Do you feel like an imposter as a writer?
You probably are.
Most authors who experience imposter syndrome are imposters, but they don’t have to be. Every author starts off as a bad writer and gets better through hard work, determination, and training. Some authors take shortcuts and never get good enough to make a living writing books.
Writing the kind of books that readers want to read will require hard work. I recently interviewed Chris Fox, who has sold over three million copies of his indie books. He knows writing requires hard work, and he’s shared his process with us.
I regularly recommend Chris Fox’s books on How to Write Faster and Better and How to Write to Market. He now has a new book, Level Up Your Writing (affiliate link), and he shares his system for doing so.
What’s the first step to leveling up your writing?
Chris: The first step is understanding that writing is a system, like a coding language with a series of rules. Every word serves a specific purpose and conveys a certain amount of meaning. You have to understand what meaning a word conveys and what your readers already understand for free, so you don’t need to repeat it.
If you’re telling readers things they already know, every word, however beautifully written, is wasted. The goal is to tell them the right parts of the story with as few words as necessary, choosing the most specific words so your prose is both succinct, in a Hemingway sense, and richly descriptive.
The beauty is that this is a conclusion you reach through the course of the book. You decide how to change your own writing. The exercises walk you through identifying what you’re doing wrong and how to improve it.
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Is AI ruining your voice?
Thomas: Developing a unique voice as a writer is more important than ever. Everyone’s voices are being polished away by Grammarly and ProWritingAid, which nudge you toward the median on every editorial decision.
Having well-informed opinions and knowing when and where to break the rules is far more valuable now than before because so many writers are clicking ‘accept all changes’ and everyone ends up sounding the same.
Chris: AIs learn by training, precisely the same way humans learn. You are trained on a series of information, and if you’re trained on better information than the AI, you are better than the AI.
AI is trained on everything everyone currently writes, the right and the wrong.
You are guaranteed to fall short of your best writing by using modern AI because they’re mistrained and lack the right information. You’ll get a 65%-good blurb or book, not a great one. Every person I’ve consulted for had an AI blurb, and I rewrote every single one from the ground up. AI does an OK job, but it combines all its good and bad training and writes your blurb. If you know the writing rules, you know which ones to break and how to use them in a way AI can’t keep up with.
Thomas: At the Novel Marketing Conference this year, one of the most popular talks was on book covers. The presenter had examples of good and bad covers. After her presentation, she told me that she couldn’t use AI-generated covers for any of the bad examples, because AI was better than all the worst ones.
There is a level of poor quality only a human can achieve, and a level of excellence only a human can achieve. AI covers gravitate toward the center.
The same is true with writing. Imagine a bell curve. AI writing is very good at the middle. To reach that small tail of truly excellent writing, you have to rely on AI less and less, know when to say no to its feedback, and probably get Grammarly off your computer. The new versions of Grammarly will ruin your voice.
Chris: It will literally give you mistakes. If enough people use the wrong word in the wrong way, Grammarly will tell you that it’s correct.
What does your editing process look like?
Thomas: In your book, you talk a lot about editing. The secret to writing a good book is not about writing a perfect rough draft. Nobody does that, and we don’t need to. Paper is cheap, and editing is easy. The real test of excellence is how good the final draft is.
How do you get from a bad first draft to one that sells millions of copies?
Developmental Editing
Chris: Several types of editing are in play. The first, borrowed from my book Plot Gardening (affiliate link), is plot branching. You get to a critical point in the story and ask, ‘What if the story went a completely different direction? What if this character died here? What if, what if, what if?’ If one of those branches is better than the existing plot, you write new chapters and insert them. That’s the big-picture developmental editing.
Most of my developmental work is done during conception.
Line Editing
By the time I’m writing, the story is mostly set, and I move on to line editing, which means looking at the prose. Is it too wordy? Is this description good enough, or too vague? We cover voice and fixing story issues, but the bulk of the book is helping you make your prose the best it can possibly be.
The process is iterative.
Say you do a writing sprint and get 2,000 words. You take those 2,000 words and start trimming.
Step 1: Cut Idle Words
Look for words you can remove outright that take away no meaning. If you remove two words and the sentence still means the same thing, cut them.
