Britt and Charlie Write A Book

Well everyone, we did it. We wrote books! It has been a wild ride, and one we have loved sharing with all of you. This episode we look back on the highs and lows of the past year.

The plan for this episode went Off The Rails very quickly and never recovered. Rather than talk about our experience writing and editing our first novels, we instead get really excited about our next book and spend half an hour discussing the logistics of writing together  while living in separate hemispheres. Spoiler - this new fantasy book of ours will be about twins. Maybe they're evil. We're still workshopping...

It's the final part of our 'what we're reading while writing' series. This is the 'editing edition' because... we've finished writing! As usual, we fan-girl over authors who we can only hope to be fractionally as talented as, and shout about concepts and characters we would kill to have thought of ourselves. 

Alpha and Beta readers sound cool, but the reality of handing over our blood, sweat and tears in the form of our drafted novels is a very scary thing.  In this episode we attempt to hype ourselves up, ready to face the feedback from those who have, or will soon, read our debut novels. 

A full-on episode with two very excited hosts. We have now both hit a huge milestone, and are preparing for the next long, scary leg - editing. 

This week we take some time to reflect on our writing journeys - from deciding 'hey! Let's write books!' to 'can you believe we've almost written whole actual novels?!'  

It's the home stretch! One half of BACWAB has finished and the other is days away!  On this episode we talk about finishing our books, and discuss our approaches to the final words in our very different novels. 

It's part ii of 'what we're reading while writing', and no surprises, it's a bunch of books that make us feel inadequate.  Notable mentions - Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.

We might as well post nude selfies, because sharing our potential book titles makes us feel veeery exposed, and veeery vulnerable. But alas, we do it, for the sake of the pod!

This week, one of us is tantalisingly close to reaching her word count goal, and the other spends more time fantasising about getting there than actually writing.  We have each other, (and our listeners!) to keep us company on our otherwise solo missions, but generally its a pretty lonely task writing a novel, and we dive into that on this episode. 

Tis possibly the hardest part of our journeys so far - having to make touch decisions about the direction of our books as the light at the end of the tunnel gets bigger and brighter. That fun chapter that we enjoyed writing? Gotta go. That sub-plot that doesn't fit in anymore? Deleted. It's devastating stuff. Never-the-less we continue on, and even start looking ahead to who we will give our finished books to to read!

We affectionally call it fluff. All the stuff that makes up a book that isn't the big, exciting events. Two thirds of our way through our writing journey, we are coming to realise that the fluff is important and you can't have a book without it!

What helps you stay focussed, and what distracts you to the point where you've been 'writing' for an hour but only have 4 words on the page? On todays episode we discuss our helps and hinderances while writing our first novels. 

We wouldn't have much if we didn't have them - characters! This week we have a good long chat about the people that make up our fictional worlds. Charlie has a crisis and ponders if her characters are interesting enough and Britt reveals if she has based hers on the people in her life.

Can you believe it? We barely can. We're halfway through! Halfway through our first drafts that's is... There is still a very long road ahead of us, but we're trying not to let that dampen our celebrations.

What provides us inspiration? What inspires successful, and hopeful authors alike to create whole worlds and scores of fictional characters? We try to answer this deep question, and discuss the absolute dream of being a full time novelist.  

Of course, committing to recording a podcast every two weeks until our books are done is one source of motivation, but what else keeps us at it? There are a thousand tips out there for how to stay motivated when attempting to write a novel; today we try to weed out which strategies actually work when the last thing you want to do is sit down and write a thousand words. And then another thousand…and another…

Taking a break from talking about ourselves for once (kind of), this episode is dedicated to chatting about what we are currently reading. Is it inspiring reading incredible novels while attempting to write our own, or just down-right depressing? It's really hard to tell sometimes...

This week we chat about our individual writing processes (planner vs pants-er) while trying to supress the panic of hitting walls and word targets.  Britt reveals a secret from her last two weeks of writing, and Charlie shares the un-conventional reminder she has for remembering her goals. 

We thought we were busy before, but turns out writing a novel while also podasting about it adds a whole new level to 'busy'.  This week we discuss where we are squeezing in our writing time and our very different strategies to time management, plus, one of us celebrates making it to the 1/3 the way through mark. 

This episode we revisit our introductions. Got to get that first line just right! We discuss some of the best and worst opening lines and try to decipher where ours may fit on that scale. 

Many pages have now been written, but the going is still pretty tough for us two first-time novelists. We take half an hour off from writing to chat about our chosen settings and time periods and commiserate over research woes. 

We're getting into the swing of things now, consistently (kind of) putting words down onto paper. This week we dissect why we have chosen our particular points of view and what that means for our style of writing and eventual novels. 

Two weeks into our novel writing journeys, we discuss our strategies when it comes to outlining the plots and share what our respective books main conflicts will be. 

They say the hardest part of writing is starting, and here we are! We're two amateurs right at the beginning of our journey to hopefully each writing a novel. Join us as we put pen to paper, or fingers to keys, for the beginning of our books.