Hello and welcome to Unpublishable Author Podcast, I'm your host Tommy Balassa.

Thanks so much for stoppin’ by today and downloading this podcast. Over the past two weeks since my last podcast I've accomplished something I’m pretty enthused about. I don't yet know if it’s going to work out because I haven’t fully implemented it, but I’m hopeful. I’ve created a system for myself based on what I’ve learned about writing. Now when I mention a system, I'm saying anything other than "pantsing".

As a writer I've always been a "pantser", and while it's fine to “pants” if that works for you, for me “pantsing” ultimately led to too many roadblocks. When I’ve “pantsed”, I've always come up against a wall, a lack of creativity. A harsh stopping place within everything I’ve ever written. I've read and heard a lot of writers talk about writing blocks as being caused by a lack of understanding of your own story. I think that's true.

In my own writing experience, anytime I've gone back to reread a manuscript I started by “pantsing” that means all of them, I realized I didn't understand the story I was writing. That's always made it impossible for me to jump back into a story and pick up where I left off. I've tried my hand at outlining and I don't have the organizational skills yet to really make outlining an effective tool at my current knowledge level.

For well over six months now, maybe even close to a year, I haven't really spent a lot of time writing on any manuscript. Most of my writing is been non-fiction type stuff, anything from blogging to writing this podcast. Sure I’ve started some fiction ideas, but they all end up bogged down in my lack of organization and inability to jump back into an idea. That fact is echoed in something I read by Larry Brooks in which he talks about having a concept rather than just an idea. I think not understanding the story is because I’ve always started “pantsing” with an idea and never really taken it beyond the idea stage.

Since my last podcast I started reading a book called, “The Fantasy Fiction Formula”, by Deborah Chester. Something I read in her book triggered an epiphany and I was inspired to create my own writing formula. I recognize myself in her book and I'm not going to quote it because of copyright, but in Chapter One in the section; “Planning the Plot”, is a passage that inspired me. Look it up and see if it inspires you too. It’s something I feel I should have always known, simple, but we’re all on our own journey. Most of my limitations are self-imposed because of emotional baggage. That passage cut through the emotional baggage and struck paydirt. Taking into account so many books I’ve read, videos I’ve watched and podcasts I’ve listened too, it’s not hard for me to believe that something finally came to concord. I’ve created a writing formula that I haven’t tested yet, but I’m going to this week. It might not we worth anything to anyone else, but I’m going to tell you about it anyway and try it myself this week. I’ll post the Formula on this weeks podcast page. I’ll provide the url at the end of the podcast.

I took my idea of story and I broke it down into 9 Sections and 32 Elements. What I did is I took what I know or believe about story elements, they may not be perfect for everyone but for me these seem to ring true, and I created a path from start to finish based on the elements of a story that I enjoy. I’m not creating new ideas or concepts of story. I’m simply distilling what I’ve learned into a process that makes sense to me. If it doesn’t make sense to you, by all means don’t use it. But I’d like to share it with you just in case. If you do try it out, please share your experiences of it with me and let me know how it works out for you, good or bad.

Here it is Tommy’s Writing Formula.

The First Section:

Show the protagonists life as it is, if only briefly.Show a dramatic moment that causes the protagonist to display their false belief system.