My journey to get published | Inspiration & Goal Setting

hello everyone alexa dunn here and today i am going to be talking a bit about what inspired me to write to become a writer and some of the steps i took along the pathway to what ended up being the goal of writing and publishing books this actually came from a user submitted question i posted on my community tab like i do this every so often to see because sometimes you guys give me amazing ideas for videos and there's something about the way this question was phrased that made me think it was literally would love to know what inspired you to become a writer and what steps you took to achieve your goals i've definitely done some videos talking about some of the journey stuff and i'm like thrown in like little anecdotes in different videos but i realized i haven't ever really talked about this and it could be really interesting some of these are perhaps concrete things that may help you others i just generally hope this serves as a good example for those of you out there my journey is going to close more closely aligned with someone who didn't decide when they were say 15 or 16. i'm going to be a novelist and then just like took concrete steps to get there i didn't start out that way you're i'm going to talk about some of the inspiration in the journey i wanted to be a journalist for a very long time and the bulk of kind of my foundational writing experience some of the things i did were on that side kind of essay writing narrative nonfiction persuasive writing skills research deadlines etc i have found that they have really helped me in my novel writing but i came to the goal of writing books quite late i was in my mid-20s but we're going to talk about that but that bearing that in mind i've decided to kind of break down the specific steps i took by middle school high school college post-college pre-novel meaning before i decided to write a novel then i'm going to talk about those steps pre-novel so before i successfully finished a book all the stuff that i did then i'm going to talk about the things i did once i had completed my first draft of my first novel and so essentially everything before pre-novel which i was about 25 so it was about 2008 everything before that all of my goals were becoming a journalist but like what are my origins of being a writer so the thing is most of us who are writers we've always been writers so i just certainly have those stories about oh when i was a kid i was writing fanfiction i had no clue i was writing fan fiction and yeah i wrote babysitters club novels because i loved those books i was a voracious reader so really the number one you are going to see as a thread through all of these is i've always been a reader i started as a reader most of us start as readers and so i've just always devoured books and i tried to think about it and i think i did briefly when i was probably like eight or nine ish think oh i want to be an author but at the same time i also wanted to be an actor singer because i actually wanted to be michelle pfeiffer so like it was kind of that period of my life where i either wanted to be annam martin babyster's club hive or michelle pfeiffer these weren't like realistic concrete real aspirations that i had i was a kid so once it kind of turned more into what do i actually want to do i settled on journalism i focused on journalism because i loved writing but i didn't actually really see myself as a fiction writer i didn't see myself as a fiction writer until my mid to late 20s when i started writing not just writing fiction like for me it really took completing that first book to feel like oh i guess i can write fiction i never felt that that's where my strengths play so i do think it's worth pointing out like you're gonna have those like self owns the vulnerabilities the things that you kind of nag yourself on and part of the journey is uh proving to your proving yourself wrong proving that you can actually do the things that you want to do and that's a whole other separate video we could talk about about identifying your strengths and weaknesses and blah blah blah point is middle school high school steps i took towards achieving my goal bearing in mind that some of these are just things i did because i loved writing there was no goal attached to it until i figured out oh i think i want to be a journalist so i read a ton these were very formative years for reading it's when i read jane hair it's when i read jane austen uh bridget jones harry potter as so many books plus all the books i had to read for school i didn't hate all of them i i read some good ones there like i ended up loving tests of the derbyvilles i really like flannery o'connor gatsby is okay we did shakespeare units i mean like everyone we read roman juliet but i ended up really loving hamlet so just literary exploration and reading a lot very important here and this isn't specific to writing but storytelling this is also the period where i became very obsessive with like movies and tv so i have been obsessively ingesting story pretty much my entire life i am not that person who's gonna say like you shouldn't watch a lot of tv i was the kid watching at least six hours of tv a day from the time i was seven or eight years old while still accomplishing all my homework getting good grades and reading books tv can be good for you so next uh i entered essay contests anytime there were those opportunities now not because i was super like ambitious my teachers encouraged me so perhaps this will help you take the initiative if you are in middle school or high school if you see opportunities to enter basically writing competitions shoot your shot but i'm very grateful that i did have teachers who encouraged me because i won a couple of them there was one i don't remember what it was but i do know i had to go to another high school to like we sat in the library and it was like a timed essay thing and i won that uh there was a georgia governor's honors and my english teacher encouraged me to try out for that and i got that so i didn't get to go because i got a scholarship to go to germany for a year which is a whole other thing that has nothing to do with writing but those really helped my confidence i attended a journalism camp at uga same thing