Step 2: Remove Repetition
Next, check your crutch list. Do you use the same word repeatedly? Find those instances and replace some with a synonym so you don’t sound repetitive.
Step 3: Evaluate Nouns & Verbs
Then look at your adjectives, verbs, and nouns. Are there stronger options? David Weber, who was a guest of honor at a conference I attended, gave us one piece of writing advice: use stronger verbs. A stronger verb can replace five words in a sentence and still read better.
If you do that in every single sentence throughout an entire book, your 2,000 words become 1,600 words, but they tell more of the story than the original did and are far more compelling.
Thomas: A wordy sentence is often a symptom of picking the wrong word and then adding other words to fix it. ‘He walked. He walked quickly. He walked very quickly.’ Is there another word? ‘Hustled’ and ‘trotted’ both mean walked quickly, but they communicate very different emotional intent. Suddenly, you work in a lot of nuance while using fewer words. As Mark Twain said, ‘Use the right word, not its second cousin.’
Twain has an excellent essay called “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences.” It’s a fun piece where he roasts James Fenimore Cooper, who was considered the greatest American novelist of the time. It’s funny, mean, witty, and a great lesson on excellent writing. Nearly all of Twain’s famous quotes on writing come from this one essay.
How do you know if a sentence is wordy?
Chris: Specificity. What are you learning from this word? For example, take ‘walked.’ What does it tell you? Almost nothing about speed or emotional state. Finding a synonym for ‘walk’ that conveys the emotional nuance and shading you want to add. Trudged or staggered would tell us more. Look for a verb that also comments on the emotional state of the person or the current circumstances.
Many new writers divorce themselves from the protagonist’s senses. If you can pick words that key the reader into what the character feels and experiences in the scene, while still conveying the same information, that’s what hooks readers and keeps them going. Instead of ‘running quickly away,’ maybe ‘he stumbled, clutching at his side, blood running through his fingers.’
Are adverbs and attribution tags bad?
Thomas: Some of this is trendy. Adverbs are very out of fashion right now. Stephen King famously said, ‘The road to hell is paved with adverbs.’
Along the same lines, the old-fashioned way to designate a speaker was to use elaborate attribution tags like ‘John whispered’ or ‘John implied.’ Now the advice is just to use the word ‘said.’ Don’t use any word other than ‘said,’ and work your descriptive language elsewhere in the sentence.
Chris: As usual, the conventional advice is wrong. Attribution tags are worthless in 90% of instances. Your primary job as an author is not to write; it’s to be a psychologist. It’s understanding what readers know, think, and are experiencing in their heads.
You never need to say ‘he said’ to indicate who said something. If you write the dialogue in a manner only a specific character would use, and each of your characters speaks differently, you don’t need any tags.
One character comes from a wealthy background and uses very crisp language. Another comes from the wrong side of the tracks and swears more. You’ll know instantly who said the dialog by how they speak. Pair it with an action only that character would do, and you’ve deepened their character without writing ‘he said.’ Remove ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ from every instance in the entire book, and you’ve probably lost no meaning at all.
Thomas: I recently interviewed Jerry Jenkins on the Christian Publishing Show. Jenkins has sold over a billion dollars’ worth of books. We were talking about this very topic, and he mentioned that as a challenge for himself, he wrote his novel The Last Operative (affiliate link), without using a single dialogue attribution tag. It was a personal challenge. He wanted to see if he could give each character a voice so distinct that no tag was ever needed, and he pulled it off. It can be done, and it has been done in traditionally published books.
Chris: That’s not to say I never use dialog tags. You’ll find some ‘saids’ in my work, but not many. The reader’s ear becomes very sensitive, so be aware of your repetition.
What is the right order for English adjectives?
Chris: Word order matters too. Words in the wrong order sound wrong to the human ear.
Thomas: There’s word order for descriptors and word order in terms of sentence structure. English is a right-branching language: subject, verb, object, then modifiers. ‘John hit the ball.’ John is the subject, hit is the verb, ball is the object. Nine times out of 10, a right-branching sentence is the better choice.
Every single tool in the Patron Toolbox has the instruction to write only right-branching sentences because that’s the normal way English operates. A left-branching sentence has its place. ‘In a hole in the hill, there lived a hobbit’ is a famous left-branching opening, which places the subject and verb at the end of the sentence to build tension and drama.
