Staying on Target
Writer Glen Knock recently finished the first draft of his novel, and we invited him to sit down for a little interview to talk about his experience.
Q: OK, Glen, can we have the basics about your project and your book coach?
Glen: I’ve been working on my thriller, Deep Decay, with book coach Sheila Athens for the last four months.
Q: How does it feel to have finished?
Glen: It feels great! I am very excited to go to the revision phase, especially with the comments that Sheila made and we discussed along the way. If you had told me a year ago that I would have written a first draft that was more than 75,000 words I would have spit out my coffee and laughed.
Q: What did you do to celebrate?
Glen: My wife is taking me out to dinner.
Q: What are your next steps?
Glen: Revision, hopefully with guidance. I plan to let my manuscript breathe for a while. In the meantime I am taking courses to hone my social media, promotion and character development skills.
Q: Why would you recommend coaching to get to a finished draft?
Glen: It kept me on target. Left to my own devices I would have spent too much time going back and correcting or revising and not writing new words. Getting to the finished first draft would have been an award winning example of procrastination. Which is also a word for “sloth” in five syllables. Coaching especially kept bringing me back to the protagonist’s misbelief, point of view and internal dialogue.
