Developing Your Manuscript

Introduction (various voices) 00:15

Welcome to the Empowered Author podcast. 

Discussion, tips, insights and advice from those who’ve been there, done that, helping you write, publish and market your nonfiction book. 

Being an author is something that you’ve got to take seriously. 

I’m proud I’ve written a book. 

What does the reader need, first? What does the reader need, second?

What happens if you start writing your book before you identify your “why”? What’s the problem with that?

You’re an indie author, you take the risk; you reap the rewards; you are in charge of the decisions. You’re the head of that business. 

Every emotion you’re feeling when you’re writing is felt by every other writer.

The Empowered Author podcast. Your podcast hosts are Boni and John Wagner-Stafford of Ingenium Books.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 01:09

An author’s manuscript development process can be as unique as their DNA. And while you can certainly find lots of advice online about the quote, unquote best way to develop your story, as an author, you must find what works for you, which will likely be different based on whether you write fiction or nonfiction and a host of other factors. Today we’re talking with a fiction author about her process. Brenda Margriet writes savvy, slow-burn contemporary romance with ordinarily amazing characters. In her own ordinarily amazing life, she’s had a successful career in radio and television production before deciding to pilfer from her retirement plan to support her writing compulsion. Now readers have called Brenda’s stories poignant, explicit and steamy, interesting, intriguing and entertaining and unlike any romance you’ve ever read before. And of course, we are assuming the latter is meant in a good way. So Brenda, welcome. 

Brenda Margriet 02:16

Hi, Boni, how are you? 

Boni Stafford-Wagner 02:18

I’m very good, thank you. And I can’t help it, I have to tell people that we go way back, like 30 years. And that, you know, we talked about your television production experience. And we worked at the same television station together eons ago. It’s so fun to connect again and to talk about writing and publishing. 

Brenda Margriet 02:35

Awesome. 

Boni Stafford-Wagner 02:37

My first question for you is, I really have to know: how did you make the leap and the link between radio and television into being an author? Is there a connection? Is it a – does it feel like 180 degree shift? Tell me about that.

Brenda Margriet 02:55

So like a lot of authors, I’ve been reading and writing all my life. I mean, I – from the time I could walk, barely, you know. So I, to be honest, being an author was actually my original goal way back when in elementary school, sort of thing. But you need to make a living. And my parents were very practical and, you know, directed me towards something that would actually pay the bills, to start with. And so what I did is I looked for something that involved writing. And that is how I ended up in broadcasting because, you know, a friend of a friend of a friend and that sort of thing. And with broadcasting on the commercial side, which is where I spent most of my time, at least you were putting words on paper and creating something and it really fed into that creative soul. But during the rest of the time, when I wasn’t at work, I was always writing. And I was – I probably have 10 or 15 books that made it to about page 70 and then died. So what really tipped me over was in 2011, my husband bought me a laptop for Christmas and basically said, “Sit down and finish the damn book.” So I did. I finished one that I’d been working off and on on for 10 years. And that was my very first published book, which is “Mountain Fire”. So that one took me a long time to get to. 

Boni Stafford-Wagner 04:19

And how exciting was that? 

Brenda Margriet 04:21

It was very cool. I submitted it to a large publisher because everybody does. And of course, that went nowhere. And then I submitted it to a small press, The Wild Rose Press and they took it right away. And I was just absolutely thrilled. They did take my second as well. But since then I’ve been self publishing because it’s a whole new world out there for fiction writers with the whole ebook and online and all the rest of it and I’d probably still be languishing unpublished if I had been 20 years ago, when you had to hit a traditional publisher and find someone. And nowadays, I’ve got nine books out and I can say, “I have nine books published.”

Boni Stafford-Wagner 05:03

That is absolutely an incredible achievement. I love what your story represents, which aligns so well with our whole philosophy and the title of this podcast, the Empowered Author, which is that there are many ways to achieve the goal and what’s right for one person isn’t necessarily going to be right for the other. And the most important thing is you find a way to empower yourself to achieve your goals. So congratulations, I’m super happy about that.