Latin is a left-branching language, and educated people, to appear impressive, adopted left-branching sentences. Many still do today, even without knowing Latin.
Your writing will be much better if you lean on the Anglo-Saxon structure rather than the Latin structure.
Anglo-Saxon words almost always carry a stronger emotional punch than Norman or Latin words. Norman words have more elegance and sophistication, are longer, and are often harder to understand. You’d be shocked at how many concepts have both.
I noticed, in a conversation with my wife, that I used the word ‘graveyard,’ and my wife used ‘cemetery.’ I guessed that ‘cemetery’ is the Norman word and ‘graveyard’ the Saxon, and sure enough. ‘Graveyard’ is very literal and concrete. ‘Cemetery’ is more mystical.
You can even apply this at the character level, giving one character only Norman words and another only Saxon words. Readers won’t know why, but they’ll feel it.
Chris: For adjectives in English, the order is opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and then purpose.
Thomas: And if they’re out of order, it sounds shockingly wrong.
Chris: For example, ‘the old leather riding boot.’ That’s exactly what you’d expect to hear. ‘The riding leather old boot’ just doesn’t sound right. You sense that immediately. Rules you may not consciously know are broken, and you feel it because you internally know what these rules are.
Thomas: Native English speakers don’t need to be told the right order. Turn on text-to-speech on your word processor, turn your back on the computer, hold a printed copy of your book, and just listen. Any time something sounds wrong, circle it in red. You’ll catch this naturally. Bestselling author Angel Hunt uses this method.
Non-native speakers need to know this explicitly, and Chris Fox’s book will save you from errors that sound weird to native readers but may not sound wrong to you.
Are adjectives still acceptable?
Chris: Nine times out of 10, you’re going to cut the adjective simply because you’ll find a stronger noun or verb that makes the adjective unnecessary. But many cases call for three adjectives, so you make a stronger verb that removes one, then cherry-pick two excellent adjectives, and you end up with one of those sentences that sticks with people after they finish the book.
Thomas: The same is true with adverbs. Stephen King is a famous hater of adverbs. At the end of his book On Writing, he shares a chapter he wrote and then shows the edit. In his own edit of his own work, he added an adverb because it followed the higher rule: don’t use unnecessary words. He didn’t have a perfect verb for the concept, so rather than using a bunch of words, he fixed it with one adverb.
Chris: Adverbs and adjectives don’t have different rules. Any time it’d be okay to use one, it’s okay to use the other and vice versa.
Thomas: We’re slowly moving past the Stephen King approach. Language changes over time, and this is specifically writing advice, about crafting good sentences, not storytelling advice. There is an ebb and flow to this over time.
I went through a phase reading the original Conan stories. When they were written, they were considered trashy pulp fiction for uneducated boys. Reading them, I noticed their sentences are more complex, and their vocabulary is deeper and richer than most modern books. This pulp from the 1930s was higher quality than much of what passes for literary fiction today.
But you can’t simply write like the Conan books. You have to meet readers where they are. If you bring in words people aren’t familiar with, they’ll bounce. The money comes from readers, not from your writer friends, who’ll ask for a free copy, and not from your editor, whom you’re paying to read your book.
How does understanding the reader’s emotional experience shape your editing?
Thomas: How do you work the reader into editorial decisions? You literally wrote the book on writing to market, on writing the kind of book readers want to read. How do you apply that at the editing phase?
Chris: All readers read for a specific emotional experience. In my upcoming book Blurbs That Sell Books, I explain that the goal is to understand the emotional resonance. If you understand it, you know what experience to give readers to scratch that itch.
If readers expect romance and someone bursts through the wall with a chainsaw, that’s not the emotional experience they’re after. You broke a convention of the genre and didn’t fulfill the emotional resonance your audience was seeking. Your whole goal when writing is to know what experience they’re searching for and give it to them.
Thomas: My original research on this led me to conclude that readers read for one of three main reasons: entertainment, education, and escape. Almost all genres map onto those three categories in a Venn diagram. A fourth reason, arousal, exists in its own separate circle and operates differently.
Education, in this framework, includes literary fiction, where readers want to feel smart and sophisticated by reading a Pulitzer Prize winner that’s hard to understand and worth bragging about.
