than you tell” or “write a strong query” without having someone show you in your own writing what that looks like or how to do it. The advice is dispensed dispassionately and academically, parroting old rules and classes without making it useful and clear. I think making advice clear and usabe is a fundamental requirement if we want more writers to succeed and get more books published and sold. 

Gatekeeping and secrecy and trying to please someone with a job title help nobody when the problem is someone doesn’t know how they’re going to fix a chapter they’ve been revising for 6 weeks. 

Writers should be given tools and encouragement to reach their goals. 

Absolutely! Beta readers, editors, reviewers are all an integral part of the process for a reason and if they can’t help make the writing better through honest actionable feedback, what will?

On Doing new Thing with Old

Gatekeeping and secrecy also made me think about safeguarding our original ideas. In academia, new positive results matter but in writing, we often see different tropes repeated in different settings. Every writer brings something new to the trope and that is one of the reasons why I love reading – to look for these different interpretations. I’m curious if you have come across some tropes more than others? Is there one you love reading about?

I’ve always been a fan of the merger of A- and B-plots. You see it most in detective and hardboiled fiction where one case feeds into the other case at some critical moment. I think it’s the reason I tend to prefer that kind of fiction over most everything else now. I went through a pretty lengthy phase of tracking down world-weary protagonists, people weighted down by guilt and a troubled backstory but over time that was more exhausting than pleasurable. 

In the manuscripts I read for work, I still see a lot of prophesied Chosen Ones and a lot of large ensembles on a quest across a large continent or a lot of quickly paced alternating POV stories where one character is vastly preferable to the other. I want to make clear that using those tropes doesn’t automatically mean the manuscript is bad, but what gets sought after with them, because they’re done over and over again, is how they’re tailored and interpreted by the author within their own created world. Taking any trope, knowing it well enough to knowing what you can make your own, is a huge asset in getting plucked out of the slush pile. 

On Writing Community Practices

In my recent conversation with Nora McKinney, we talked about some of the prevalent tweets on twitter about the number of words people have written in their WIP. Words obviously signify progress, but are there tools or indicators other than numbers that you tell your writers to pay attention to?

I think it’s easiest to mark progress in words because we can watch the word count increase the more often we sit down and write. And while that is important and helpful, I think a writer can track their progress in the scenes that get created and the events in the story that end up completed. Whether ticking off items in a to-do list or walking through an outline, the quantity of words matters slightly less than the sense of accomplishment that in today’s writing you wrote the big climax that you’ve been building up to for the last twenty chapters. 

It’s why I’m known for promoting outlining and organizing, not because I want to winnow the writer’s creativity away but because knowing what to write and what comes next is its own kind of momentum with its own kind of excitement and satisfaction when it’s accomplished. 

Maybe it’s just me who follows a lot of writers writing novels, but I often feel alienated from writing conversations because they center a lot about Main Characters (MCs) and plotlines that as a non-fiction blogger, I can’t participate in. What can fiction writing teach the non-fiction writer/blogger? And what are some ways to start the conversation about writing without it becoming about fictional worlds?

What a wonderful question! I think writing is about expressing something personal and hoping that someone else can connect to it in some way. I think that some writers choose to do this by making up a world and characters and other writers do it by looking at their own lives or something historic or instructive. It’s all about delivering some idea or experience or emotion to someone else. 

The tools we use in fiction on a broad level – sentence structure, pacing ideas out across scenes or sections, building to a climax and paying it off – they’re essential in non-fiction because the content, the material being covered, still has to provoke emotion or connect with a reader, maybe even more directly because of how it’s lensed through the language. 

I’ve been blogging for over fifteen years, and talking about the craft and act of writing is universal whether we’re talking about how to write a better query letter or if we’re describing what a brave adventurer does on a quest. The way we make the language dance and create a movie in the mind of the reader, whether that movie is an action thriller with a detective and a killer or a documentary about using semicolons, is what all our stories have in common.