Brenda Margriet 05:33

Thank you very much. It’s an interesting journey for a lot of authors because you’re – comparison: you compare yourself to other people all the time. I mean, we do it in life all the time. But, I mean, there are authors out there now that are very successful – especially in the romance world – that are publishing five to 10 books a year. Now, they’re 50– they’re usually about 50,000 words. So they’re sort of shorter: that’s not short but it’s shorter. But it’s amazing what people are doing out there now. And that’s their path. It’s not mine but that’s their path.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 06:10

So your – do you have an average length for your books? And I’m excited to get into now the process. In fact, let me just back up a second. I – before we get into your process, how did you choose the romance genre? Or did it choose you?

Brenda Margriet 06:28

I like to read for recreation. Personally, myself. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction. I love biographies, those sorts of things – especially with people who have, you know, really had challenges in their lives and moved on. But I like to finish a book and feel good. And a lot of the good books on – in book clubs and things like that – make you want to slit your wrists at the end. And that’s, you know, not my thing. And I look back, I read a lot of romance all my life. And I look back on a lot of the mysteries I read as well – because I’m a huge Robert B. Parker fan and Dick Francis fan. And I’ve even read, you know, I’ve read some sci-fi and things like that. But what drew me to all of those stories are the relationships in those stories. I mean, I love a good mystery but the ones that are my favorites are the ones that have a relationship in them that grows along with the mystery. And also, I did the newbie mistake of thinking that writing a romance would be easy. Because you go, “Well, you don’t really have to worry about having too much of a complicated plot because there’s no mystery and there’s no thriller and there’s no,” you know, that sort of thing. But writing about strictly about relationships and making that interesting for a long time – for example, 80,000 words, which is about my average length of a book – is more of a challenge than a lot of new authors think.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 08:00

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Boni Stafford-Wagner 08:33

So how do you deal with that? Is it – where do you start? With the relationship? Do you start with the characters? Do you start – how do you start when you’re sitting down to start the next book? What’s the first, second and third thing?

Brenda Margriet 08:51

So I’m always learning. And I mean, nine books, like I said, is nothing for some writers. But I write very slowly in the sense that by the time I have a first draft done, it’s pretty much done. I don’t do a lot of revising; I do do some revising. But because I write at a steady pace, I don’t have a lot of chance to practice getting things wrong. Once I’ve got a manuscript done, I’ve got it the way I hope to have it. So the thing with me is – that I’m learning – is to make sure that I’ve got enough conflict between the characters to carry for the book because you get to the saggy middle and you’re like, “Huh, now what?” So one of the best pieces of advice I ever read was to make sure in your romance that your two main characters are absolutely the worst person for the other. They have to – they don’t even necessarily have to be opposites. In a lot of cases, two very similar characters will have a lot more head-butting capabilities than two that are opposites. But that was one something that made me look at my characters a lot differently, was, okay, if I have an idea for a female character, what kind of male character is going to be her absolute worst nightmare? And how do I get those people together? So they’re – that’s one way I look at it. The other is putting them in a crucible. Other people call it different words but putting them in a situation where they can’t avoid each other. Because if you write romances – particularly with characters who are smart; reasonably intelligent; reasonably, you know, even keeled – not totally drama driven and all the rest of it – most of the romances would be over by Chapter Two because you get together; you’re like, “I like you; you like me; okay, we’re good.”

Boni Stafford-Wagner 10:51

That’s right.

Brenda Margriet 10:52

So you have to come up with something: you have to come up with something that keeps them apart to make the romance satisfying, so that the ending is satisfying. And to be honest, that’s why a few of my books also have a mystery plot as well or have a suspense plot as well: because giving them that external conflict helps the internal conflict travel along as well. So those are – but I’m learning all the time. I’m just finishing a course on conflict through a romance group. And it’s really about talking about what happened in the characters’ past, well before the book even started, that is what they’re dealing with in this book and need to move forward. And I’ve learned a lot just in the last three weeks on this one small course that I’m taking. So you’re always growing, always learning.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 11:40

That is part of what I love so much about this industry is that it’s not really a one-and-done. There are tons of opportunities for growth and expansion, whether it’s skills or mindset or, you know, all of those kinds of things. So when you’re – when you’re traveling around in your regular life, off the page, do you find that you are looking at people and their relationships differently because you’re engaged in the craft of writing your next story? And how does that change your relationships?