i went because i was interested and i was thinking about college already i attended that the early part of the summer between sophomore and junior year then i went to germany shortly after that and i just drunk drunk it in we took workshops and classes we did reporting and i did end up winning an award for a persuasive writing piece that i wrote and so that again it really helped my confidence to go okay journalism is definitely something i should pursue i'm okay at this kind of writing which led me toward college but before that throughout this period i was writing fan fiction i wrote buffy the vampire slayer fan fiction i think from 14 to 16 ish 14 to 17 ish i wasn't hyper prolific not on the level that i ended up being in harry potter and even in harry potter which comes later i was never as prolific as most other people but definitely buffy fanfic was my first real foray into fiction writing as kind of a teenager and like it wasn't great i won't lie i was writing like script format which now i'm like that is bad uh but i was writing things i loved i was posting them to internet and it was a lot of fun it was my first experience kind of really playing with tropes so that was very good and i wrote for my school newspaper i joined a senior year i would have done it junior year if i'd been there but i was in germany so senior year i was on the writing staff for my school newspaper so college i got into boston university for journalism it has a very highly respected and well-ranked journalism school specifically for the journalism school at the time it was definitely top three i don't know what it is now but i went to college and majored in journalism and i freaking loved it i gotta tell you like a vocationally based major around writing is super fun you don't have to spend as much on books because most of your classes are writing classes you don't really read textbooks so we would have to get like paperbacks and i legit still have one from college in defense of elitism you can i marked it up with little post-its this was assigned reading for one of my classes it was a actually a great class it was a media criticism class where we were encouraged to really think about media bias that was one of the best classes i took it was actually a graduate level class that i took as a sophomore i loved that class i again i joined the school newspaper uh the newspaper at bu was the daily free press i got into it sophomore year i went straight for the entertainment section because by that point i was like i want to be a film critic and so i went all in and then i also ended up being a section editor for the last two years of college so i was doing layout assigning stories editing work in addition to writing oh my favorite semester though was this semester i was a film editor i wanted to be film editor instead of editing the the entire entertainment section just so i could go to press screenings two to three times a week and write a ton of film reviews that was amazing i loved that i did internships one was with variety though in the ad sales department it was not a writing internship but that led to a writing internship where i was privileged to go to the cannes film festival to be an editorial intern uh with variety for the duration of the festival i got a part-time job my senior year i worked at the boston herald so these are just kind of the writer related things there was other stuff i did like i did an internship uh study abroad program in london but nothing super notable but these are the things i was doing on top of all of my classes and i took a majority of my classes were writing discipline there were classes on news reporting where you had to identify stories research interview people and write reporting i took feature writing classes i wrote profiles of people i did the film criticism just tons and tons of writing in my journalism major plus tons of writing in my other classes i did take you know kind of the literature classes where you're reading and analyzing books i also took a bunch of film classes for fun uh so that was helpful too having to analyze film technique and story and all during this period i wrote a i wrote fanfiction now i was balancing my college classes so like when we get into the next period which is post college that's when i really wrote a lot of fan fiction but i started writing harry potter fan fiction when i was in college reading was actually really interesting during this period this is the period of my life when i read the least that i really ever have in my entire life and this is me saying to you if you are a student very often school is going to kill your joy and love of reading because all you have time and bandwidth for are all of those assigned reading books that definitely happened to me in college where i was just juggling a lot of things and so the only books i really read for pleasure were harry potter and jasper ford i discovered jasper ford i think it might have been my senior year but those were fantastic escape books that i could still kind of find the mental bandwidth for i mean harry potter books always came out in the summer so i wasn't technically in classes but honestly during the year i really just read whatever i had to for class and that reading slump because it basically created a reading slump lasted for a few years so let's talk about post college bearing in mind this whole time i am not trying to write books i am not interested in being a fiction writer i don't even think i'm that good at it i do harry potter fanfic purely for fun i am gunning toward being a journalist we are not gonna talk about the recession and the horrible job market i graduated into but that post-college period which is like 22 to 25 i wrote harry potter fan fiction for fun i started working on harry potter fan conventions which technically isn't like a writing thing and it's not something where i went i have a goal and i'm gonna do this thing but it didn't end up helping me on my journey to being a published author and in this period so this is the pre-novel period towards the end a friend of mine introduced me to this fantastic new thing why a fiction when they like formally gave it a label is what i mean when they created that section of barnes and noble cassie clear's book had just come