I think too often we get bogged down in the divisions – fiction/non-fiction, pantser/plotter, show/tell – and we lose sight of the broader unifying idea that we’re all telling stories to build bridges. 

You mentioned outlining and organizing earlier and those two are techniques I use for my blog posts everyday – having a skeleton idea for the main points I want to discuss. And you are absolutely correct that as writers, no matter which genre or kind, we are trying to deliver some ideas or experiences to someone else. Audience plays a huge role in every writer’s life, whether it is in the form of book sales or blog post views. Do you have any strategies for how to engage with the readers? Any best practices that you have seen in your career?

I used to have an incredibly adversarial relationship with whoever was on the other side of my words. As an editor, I’d argue with the writer and as a writer, I’d try to club my audience over the head with how smart I was, or how good I was at whatever I was doing. It was a terrible place to write from, and it came from thinking that I personally was always at some disadvantage in the relationship – that there were better people to work with, that there were blogs to read, that if I didn’t aggressively come at the person on the page there wouldn’t be a reason to stick around. I think it cost me a lot of time and audience early on. I know it cost me a lot of jobs, both being fired and from writers using other editors and coaches who had a different approach, even if they weren’t entirely getting what they wanted or needed, they at least wouldn’t be getting into an angry back-and-forth. 

Over time, thankfully, I realized the value of empathy and connection with other people (this probably had something to do with getting clean and sober), and the way I interact with people – in person and on the page – changed pretty rapidly.

Now instead of trying to show how smart I am or how much I belong, I put a premium on making sure the other person knows I’m meeting them where they’re at. If I’m explaining some literary theory or if I’m giving advice to someone who’s never written a novel and never received a professional’s feedback, I don’t try to bowl anyone over with jargon or a lot of broad statements – people can get enough of that on social media. I instead look for ways to get the point across in an intentionally kind and clear way. Not patronizing, but clarifying. Regularly asking myself, “If I was totally absolutely new to this idea, what would I want to hear or read so that it didn’t scare me off?” has been hugely helpful in that regard. 

A reader, whether they’re new or they’ve read for decades comes to any story because they want a good movie played in their mental theater.

Out of all the stories they could pick, they picked yours, and they’re going to stick with it until you give them significant reasons to leave and find something else. I see and talk to a lot of very skittish writers who think the first moment the pacing shifts or the first time a scene is maybe a little detailed, that the reader is going to hurl the book across the room and immediately bolt. I promise they won’t. The reader wants that movie in their head, which is why every sentence is a camera, showing and telling and zooming and moving and focusing in on what makes each shot and frame the best it can be to maximize emotional provocation. (I am pretty sure that every client I’ve ever had has heard me say this maybe a million times in 20 years)

Our goal is an emotional connection, so that no matter what we write or who we are as authors, we can reach deep into the shared experiences of any reader, no matter who they are, and speak about a universal truth even if we’ve packaged it inside a story about a mythical kingdom or something with robots and faeries. I think to do it well you need to be able to get past all the material you’ve designed, all the lore and the character types and rules and get to the core of what’s driving people to make their choices and pursue their goals. Yes it’s wonderful that you have a rich world and characters with a lot of snark and cool powers, but if they don’t stick with me because I can’t connect to them, how am I supposed to feel engaged with your story? 

You get better at this the more you push yourself to dig deeper. Not just write another draft or start another round of revisions to “make it perfect”, I mean craft a better story. Think more about the plot points. Develop the character more. Get better at describing the rooms and the places and the trees and the smell of coffee.

Improving your craft doesn’t mean churning out bigger stories with more made up things, it means becoming a better writer who can reach a reader and share that mental movie and make some words on a page evoke something inside someone else. 

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What is one thing you are doing to improve your craft?

It was a pleasure to talk with John! Interested in connecting with him? Find him at The Writer Next Door, support him on Patreon or follow him on Twitter.

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