Brenda Margriet 12:20

I think one of the coolest things, that – one of the things that’s really driven me towards romance is I love to hear how people met. Because I’m sorry, you can’t make up some of those stories, you know. People who met online playing Dungeons and Dragons or people who met because somebody was in hospital and they fell in love with their doctor – or not their doctor but the person in hospital’s doctor. You know, the it’s just amazing what you can come up with. So I’m often looking at other relationships and going, “Why does that work for those people?” You know, that’s the other thing. I mean, we all know those couples – those relationships – where you look at them and go, “I don’t know how that works. Like I would kill that person in a month if I were living in the same house with them. But these two people have been together for 30 years. How does it work for them?” And that’s the thing that’s fun to explore, is I hope I don’t write people who are me. I don’t think all my heroines are me. I write heroines that maybe I would like to be or that it kind of would be fun to be and then give them the heroes too that I wouldn’t want. I mean, they’re all nice guys. But there’s a nice guy and then there’s a nice guy you can live with for 30 years. There’s two different kinds of guys, right?

Boni Stafford-Wagner 13:35

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Well, that’s very interesting. Now, I was taking a look at your website – and we’ll drop the URL before we go; just a reminder – that you talk about theme and trope. Can we start with theme? So obviously, they’re all going to be related to the character development and the relationship because in romance, as you say, that is kind of key. But how do you – tell me about what you think about with theme: how you decide it and how it influences what you’re writing.

Brenda Margriet 14:11

Theme is actually something I don’t think about while I’m writing the first draft. It comes out after the book is done. I’m a bit of – in fiction, there’s two terms: plotter and penster. If you’re a plotter, you like Excel spreadsheets. You know, you figure out every scene; it’s all listed. You have a hundred scenes in Excel and you’re good. Penster, you just write and then you figure out – and a lot of people – and this is not for me – but a lot of people don’t even write in order. They’ll come up with a great idea for a scene and they’ll write that scene and then they’ll write another scene and then they’ll write another scene and then they swap them all around and put them in the order and write the little linking sequels and there they go. And I mean, to me, that just makes me break out in a cold sweat. But so when you’re talking about theme, I just want to get to the end of the book when I first write it. I have a daily quota when I’m writing a new book and I have to move forward. Personally, I have to feel like I’m moving forward, not going back and fixing things. When I get to the end of it and when I’m starting to do the rewrite, that’s where I start thinking, “Oh, she mentioned, you know, never having a pet in her life at the beginning. And I gave her a pet at the end.” And I’m like, “Oh, well, that’s kind of cool. Like, I didn’t even think I was doing that. But you know, it’s all about home.” So maybe the theme of this one is building your family and whether your family is the nuclear family or it’s a family with someone that you knew 20 years ago or, you know, however, that works. So that’s something that I look at after I’ve done the first draft. Because theme is so wide: it can be so overarching for romance. And in a lot of cases, it’s so – like I said, it’s finding home: that could be your theme. And you just use all the little bits and pieces. And it might only be a word here or a sentence there that builds on that theme but that’s sort of in the refining process for me.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 16:11

Right. So what would happen if – and maybe you’ve done this already – but if you took a look at your nine books and put together an Excel spreadsheet with the list of the themes for each of those books, are you going to be surprised with differences or similarities? Do you ever do it that way? Have you ever done that?

