Writing advice
This Week on Substack
· Your Book Pro
This week on my Substack, writers we follow were being soaked by endless rain, banned from book clubs, told their manuscripts were not publishable, and warned not to sprint through the final chapters simply because the end was finally in sight.
In other words, it was a fairly normal week for anyone trying to write a book.
A prompt from Writers & Artists suggested changing the weather in a scene and watching what happens. Put your characters in unbearable heat and they move more slowly, avoid touching and become preoccupied with water. Trap them in relentless rain and suddenly every family argument takes place in damp clothes. Freeze them and their priorities change again: shelter, warmth and proximity become urgent.
It is funny because it is true. Writers often try to enliven a scene by adding description, when what the scene really needs is inconvenience.
That idea connects neatly with Ian Ayris’s discussion of first person for Writers Online. He describes point of view as the position of a camera. In third person, it watches from outside. In first person, it sits inside the character’s head. So the real question is not merely whether it is raining. It is whether your narrator finds the rain romantic, irritating, frightening, or proof that the universe has developed a personal grievance against them.
Voice turns weather into story.
Voice can also get you into trouble. One of Substack’s recommended posts came from a writer who attended a book-club meeting and concluded that she would probably never be invited back. Another, from SC Godfrey’s Rabbit Holes, dealt with the more painful discovery that a finished book was not yet publishable. Both stories circle the same uncomfortable truth: readers do not always respond as politely as the people who love us.
That is why finishing a manuscript and preparing a book are different achievements.
Abigail Fenton focused on one of the most common late-stage problems: the author who has spent 70,000 words building tension, sees the finish line, and suddenly resolves everything at the speed of someone packing five minutes before checkout. Her advice is to settle smaller threads first and preserve the central question until near the end. Readers have waited a long time for the answer. They do not want it delivered between two minor pieces of housekeeping.
Several posts also explored where books come from before they become manuscripts. Thomas Salerno described attending a retreat for Catholic artists and writers, exchanging business cards, making new friends and unexpectedly reciting a poem at an open-mic night. The weekend helped him clarify what kind of writer he wanted to become. It is a reminder that books do not always begin at a desk. Sometimes they begin in a conversation, a moment of courage, or a story you hear yourself telling aloud.
That link between speech and writing appeared again in Brett Salkeld’s Making Every Class Catholic, where long-form conversations became vehicles for exploring education, psychology, faith and poetic imagination. The New Yorker offered an even older version of the same journey by revisiting Emily Wilson’s modern translations of Homer - stories born in an oral tradition, carried through centuries, and made immediate through a new voice.
The pattern is striking. A retreat can become memoir. A conversation can become a chapter. A podcast can contain the argument of a book. An old story can become new without losing its identity.
But none of that happens through transcription alone.
In The Substack Post, entertainment journalist Richard Rushfield argued that independent media is now less about appearing powerful and more about being interesting. Writers face the same test. Expertise matters, but readers also need curiosity, personality, tension and surprise.
Finally, The Literary Times brought everything back to deadlines, submission windows and prizes. The romantic image of writing may involve inspiration, rain-streaked windows and sudden revelation. The practical reality eventually involves word counts, formatting rules and remembering to attach the correct document.
That is the journey Your Book Pro is built around. Create from speech, notes, recordings or a blank page. Shape the strongest material into a coherent book. Improve the voice, pacing and structure. Then Prepare it for the reader, printer, competition or publisher waiting at the other end.
Your book may already exist in fragments. The work is discovering what belongs together.