Hi, this is Val Campbell. I was just doing some recreational reading not too long ago, and actually it was right around the first of October. Most of the stuff that I'd pick up and read was so uninspiring and kind of poorly crafted - cliché, a lot of cliché - and I just thought, "Geez, I could write better than this." Then I kind of thought, "No, wait, I can write better than this," and it was sort of a "put your money where your mouth is" deal, you know.
So I just sat down one weekend, and it was right around the first weekend in October, I think. So right now this is the end of May 2025, and I just published many Books. It just started streaming out of me, and I've learned so much. This is one of the most educational processes that I've ever been in personally. I've developed a lot of things in my life, and this is just amazing. I just wanted to share this because as I went on and looked at a lot of the videos on YouTube, and Done researches, I felt that there were two things.
First off, I didn't really... I felt like I didn't really learn a lot, or nobody really covered everything, so you end up digging and digging and digging. Sometimes I think they weren't very good teachers. But I thought there's two themes that I saw there.
Secondly, they were people that wrote books teaching people how to write books, and I've always kind of had a thing about that. I kind of feel like, you know, if you really feel like you know a lot about writing, then get out there and write and get in the published world and, you know, earn your attention, so to speak.
The other thing is that some of them I think were really very good teachers. They might be really good about making videos or something, but I would watch and I would say, "Wait a minute, they didn't answer those five questions that I had," sometimes really basic. I think they forgot what it's like to be a beginning writer, you know, not knowing anything really other than you've just got this idea inside of you that needs to get out and share with people.
The other thing that really kind of bugged me - and this is my personal thing, okay? I'm not casting this on anybody else, but just sharing with you what I went through - is that a lot of times they give you like their three tips and then it was a teaser to buy their thing, whether a book or their series or whatever. And I've always kind of again had a little bit of a personal issue with that. You know, it's kind of like the guy that made all of his money teaching other people how to make money in real estate. Really, if you know all that much, go do it in real estate. What are you doing here? If the real estate thing is so good, why are you spending all your time running around the country in seminars selling books and tapes? Right? You get the idea.
So one of the things as I went along is I kept thinking, "Geez, somebody should tell people about this. Somebody should explain this a little better." So here I am now.
There were a couple of people who I felt had some fantastic content on YouTube, and I will share those links down below so that you can look at some of that because I'm not going to deal with all of the - excuse me - all of the issues of sentence structure and stuff like that. There's one woman in particular - I can't remember her name off the top of my head - but she was a fantastic teacher, and some of her videos were kind of older actually, I think like six or seven years old, but she's so good and obviously was an accomplished author and an awesome teacher. So I'm going to share that with you because there's no sense in duplicating something that's really fantastic.
So first off, if you watch these videos, I think you're going to save weeks. You know, spend an hour watching these videos, I think you're going to save yourself weeks of editing and rewrites.
Okay, I think the first question that we all have to ask ourselves as we sit down and write is: Is this a business or is it a hobby? Do we just have a couple of short stories and we want to sit down and kind of play with this, or do we have the idea that we might want to monetize this by actually selling books or selling the stories somewhere? And that's a whole separate process that I learned that is actually... I thought it took me more time to learn the publishing process and the marketing and monetizing process than it did to write the book. The writing of the book just came fast.
And I have to share with you that I joined a couple of groups - author groups on Facebook - and in one of those there was a gal who said it took her five years to write her novel. And God bless her, but wow, I just thought, "Five years?" Mine took me six weeks, and it couldn't get out of me fast enough. It was inside fighting and tearing at me to get out. I don't know how you could take five years. You know, everybody's got their own path and everybody has their own work and kids and whatever, so I'm not judging that. I'm just saying for me, once I started writing, it was a passion and I had to get it out.
But then you know you kind of have to deal with this other issue of if you're going to write with the idea that you're going to sell it, then there are maybe some things that you want to keep in mind going forwards. You don't want to get to that point and then realize, "I've done something here that's not really very marketable." So keep that in mind.
Be one of the best. Make a commitment to be really excellent at your craft. And the reason I say that is because this is going to take some work, and you might as well develop yourself. It's your work. It's going to come out of you. It's something inside of you, and if you don't spend some time developing you and developing your skills, you're not going to create a piece of art that touches and that you can communicate what's inside of you to other people. That's what a book is. It's a story that's inside you that's rendered into a translation that someone else can pick it up and read it and experience what you're feeling.
In order to do that, you're going to need to become a little bit of a wordsmith. You're going to need to study those processes, and I'm just going to encourage you to be willing to do that, to take the time, especially with the first book. Once you've experienced it once, you've developed your abilities a little bit. From there it comes very, very easy.
Okay, so decide to be one of the best. You might not be Faulkner. I have no misgivings or misguided thoughts that I'm going to be the next William Faulkner. That's not my goal. But my goal is to tell compelling stories and to share some stories, some things that I've lived and some things that my friends have lived, and get those into a book form so that other people can share those adventures. I don't want those adventures to die with us. That's the biggest thing, right?
So be willing to do that. In this aritcle, I'm going to do my best to cover mostly the mechanics of writing.
Now I'm very fortunate. My wife and I don't have kids. We do have two little dogs, so it's like perpetual two-year-olds. And my wife is awesome. We are a writing team in that she takes care of all the details in the background while I'm writing because I just get so intense. I'm cranky, I'm focused, I'm just all in, and she just kind of takes care of things in the background and lets me, for the most part, just do what I have to do to get that story out of me. The dogs aren't so considerate, right?