That emotional experience is very different from the stressed-out reader who wants a cozy mystery to relax at the end of a stressful day, or the bored cubicle worker escaping into a world of wizards and dragons.
If you don’t know what emotional itch you’re scratching, you’re relying on luck, and your likelihood of a commercial hit is much lower. As a human, your advantage over the machine is this psychological motivation.
Learn more in my episode on The Psychological Reason Readers Read Books.
Chris: ChatGPT is never going to yearn for a spouse. It’s never going to be humiliated or know fear or pain. It can only regurgitate human experiences.
You, as a human, know precisely what it’s like not to get the person you were interested in or to be humiliated. Channel those emotional experiences and use them to create compelling characters and show their growth and development. If you do that, people will read you forever. I’ve published 80 books, and people still ask me when the next one is coming.
Thomas: The worse your writing is, the more money you spend finding new readers who haven’t yet realized they don’t like your writing.
Creating this emotional experience and knowing what you’re trying to create is critical.
The two Aristotle books I most recommend to authors are Rhetoric and Poetics. Poetics is Aristotle’s book on writing fiction. Rhetoric is his book on moving people emotionally. The pathos scroll is, I think, the most valuable. This is the source of the pathos, logos, ethos trifecta of what makes for good writing.
How do you craft characters that resonate with readers?
Thomas: A core part of good writing is creating characters that resonate with your target reader. As humans, we have empathy and sympathy, so seeing someone else experience an emotion can bring out that emotion in us. Even the opposite works. When the villain finally gets his comeuppance, we experience pleasure, satisfaction, and catharsis. How do you craft characters that resonate?
Chris: A character can only be empathetic if they are first sympathetic, but the problem is that we don’t know what sympathetic actually means. Sympathetic doesn’t mean you feel bad for them, or that they have a sob story. It means you can understand why they do what they do.
One of the most sympathetic characters in fiction is Darth Vader. We understand very quickly why Darth Vader does what he does. He’s absolutely ruthless, and that makes him a fantastic villain because his motivations are crystal clear. You might struggle to empathize with him, to put yourself in Vader’s shoes, but the sympathy part is critical.
Your antagonist doesn’t need to be empathetic. They’re supposed to be a monster in most genres. But your protagonist needs both sympathy and empathy. Screw either one up and readers won’t connect. Making a protagonist unsympathetic means they don’t respond in a rational human way, doing something you think is really weird given the circumstances.
Thomas: People’s decisions make sense to them. Empathy is the ultimate tool for an author. This was illustrated beautifully in the original The Magnificent Seven. The cowboy leader is asked, ‘What would you do if you were him?’ He says, ‘Well, this is what I would do if I were him, but I’m not him. This is what he’s actually going to do because he’s different and has his own worldview.’
People incapable of empathy assume that everyone else is like them, so they ask only, ‘What would I do if I were this character?’ That gives you a whole bunch of characters who are all just you, no verisimilitude, no sense of a true story. The more empathy you have, the more you realize that different people think differently and have different value systems. One person is driven by honor, another by fear, another by shame, and another by greed. These different characters can see the same set of facts and come to very different conclusions based on their motivations.
Empathy is, in many ways, a chess master’s skill. It’s predicting the move the other person will make. The author of the first craft book I ever read said, ‘The number one most important skill for a novelist is empathy.’ I railed against that for decades. Now, I think that author was absolutely right.
You need empathy for your characters. That can be hard when they’re very different from you. If you have empathy for your character, you probably won’t need dialogue tags because you can give each character a distinct voice rooted in how they think, not just how they sound.
Chris: Tailoring every character to be a real human person is how you sell fiction. If you’re not sure how to do that, follow the advice of “write what you know.” Everyone you know is unique in their own way, with different principles and different value systems. Pick someone from your real sphere who roughly reflects the character you want to create, tweak a few things, and you have a starting point.
Eventually, you’ll understand psychology well enough that both sympathy and empathy become easy.
Thomas: I’ve been watching the John Adams miniseries on HBO in preparation for America’s 250th celebration. It’s an excellent, historically accurate show, and it does a remarkable job capturing Franklin.
Franklin is a very nuanced person, yet he’s very reproducible, especially for Americans, because there is a recurring archetype: the scientist-philosopher-politician-media mogul. We had Franklin as the original, Edison as the second version, and Elon Musk as the third. All three were fascinated by electricity. All three dabbled in politics and media.