out holly black was publishing and my friend was super on top of it we're both from harry potter fandom but she like really got into it first where she was like oh these people we know from harry potter fandom are publishing books i'm gonna read them and so she was like you need to start reading these books and i remember the one that she gave me it was the uglies so the uglies by scott westerfeld and it was like so i started devouring y ebooks this is the most critical thing in this period which i call post college and pre-novel i read voraciously specifically nya which contributed to the path that i ended up going down and as i read more and more y.a i mean i was eating them like candy i i wasn't keeping track of my book counts at that time but i had to have been reading at least 50 books a year consistently for three four five years i just volume away novels and so what ended up happening is well the more you read those books you're gonna have less time for reading fan fiction in general harry potter phantom was starting to decline though in this period which we're gonna finally talk about pre-novel this is like the transition of i started to think well maybe i i could write a novel and it was kind of tapering off of harry potter fandom which wasn't a decline for many reasons the last book had come out i was disappointed in the last book the russians bought live journal live journal turned into a total show bnfs were leaving so much drama many many reasons and i was starting to kind of thinking of stepping away especially because i was just getting interested in other things and i started having plot bunnies for fit great but then going this would work for an original story because i always loved au's alternate universe basically things that were barely harry potter i just wrote them in fandom because i was in a harry potter fandom but they didn't have the magic system of harry potter the characters were kind of transposed into these ideas that i had and so there was one specific plot bunny that is still in my list of things that i eventually want to write because it would have been an adult uh an adult romance essentially and there was another one as well i started developing that was urban fantasy and that's the thing i started my having plot bunnies that didn't fit harry potter and i started thinking well why don't i write something original and here's the thing in the years before that i legit thought to myself i'm never gonna have an original idea i like i'm satisfied with fan fiction i don't need anything else i'm not good enough to write original fiction and you will feel that way until you don't feel that way and it's just so funny how like there was just a day and i don't remember what the day was but clearly it happened where there was just a plot bunny that popped into my head and i went oh that's an original idea and it just kind of go went from there i got excited about something and i started thinking maybe i could write a novel and it helped that i had other friends from harry potter fandom who were kind of going in the same direction we all loved writing and we were thinking do we want to write original novels and yeah people like cassie claire and sarah reese brennan were definitely role models as well um naomi novik of people who we knew from harry potter phantom who we uh i wasn't a cassie stan but i loved sarah reese brennan and it was kind of like maybe we can write original novels so we're in the pre-novel phase steps i took so the first step i took is i gathered i think it was four or five of my friends from harry potter phantom like who had been either uh beta readers of mine i better read them or they better read me or they were just spanish friends who i knew were working on original material and i said do you want to form a writer's group because you know that's what people do they join writer's groups and i hope that one of those friends of mine did clarion and so like she was she was like very smart about like workshopping and all that kind of stuff and so i think it was 2008 it was 2008 or 2009 when i did this and i tried to gather us together we i started a tumblr for our writing journey i had all of these like ideas that we would have like check-ins for writing our novels and like deadlines where we would want to exchange them and i'll just tell you it utterly failed so it's a step i took toward my goal because by this point i had a goal i wanted to write fiction i wanted to write novels it just didn't go anywhere this was the start of me learning and it was a it was a learning process i had over three or four years until i finally finished a book of you can't rely on other people to keep you motivated the idea was that we would motivate each other to write our novels because that's how it worked in fan fiction fan fiction fandom is very collaborative and often you would have your beta readers to cheer you on and brainstorm and bounce ideas off but that just didn't really end up working in this original fiction writers group because we were at different points in our journeys different we have different writing styles and i'll give you like spoiler alert so that was 2008 2009 and it is now 2020 and out of that group i uh i am one of so i think there were there were four or five of us five or six um half have never completed an original novel to this day one wrote a thing and doesn't write anymore original fiction and the third my very closest friend i have been cheering her on and she finally finished her a draft of a story this year she's amazing by the way she's probably gonna surpass me in every possible way but like the journey takes different lengths of time but also what you're gonna find when you join writers groups i mean writer's groups but also when you find people on the internet because i'm gonna talk about some of the other steps i took with like critique partners or whatnot it's gonna take a lot of trial and error to find the writers who are on your exact wavelength and more or less functioning on your same timeline more often than not especially in the early days of kind of having friends who who are all aspiring as you are aspiring is some people are gonna jump ahead some people are gonna be left behind some people are gonna fizzle out and you can't rely on