And I told her I said, "You know, we're going to need to get a place where I have a room that's just for writing, and it's going to have a door on it with a sign on it that says, 'Go away, I'm writing,' right?" Because I just... I'm almost too cranky to be around when I'm in that mode where it's just so intense.
So have a space. Now, what about tools? You're going to need to have some tools. Now you could start writing with a piece of paper and a pencil. I don't really suggest that. Or an old Royal typewriter - remember those? That's how I started, you know, when I was in junior high taking typing classes. It's crazy. I think about those times, and as I'm writing on a word processor using the internet for research, I'm thinking, "How on earth did they do it in the old days? How did they do it before you could just take your sentence and split it and flip it and move it, move things around, and take entire paragraphs and move them up and down?" You know, a lot of White-Out, I guess, right? Remember those were correction ribbons. Some of you aren't old enough to remember this stuff, but it was archaic.
So you can have some kind of a computer. Really, a laptop is probably fine. A desktop I think is better. If you can afford and if you have two monitors, I think that's going to be hugely beneficial because what I found is I was writing on one side doing research or have my character development outlines on the other side, and so that I could compare.
My books really involve timelines. Everything is... they're about a pair of military missions and characters that are in multiple places, and they all have to have things come together at the same time. And I found that that got really complicated with time zones and personnel and different plot lines in different cities. And I'll show you how I dealt with that because I had to figure out a way to do this. And interestingly enough, afterwards when I started going and looking at some videos, some of these videos, they were telling people, "This is what you do," and I did that. I didn't know it. It was just what I had to do. So I guess, you know, necessity is the mother of invention, my mommy used to say. So I'll share some of those with you so you can see exactly how I did it.
A keyboard - if you're working on a laptop, I suggest that you get a keyboard and a mouse because you're going to be highlighting and flipping and doing a lot of things like that. It's so much faster and so much easier. And one of the reasons that you want to have the right tools and the right physical setup and the right space is because you want this to be as free of fatigue as possible. You want to be able to create the ability to write for periods of time, and I'll talk about that a little bit more as we go along because you want to use momentum. I'm going to get into some of that in the next post.
Okay, so but you know, get a comfortable chair. I ended up with one of these chairs that's a ball. It's a rubber ball and a little thing that swivels around, and I just found that that was the most comfortable chair for me to sit in for long periods. It didn't put the stress on the back of my legs and cut off my circulation, things like that. Because when I got cranked up - and hopefully you'll be that passionate about your work - sometimes I would look backwards and I'd be sitting in that chair for 10 or 12 hours just writing, and it was just streaming out of me.
So make sure you've got a comfortable chair, keyboard, and a mouse is suggested, partly because your table height probably is too high. Your shoulders are going to be upper, and you want to get them down. So I actually spent a little bit of money and went on Amazon and bought a shelf - a slide-out shelf for the keyboard. I think it was 30 bucks or something like that. So you know, I know I throw these numbers around. Some people are starting out and they don't have any money, but if you can, that's going to be a big help, right? Get that keyboard down so that you've got comfortable posture and the ergonomics are good.
Now, talk about the tools of writing. Microsoft Word - I would suggest - and Google Docs. So this here we come up sometimes where I've got Google Docs up on one side, I've got Microsoft Word on another, because of what I'm developing. Like as we go through this series, I'll show you this so you can see what I do.
Okay, the next thing is either Excel or Google Sheets, which is a spreadsheet, right? Either one. I tend to use both, and I move back and forth depending on what I'm doing. Multiple browsers - I use Chrome a lot. I also use Firefox, but I started using Brave quite a bit, and I keep certain things on Brave so when I pull Brave up, boom, it's all right there. I keep certain things on Chrome so when I pull Chrome up, it's right there. And I spent a lot of time figuring out a system to be able to bookmark sites, websites, and things like that. So it's not really technical, but it took me just a couple little things to figure out, "Oh, this made it a lot easier to do." So I'll share some of those little tips with you as we go along also.
Okay, I saw a lot of things on YouTube, and I actually subscribed to a couple of them, purchased a couple of things that were supposed to be aids, helps, you know, to help you do this or do that. Honestly, I didn't find them to be that helpful. Just the truth of it. I spent a little bit of money on some things and then ended up used it a little bit and then went, "Yeah, not so much."
Grammarly is an exception to that. I would highly recommend that you develop your chapters in Word, flip them over into Grammarly. I think of it as a really good writing instructor. Not only does it go and check some things, it gives you suggestions, and then it allows you to see your work in a different way. So that's one thing that I would suggest. You know, if you're just starting out, spend a little bit of money investing in Grammarly. I think it was 60 or 70 dollars for... I don't know if it was a year or maybe unlimited, but anyway, whatever it was, it was well worth it.
Think about this from a business standpoint. If you're going to be selling on Amazon.com, you're probably going to be making a couple of bucks per book. So if something costs you 60 or 70, think of this in terms of, "Okay, that's 35 books." Well, that's pretty worth it because hopefully you're going to create something really great, and over the course of the next couple of years, you're going to sell thousands of books. And so for you to be able to invest maybe your first hundred books in a few tools, that's probably a pretty good investment. You're going to actually probably create a better piece of work and sell more. Does that make sense?
Okay, so and I did talk about two monitors if at all possible because it's going to allow you to move some things back and forth. So that's where I'm at for the first Article here, and I just kind of wanted to go through those things. Super excited to show you some of the next stuff, and we'll get into those on the next post. I'll see you there.
Have a splendid Day/Night
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