Brenda Margriet 16:37

I have not. But I think the theme of what I write sort of comes out in the bio that you read at the beginning. I like to write smart women. And I like to write slow-burn romances because they’re all about the relationship. They’re not insta-love; they’re not insta-lust; they’re not, “We’re going to, you know ...” Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean sex doesn’t happen early – because I do have sex scenes in my books – because that can totally throw a relationship in a different direction. If you have sex before you’re in a committed relationship, then how does that work? And so that’s an interesting thing. But I think the theme of my books, mostly, is accepting who you are by meeting or by learning how someone loves you, if that makes sense. Because we don’t see ourselves very well. And all of my characters – or most of my characters, especially my most recent ones – have had, they’ve got some baggage, they’re older characters generally and they’re past their 40s now, so you know, they’ve lived life already. And they have a vision of themselves that might not necessarily be true. And when they meet someone new that they’re falling in love with or that the relationship is growing with, they have to see themselves how that person sees them. And it’s learning to accept yourself, no matter who you are.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 17:59

That is so true. It’s either one-way glass or it’s a distorted mirror whenever we’re trying to hold it up to ourselves. Interesting. Okay, trope: talk to me about trope. This is something as, you know, coming from the nonfiction world, we don’t really get into trope too much. So I’m all ears.

Brenda Margriet 18:22

So you’ll find in fiction – and it’s not necessarily only romance – trope is what gives genre fiction a bad name. Because that’s what a critic or reviewer will look at and go, “Well, this story has been done a million times.” It’s a marriage of convenience or it’s friends to lovers or it’s enemies to lovers or whatever it is, because that’s what a trope is: a trope is just the skeleton that the framework – the story is framed on. And what it actually does is it works similar to theme in that if you’re writing a friends-to-lovers, you’re not going to have them angry at each other at the beginning. They’re going to be friendly with each other and that friendliness is going to grow into something more intimate as the book goes on. And what tropes do is tell the reader what kind of story it’s going to be like. Romance readers are voracious, absolutely voracious. And that’s why authors are writing five to 10 books a year: because romance – it takes me about six months to write a first draft and then another three to four months to do revisions and get it to my developmental editor. It’s basically a year before I can get a book out which someone can read in seven hours. 

Boni Stafford-Wagner 19:43

Exactly. Yeah.

Brenda Margriet 19:46

So, you know, so what is – with a reader who reads that much, they generally have a favorite. They like certain storylines. They want – because reading a romance is like putting on a warm blanket: you know it’s going to have a happy ending; you just don’t know how they’re going to get there. So when a reader is looking at the blurb on the back and it says, “They’ve been friends for 20 years but an unexpected pregnancy changes things,” they know what they’re getting. Mind you, unexpected pregnancy is actually its own trope. But yeah, so the reader tropes are more for readers. I am, I do think about those before I write the book because that, again, will help me determine what kind of scenes I put in it. And it’s more specific than theme: theme is very, very generic and very 50,000-foot level whereas a trope is, if you’re writing a specific trope, the reader will be really mad at you if you veer from that. So you have to make sure you stay within it. And to me, that’s where the challenge lies. Because how often – I mean, everybody says, “Well, every romance is the same.” Well, they’re not. Trust me: four, five million books out there are not exactly the same. But there might be a million out there writing the same trope with a completely different storyline. And that’s – again, that’s what the readers looking for. They know what they like and that’s the one they’re going to go to.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 21:15

Right. Okay. So, writing is clearly a big part of your process. When you’re self publishing, as you are, it is not the only thing you have to pay attention to. What do you – including writing – but what is, what part of the process do you like the most? What is it that you get the most out of?

Brenda Margriet 21:45

To be our – I love interacting with readers. I would like to get to the point where I don’t know all my fans by name. I’m not necessarily related to them all by blood anymore. I can actually remember the first time somebody not related to me wrote a review on one of my books and they liked it and I’m like, “Oh, somebody is reading it.” But I mean, I’ve made some really good friends in the writing community. The romance community is very supportive as a whole. And made some very good friends: online friends. I mean, living in Northern British Columbia, there’s, there are several up here in this area but not – I mean, especially in the last year we’re not meeting or anything like that. So it’s a lot of online stuff. I’ve learned so much about formatting and on the technical side of things like just using websites and stuff – which I’m not scared of but there’s a million different ways to create an ebook; a million different ways to upload them; which ones are better. Marketing is where life gets really tough because with online, things change so fast. And Amazon being the behemoth that it is, you know, they can change one rule and all of a sudden, everything you’ve done before needs to be revamped or reworked or changed somehow because it’s no longer working. So that’s where I need to spend some time. But it’s – that’s my scary spot: my … Not meeting people: I’ll meet people; I’ll do reader events and all that sort of stuff all my all day long. But looking into advertising and all that kind of stuff, that’s where I need to hire someone to do that. 