Primary sources matter enormously. John Adams’ intimate correspondence with his wife are preserved. We have a great snapshot of the man, so we can compare fictional portrayals and learn craft principles from what works.
But it still has to be interesting. You can’t just recite all the letters.
How do you choose which physical attributes to describe?
Thomas: How do you determine which physical attributes to describe and which to leave for the reader to fill in?
Chris: Focus on what’s going to be important to the story. If your character needs to be physically adept and martial, show that early. If you need to show the quality of their character, take a scene like Washington cutting down the cherry tree and do it justice. Show that he chopped down the tree, which was wrong, and then show that he felt guilty and did the right thing by telling his parents.
In one scene, you’ve shown this character is morally principled and conscientious, but also physically strong.
Thomas: That story may be fictionalized, but it’s a useful fictionalization for conveying the true moral character. It illustrates a technique where you can show attribute A of a character by putting them in a scene where attribute A is put at risk or challenged.
Washington’s story wouldn’t have the same emotional punch if you demonstrated his honesty by having him tattle on his brother for chopping down the tree. The punch comes from Washington’s honesty at his own loss.
The most remarkable thing about George Washington, historically, is that he’s Cincinnatus. He had ultimate power, could have been king, and declined the crown. He stepped down from power at his own loss, for the good of the nation rather than himself. The cherry tree story captures that moral core that would later grow into a man who walked away from power.
Good foreshadowing leads to a good narrative, and since you’re writing fiction, you can engineer that.
Chris: We all have an inherent sense of fairness. All mammals do. Your job as a storyteller is to invent circumstances where the protagonist is getting wronged, then give them the moral high ground, and make us want to see justice served. They’re the underdog. If you pair that with a ‘save the cat’ moment, showing that they’re a good person through their action, everyone roots for them.
Forget to do that, and everyone will call your protagonist a Mary Sue.
Thomas: They need to be a good person in a way that fits the character’s defining trait. The first Captain America movie does this beautifully. Steve Rogers gains physical strength through a serum. To distinguish him from the Hulk, who gets the same basic serum, they show him demonstrating moral strength before he has physical strength. Bullies try to start something. Steve fights back, gets beaten up, and says, ‘I can do this all day.’ His face bloodied, and he has no chance of winning, but he’s too principled to quit. That’s a classic save-the-cat scene.
When he finally takes the serum and becomes physically powerful, you see him as someone who earned it.
Chris: That first scene is the most important. Look at Rey in Star Wars. She’s only missing that one scene. If you added an equivalent moment showing her without power as a girl and contrasting it with who she becomes, people would have liked her far better. The buildup wasn’t there. She never had a point at which she lacked power, was wronged, and had to grow into it.
Thomas: This is where mixing up sympathy and empathy can really hurt you as an author.
If you feel sympathy for your characters, their pain becomes your pain, and you’ll avoid putting them in painful situations that reveal their character. You have to allow your characters to suffer. Their suffering cannot be your suffering. Remember that these characters are not real people. Your book is a shared dream, an invitation to readers to dream with you. For the dream to be good, the characters need to be good, and that means letting them suffer in intentional ways that reveal something about the world, the character, or the plot.
This is why self-insert characters are so risky. It’s almost impossible not to feel sympathy with a version of yourself. Dostoevsky named the worst character in all his novels after himself. Jane Austen named the most beautiful woman in all her books Jane. They each took very different approaches.
Starting your craft journey with fan fiction can help you learn to construct sentences and connect plot points without having to invent characters from scratch. But it carries risks, and self-insert sympathy is one of them. Classic self-insert fan fiction often ends up with no suffering, no arc, no moral growth, just a fantasy that isn’t very interesting, even to you when you reread it later.
Chris: That’s actually where the term ‘Mary Sue’ comes from. Fan fiction for Star Trek was published in magazines, and one writer kept sending Mary Sue stories. The character, I believe it was Ensign Mary Sue, outperformed all the heroes, the captain fell in love with her, Spock fell in love with her, she won everything, and earned nothing. That is the origin of the term.
How do you know when you’re done editing?