those other people to do it for you so in this pre-novel era um i tried the writing group i tried following lots of different writing advice i kind of tried outlining i tried different methods i attempted to write i think four different books uh i got like 10 to 20k into two of them uh the one i got the furthest on 20k was hawaii dystopia and i mean luckily i gave up on it right before the bottom fell out of why a dystopia but i just i got stalled on it but in this period i continued to read a ton i was still really devouring y a i joined the dragon con y a literature staff so these are things i did because i enjoyed them it was it wasn't in my head this is gonna help me get published but again they did end up helping me get published so in terms of like goal setting it shouldn't always be transactional like if i do this it's gonna lead to this but i highly encourage you to do things as you are pursuing your love of writing and your writing goals that facilitate that but that you genuinely enjoy so i did not join the dragon con wyolit staff to get a book deal but it helped me with a lot of author stuff like it helped me uh gain confidence just speaking to writing professionals i did forge some friendships with writing professionals i learned how to moderate panels which has made me so much better at public speaking like i am not afraid of book events at all because i moderated so many panels i got to watch authors i really admired be good on panels i picked up tips and tricks but also moderating panels you have to learn to ask interesting questions about other people's books you have to read those books you have to be very aware of kind of genre and convention so i mean that was just a fantastic experience for me learning so much more about the industry and the market and i highly recommend volunteering with any kind of bookish type of things in this time i also organized a while literature track for a harry potter convention that a friend was organizing and put a pin in that that and it ends up being very very important i also i found a couple of new cps in this time because i've realized that the previous writing group i mean this is years later uh it wasn't going to work so i found a couple new people who were also kind of in the same ya writing space i should have mentioned that writer's group i put together we weren't all writing the same kind of books which does often end up being important kind of making sure you're all on the same page um so several things happen all at once more or less in 2011 2012 that became very very important i did nano for the first time it was either 2011 or 2012 and though i did not win nano it was essential because that's how i ended up buying scrivener which was a game changer for me um part of my problem was writing in microsoft word i just didn't know it because of how my brain kind of works next all of that trial and error of trying different outline methods looking at different advice trying to form a writing habit figure out what worked for me i found something that worked for me and it was on jim butcher's live journal and i've talked about it on this channel i kind of made my own version the story curve but it's essentially that it's just you take a piece of paper you draw a curve and you plot your book along it and so essentially i found the thing that unlocked what i now know is discovery writing or pantsing with a very very loose structure i.e planning obviously concept and character but inciting incident midpoint turn thinking about the climax and it finally helped me to finish a goddamn book the other thing that really helped me finish a book that harry potter could mention it's called sendio and again remember i was reading why voraciously i had my finger on the pulse i invited people who i thought were really talented and interesting who i knew were harry potter fans i invited agents to come down so like that con i libra bray was there veronica roth was there joanna volpe was there it was just so great and i created all the panels for for the y literature track i basically got to create my dream programming and put people on them and i went to all those panels and i listened to these industry professionals talk about things i was able to have one-on-one conversations with multiple literary agents because they're lovely and friendly and i was drinking in all of this information but also inspiration it was a real kick in the pants for me because if you see it enough if you see what you want enough eventually hopefully it'll kick you in the pants it'll either do that or defeat you but i am not a defeatist and so you can either be consumed with jealousy and wanting and give up or you can be like if i want it i have to do it and so at ascendio i had some really great conversations with literary agents i worked up the courage to pitch to one of them and they told me my idea sounded great and you know you shouldn't need external validation but it gave me some external validation and some motivation and i set myself a goal that was summer that would have been july 2012 and i set myself the goal i was going to finish the book i'd been working on oh it must have been 2011 nano i did because i definitely have been working on it for like seven or eight months at that point my what ended up being my first ever book and i was like i'm going to finish it by the end of 2012. i set it as a real goal and i basically had to figure out how to meet it i'd already been doing some pushing myself to write daily i hadn't discovered writing sprints yet i don't know when i discovered those but the point is i set a goal i decided i wanted to query in early 2013 i wanted to enter pitch contests so that's what i did so i finally finished a very messy first draft of my first ever book in the early part it was either january or february 2013 i know it was january february because the next thing i did is something that i don't recommend you do but you wanted to know the steps i took to achieve my goal uh so i entered pitch madness with a book i had finished a week before and not edited i don't recommend you do that but i did do that which means you're probably gonna do it you still shouldn't but i did and what that did was force me to revise my book brutally honestly and quickly because i got