Boni Stafford-Wagner 23:40

Exactly. Never a dull moment. I’m just going to go and look for the episode number of – and I’ll find it while I’m asking you the next question: I want to come to your cover design process. But before we get there, you mentioned Northern British Columbia and Prince George and I am reading right now your latest book. I forget what it’s called; I don’t have it in … What is it called? 

Brenda Margriet 24:10

“Richly Deserved”.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 24:11

Yes, “Richly Deserved”. And of course it’s set in Prince George. The first book of yours that I read was not set in Prince George – at least not that I could recognize – but this one is and so I wanted to ask you about setting and location and are your – do you find your books all are drawn from your experience with your area? Or how do you figure out where they’re going to be set?

Brenda Margriet 24:35

So the only book that’s not set at least partially in Prince George is called “Reserved For You” and it’s set in Vancouver. But what I did there is it’s actually a romance between someone who works behind the scenes on a reality TV show. So I use my TV production experience. But because Prince George is smaller and doesn’t do a lot of those sorts of shows, I moved to Vancouver because it made more sense there. Again, putting it in Prince George was a bit, I don’t want to say lazy decision but when I was writing my first books, I had enough to worry about. So I thought, “You know what, let’s put it where I know. And I can mention the university; I can mention downtown and I can send them to a lake I’ve been to. And if I don’t get it exactly right, it really doesn’t matter.” So it was sort of a shortcut for me. I mean, I’m not writing fantasy; I don’t have to create a world: let’s work with what I’ve got. So that’s partly why. The other thing is, is I’m proud of the area I live in. So why not celebrate it? It’s a bit of a hook for some people who, you know, have never heard of Northern British Columbia. So there is a – there has been in the past – some bias towards romances not set in the United States, only because the United States is such a humongous market. But I personally love to read a book or go to a place where I read a book and go like, “Oh, they mentioned this in that book. And they mentioned this in that book.” I mean, New York is a great place. I mean, the same thing with movies: you know, if you’ve been to that city and you’re like, “Oh, that’s cool. That’s – we walked in front of that building,” I find a lot of connection with that. And I thought, you know, why not start building something that maybe other readers will have that same connection? Either go, “You know, I never even thought about going there. Let’s see what it’s like,” or, “I grew up there and now I live in Ontario,” or, “I live in Minnesota,” or whatever, “and now I’m going back.” So Prince George – setting them here was sort of a shortcut and an homage.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 26:48

Makes perfect sense to me. And you know, so much to learn about, “Why mess with it if it works?” I was going to say when you talked about marketing and some of the challenges and how fast things change, we have an upcoming episode number 36 that will publish in a couple of weeks: Roseanne Cheng from Evergreen Authors. And her message was so liberating: don’t do what you don’t like with respect to book marketing; you got to be in it for the long game. And I thought, “Oh my goodness, that is a message so many of us need to hear.” There’s like, “Oh, you got to do this. And you got to do that.” And, “Well I hate Facebook,” or, “I hate Twitter,” or, you know, whatever it is. So, “Oh, we get to pick and we get to do what we like.” So I really liked that message.

Brenda Margriet 27:39

I think you’re just much more credible and you’re much more believable if you’re doing something that you enjoy. 

Boni Stafford-Wagner 27:43

Exactly.