Thomas: Before we go, we need to talk about knowing when you’re finished. Jerry Jenkins, after writing 200 books, told me he knows he’s done when he’s making changes, not improvements. For a beginning author, though, it’s hard to know the difference because all changes can feel like improvements. How do you know when it’s time to release the book?
Chris: Crowdsource it. Get beta readers. Even one will help to start, but I go with as many as possible. Right now, 57 people are reading my Battleforge novel and giving me feedback.
I look for commonalities in their feedback. If five of them identify the same problem, that’s a real problem, even if they each suggest a different solution. I’m not listening to their solutions. I’m noting where they find problems, getting eyes on parts of the story I wouldn’t have caught myself, and then I go back and say, ‘This isn’t conveying what I wanted,’ and I either remove it, change it, or add setup.
You need to pay off all your setups and set up all your payoffs. If you lack adequate setup, beta readers will find it.
Spotting that on your own is nearly impossible as a new author. Get readers who love the genre to help you. They’ll find every flaw, to the point where you want to stop writing because you’re thinking, ‘Please, just stop telling me what I’m doing wrong.’
Thomas: Beta readers are very good at identifying real problems in your book, but they are almost always wrong about the best solution. That’s where you use your judgment. If you send your book to a beta reader and accept all their feedback, you’ll lose your voice. If you get no feedback at all, you’ll have a terrible book. Knowing when to ignore your editor, and when to heed beta readers is a craft in itself.
Getting feedback from 50 people is far easier now than it was 200 years ago, but the practice is ancient.
John Adams, in the miniseries, is shown sharing early drafts of his speeches with his wife, who gives him critical feedback and sends him back to revise. Homer was probably doing the same thing. Feedback and revisions are part of the process.
Authors typically want beta readers to say, ‘It’s perfect.’ What they get is real feedback. And reading books on craft, like Chris Fox’s books, will guide you in navigating that feedback and knowing which notes to take and which to ignore.
Chris: I’ve been doing this professionally for 13 years with no other job, and I’m still reading craft books today. Read every one you can get your hands on, because they all have different approaches to problems.
Thomas: We have a course called The Five-Year Plan, which is a five-year plan to becoming a professional author. Each month, you read a book on craft and do exercises related to it. Over time, you build that habit of continuing to read craft books throughout your career. Jerry Jenkins and Chris Fox have made millions in sales, but they still read craft books, and they still write for the love of the game.
Chris: Loving the game means reading books on craft, getting better, and refusing to get comfortable with the level of skill you’ve developed. I want to tell the best story ever told, and the only way to do that is to know everything, and that means reading every book you possibly can.
Thomas: Reading Stephen King’s On Writing and taking out the five sentences you agree with is different from not reading it at all. Encountering books you disagree with helps you establish your own voice and figure out how and why your writing differs. Whether you’re discussing adverbs, attribution tags, outlining versus discovery writing, you’ll find a successful exception in every area. Resist the temptation to say, ‘So-and-so doesn’t follow this rule, so I don’t either.’ Professional authors know the rules and know when to break them.
Knowing what the rules are and when one rule supersedes another only comes from doing the work. It requires sweat and suffering.
What can authors expect from How to Level Up Your Writing?
Chris: Three hours will get you through the book. At the end of every chapter, there’s an exercise. You start with a passage of your own writing and directly improve it by implementing one new skill per chapter.
By the end of the book, and after eight to 10 passes over your own passage, you’ll think, ‘How is it possible that I wrote this?’
How to Level Up Your Writing currently averages 4.9 stars, which is my highest average across 80 books. Everyone who’s bought it has found that it does precisely what it says and levels up their writing.
What final encouragement do you have for someone wanting to level up their writing?
Chris: If you’re afraid of AI and afraid you can’t compete, screw all that.
Learn the right skills. Keep reading books, as Thomas and I have said, and you will get there. This is not an ‘if.’ Success is out there.
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Krisan Marotta, author of Start Strong: A New Believer’s Guide to Christianity (affiliate link)
If you’ve recently decided to follow Jesus or you’re seriously considering it, you probably have some questions. What does the Bible actually say? How is my life supposed to change? And am I really saved? Start Strong gives new believers the biblical foundation they need to understand the gospel, grow in faith, and navigate the challenges of following Jesus in everyday life.