picked for pitch madness oh no oh yes but oh no and that oh that friend of mine who's one of my rider dies was such a good critique partner bless her she read my book in like 48 hours and she gave it to me straight it remained some of the best cp feedback i have ever gotten in my life it was hard to hear but this friend of mine told me my pacing was a mess and she was very bored for a large majority um only your really good friends can tell you that and the thing is i trusted her because she's a very good writer she's a very good writer by the way the world is not ready for her books which she is going to be querying soon and i'm very very excited but this was trial by fire and it has forged me as a power reviser this is where my love a revision was born when i started to realize oh the hardest part for me is just vomiting that draft out because god i love revision i did a quick and dirty intense revision on it to get me ready for pitch madness i mean that kind of gets into the how i got my first agent conversation but i got that manuscript ready for pitch madness also in this time uh i did read save the cat the original save the cat the screenwriting one not the novel one i did not really like it except i liked the beat sheet and this is kind of when that started to like sink in to my brain and my writing ish i did try actually so after that first book kind of skipping ahead like once i had an agent i did get an agent for it and i was writing another book i tried to outline um my second project based off of the beat sheet and i failed on a couple of ideas so again i was still doing the trial and error yeah i pant discovery wrote that first book but i was still trying to become an outliner and realizing what did and didn't work for me but i do think the process of trying to use the beat sheet to outline is part of what kind of got it into my brain so that's good work also in that period backing up again i did the writer's voice which is another mentorship thing that's actually how i ended up getting my agent in that period i also did the miss snarks first victim agent critique the irony being the secret agent ended up being the agent who already had my material from the writer's voice so i ended up signing with so that's kind of funny and very critically so the next step i took toward my goal a big one for you so remembering i have a completed manuscript at this point i'm very seriously revising it because i'm querying i want an agent i got new critique partners as i mentioned it's going to be very natural and even in this post book pre i mean pre-agent period but then i also had my going on sub and not selling and then writing another book and like leaving that agent and having to get another one in this whole period there was kind of an ebb and flow of critique partners you're going to have to have a lot of trial and error of finding the fellow writers both aspiring and beyond aspiring that you really click with who you love their stuff and they love your stuff and your feedback styles match and you really get something constructive out of the relationship not just for your writing but also hopefully you like each other as humans and your friends and sometimes it's gonna gel more often it's not especially in the beginning in particular just the natural ebb and flow as i mentioned from that other writers group but it continued to happen even as i was finding new critique partners people who had written novels we were on the same kind of we were on the same step writing similar types of work some of them are going to kind of fall away after the creating process as well so i got new cps but a majority of them no longer write books so just that is a natural part of the process but i did find a couple of my writer dies like really close critique partners who made a huge difference for improving my work forging friendships i loved helping them get agents and so that kind of boosted me into like the next phase so it was very critical for me essentially getting more critique partners continuing to try to find the critique partners who were at the same level in terms of their writing ambitions goals so that we were then able to basically grow together and go on the publishing journey together also in here worth noting this is the period where i joined reddit and i got into the way writers subreddit which i ended up becoming a mod of around that same time like 2013 2014 which was very helpful again very similar to dragon con which i was still doing through this period of just familiarizing knowing the market reading a lot uh reaching out to professionals because we would have them come on the subreddit to do amas facilitating discussion and all of this helped me kind of just be super on top of things but of course i did it because i enjoyed it but no lies it ended up going into my bio and my query and it's really useful and good to show how engaged you are with the writing community with the publishing community um you are engaged but also all of that stuff you do because you like it not because its resume padding genuinely helps you to improve your craft to improve your business savvy and ends up helping you with your career from here i've definitely kind of told the rest of the story the how i got my agent my first one and being on sub and not selling and we parted ways after that second book because we just weren't gelling together on that book and then no one else wanted it i mean i've talked about it before and yet that still remains kind of my best lesson of like you can love a project you work on so much and you can grow so much writing it i grew so much as a writer writing that book it was really a pure proper discovery writing process it's the one where i really thought about pacing before i started i thought about act structure before i started but i still discovery wrote all the fun parts i had a blast writing it i was really proud of it i was like this is my best work at the time i was like this is the best i will ever do which is patently untrue um don't tell yourself that because you are gonna sell yourself short and it was really devastating when it went nowhere it's still kind of a one that got away though i can look at it with hindsight and go man i really improved at writing after that book so it ended