Brenda Margriet 27:44

TikTok is a huge thing right now: every author is like, “TikTok, TikTok,” and I’m like, “Oh, you know, I” – for one thing, I’m not sure how many people are actually selling books. They’re getting lots of views and they’re getting lots of interaction, which is all good in and of itself. But I also feel it’s for a younger generation and the vast majority of women reading romance are 35 and up. Because they started that way, like that’s just the bigger group. And certainly mine because I’m going to be starting – I mean, most of my books now have older characters and I’m pretty sure there’s not too many 50-year-olds on TikTok there. They’ll get there, I’m sure. But that’s the thing with marketing. And it doesn’t always have to be, you know. If you could spend your entire life doing nothing but marketing and never write another book. And the one of the pieces of advice I was given was, “Your best marketing is writing your best next book.” Which is true to a certain extent. You do – I mean, consider it building your backlist. That’s  basically what you’re doing. But releasing a book and not doing anything about it is just tossing it into the void. So you do have to do some.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 28:57

Right. Okay, we are just about through our promised 30 minutes. And I’d like to end by asking you to talk about, what do you hope and plan for your author future? So one year, five years: what do you see yourself doing and how are you going to get there?

Brenda Margriet 29:23

So my very reasonable goal within the next year or two is to make enough money from my books to pay for my expenses. 

Boni Stafford-Wagner 29:35

Yes!

Brenda Margriet 29:37

Let’s keep things real here, people. It costs me because I do do – I do have professional design covers. I do pay a developmental editor. I pay a copyright editor – or copy editor – a proofreader, all those people. I figure it cost me about $1,000 to put a book out. Now there are other income streams that are helping to pay for that. But so it’s not strictly – because I also do editing: I’m a freelance editor. So that sort of all works together. But my goal would be to make each book pay for itself. Now, where I’ve done myself a disservice is I only have one series and it’s a very short series. And with romance readers, they prefer series because they – again, it’s that comfort read: they like to visit the same families again. They don’t have to be the same people necessarily but they like to visit the same places and the same families. So my goal over the next three years, actually, is I have a prequel novella and the first book in a new series that will be about five books long. And my goal is to get those books up and running. The prequel novella is going to be in a box set in February of 2022. And it will – I’m going to be releasing the first book in the series at about the same time. So people who read that prequel novella will be able to buy the next book and theoretically have the second one come out a few months after that, and again, and do that rotation. So I’m pinning a fair number of hopes on this new series. And we’ll see where that goes. And the idea, of course, is if once they’ve discovered you one place, hopefully they’ll go take a look at the rest of your books. And, like I mentioned, building that backlist, right? So giving myself a few more years to see where this all goes.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 31:34

That sounds fantastic. Okay, I want to thank you for joining us. And I’m just remembering that I reminded us and reminded myself, where can readers find you?

Brenda Margriet 31:47

So my ebooks are available on all of the regular e-retailer platforms. So Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple. I’m not on Google Play. But that’s about the only one that is out there that I’m not on. 

Boni Stafford-Wagner 32:01

Kobo? 

Brenda Margriet 32:02

But my website – Kobo, yes. And then my print books are available through Amazon and selected local bookstores. Because Amazon’s the easiest delivery service for the print books. But the ebooks are available everywhere and all of the links are on my website. With – specifically, you can set it up to go directly to the e-retailer of your choice.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 32:26

Perfect. And your website is?

Brenda Margriet 32:29

Brendamargriet.com. So that’s Brenda, M, A, R, G, R, I, E, T dot com.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 32:39

Fantastic. I am so grateful that we got to squeeze this time in before you take off on another beautiful Northern British Columbia camping trip in the summer. I wish you the best of luck. 

Brenda Margriet 32:53

We are also hit – we are supposed to hit the low 30s this weekend. We’re 10 degrees above normal right now. So it’s going to be scorcher up here for us.

Boni Stafford-Wagner 33:05

Oh my goodness, that sounds like winter temperature for us here in Mexico but that’s beside the point. Fantastic. Really, its super, super, super to have you. So nice to connect again. And really good stuff for people to think about as they contemplate their own empowering journey of being an author. So thank you so much, Brenda. 

Brenda Margriet 33:31

Thank you for inviting me, Boni. 

Boni Stafford-Wagner 33:36

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