up being a really critical bridge book for me so i guess in terms of steps i took towards achieving my goal i let go of that book and that was actually the essential final step of achieving my goal if we consider the goal simply getting a book deal selling a book um that was critical it was really hard and i've told the story before i didn't think i was ready to write brightly burning jane eyre in space because i thought it was going to be a literary magnum opus but i'm not a literary writer i'm still not a literary writer and that was five years ago but at the time so from like 2013 to 2015 because i had the idea i was like i'm not a good enough writer to write this very good idea oh wait god i didn't wait because i would still be waiting and so i guess technically other than giving up the the second book that i loved a lot the final step i took toward my goal was i decided to be fearless i decided to write the book that i wanted to write even though i didn't think i was good enough to write it i questioned my own skills and my own abilities but i decided to have fun i decided to write this cool idea that i really enjoyed and have fun writing it and it ended up really paying off so i will stop myself there there's tons of other stuff but it's more or less been chronicled on this channel uh yeah that is what inspired me to become a writer kind of in a meandering way oh i forgot the actual thing that inspired me to write books i've said this before in videos i'll sneak it in here right at the end twilight because i didn't like it twilight and a couple of other y books honestly sometimes the best inspiration is when you read a book you don't like and you measure kind of yourself against it whether you are correct or not by the way whatever it takes to kick you in the pants and you decide for yourself if that's published i can be published sometimes you're right sometimes you're wrong but that motivation to try is what matters and so sadly it was twilight and i know that's such a cliche thing but it's like i know many writers who were inspired by twilight i choose to take it positively even though there's a bit of an egg in there because i personally didn't care for the writing itself but i recognized the storytelling being something that a lot of people loved that was very compelling that got an agent that got a book deal that was a bestseller and that was really important for me because i did have a lot of hang-ups that whole period of i wrote fanfic for fun but didn't think i was great at it i was pursuing journalism not as a consolation prize or anything i love journalism and honestly i'm pretty good at it it does benefit a lot of my skills as a writer but part of that was definitely i did not think i was good enough to write fiction because i thought good books good fiction was all beautiful and literary like the books that you have to read in school and so twilight was important in so many ways because it was a reminder the whole why kind of category is that and that's why i love it so much it's not always you know the most beautiful prose it's the compelling story it's the engaging story it's the commercial concept it's fast pacing and i love commercial concepts and i love kind of character driven stuff and i love romance and twilight gave me the confidence i needed to really give it a go so thanks twilight so that was fun thank you to marissa nicole for asking me this like something but the way you frame the question maybe go oh that could be really interesting to talk about and now you know you don't have to be burning with desire to be a published author from the time you're eight or you're behind literally didn't occur to me until i was 25 or 26 i didn't finish a book till i was 29 i think i was 32 32 33 when i got my current agent and i didn't sell that book i how old was i hold on what is time i think i was 32 when i got my agent 33 when i sold my book and 34 when it came out like you know what you get that inspiration to write a book whenever you get that inspiration to write a book and hopefully some of the actionable steps i took will help you as well the number one thing honestly is to read that is the common thread in every period other than my college reading slump though technically i was reading during college just harry potter jasper ford and whatever was assigned for school reading reading is the number one what really enabled me to make the transition was devouring hundreds of ya books over the course of a couple years so whatever your category or genre is you have to read voraciously and then critique partners like between like reading reading critique partners and like continually seeking out critique partners not just like trying it once and giving up because your writing group didn't work out plus experimenting with advice and craft all the stuff that failed and a lot of it did still helped me figure out how the heck to what my writing process was and how i could write a book and that's partly why i have this channel why authortube is great because you should not just listen to me you should listen to a ton of other people and try all the different things and be like that's bad that's bad that's bad ooh that surprisingly worked whatever basically good advice is advice that works for you and so that trial and error which was a couple years of my writing journey was very very useful it was just as useful to figure out what the heck didn't work uh as figuring out what to work and also what works does change over time but i have chronicled that on this channel which is the fun part of authortube so give this video a thumbs up if you like it uh if there's anything i've talked about here that you want to hear more about i'll just ramble uh ramble on about it let me know down below in the comments and if you're not subscribed to the channel go ahead and do that i post new videos two to three times a week and as always guys thank you so much for watching and happy writing

Channel: Alexa Donne

Views: 13,759

Rating: 4.9958892 out of 5

Keywords: alexa donne, author tube, writing advice, how to write a book, publishing advice, writing inspiration, writing goals, writing journey, getting published

Id: oMvmzytlbu4

Length: 39min 20sec (2360 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021