The Power of Expert Feedback in Improving Writing Skills

0:00Books go places you can't go by yourself. Yeah. And so they like have a way of like going out to the world and touching people that you can never get to on your own. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz. My guest today is Tim Grawl. He is the CEO and publisher of StoryGrid, where he oversees marketing and operations for the StoryGrid universe and StoryGrid publishing. Under Tim's leadership, StoryGrid has become a valuable resource for authors seeking to refine their craft and successfully navigate the publishing landscape. We are going to talk about a number of books, first thousand copies, book launch blueprint.

0:39But Tim's also got a new book, a novel called The Shithead, a novel for in 50 songs, which, depending upon when you're listening to this, comes out in September of 2024. There, I just ruined my G rating. Dang it, Tim. Yeah, I've already had a couple people say, the book had a lot of language in it. I'm like, if you weren't, did you read the Bible? My first book, Duct Tape Marketing, was published by Thomas Nelson. They were just getting into business publishing, but they had to date had been a Christian publisher. They still, I think if the imprint's still around, they sold the business part to Harper.

1:14But Thomas Nelson is the biggest publisher of Bibles. And so in my manuscript, when I turned it in, the only word they made me take out was crap. The word crap. So we've come a long way, haven't we? Yeah, now we're just putting it on the cover. So, so explain what story grid is for those who haven't discovered it. Yeah, so my partner, Sean Coyne, has been in publishing since 1991, mainly as an editor, but also as a writer and story researcher. And he wanted to develop a way to analyze books to find out what's wrong and fix them. And so he came up with what is now called the story grid, which is so we can give really clear, specific feedback on people's writing from the sentence all the way up to the full novel or full book.

2:02And it's a really systematic approach that's based on feedback and a rubric that we can actually help people become a better writer in a very short period of time. And so I came on, we started the podcast nine years ago and I was the guinea pig. And so I would write in public and share it on the podcast and he would give me feedback and just rip it apart live on the podcast. And now I'm the CEO. So I run all the marketing and operations and everything. And I'm kind of the main guinea pig still. So that's why my book's coming out. And, you know, it's a proof of concept of what we can do at StoryGrid.

2:36So it's funny that you talk about having a rubric and being very systematic. I remember one of my first editors read through like the first kind of chunk of the book that I gave them. And he said one of his notes on the paper, I felt like it was like an eighth grade English teacher, wrote on the paper and said, you do a lot of throat clearing here. And that was one of my favorite pieces of feedback. Like, get to the point, damn it. Yeah. So that's what we focus on is helping writers level up their craft so they can write a book that they're proud of that leaves a legacy. Do you find that one genre works better than another?

3:13I mean, obviously business books or nonfiction books are much different than fiction. Does it not matter? As far as the writing or the marketing side? Or no, really as far as like the story grid approach. Oh, yeah. So we're hyper focused on fiction and narrative driven. So we do memoir. We do like we like a lot of like Malcolm Gladwell books. You know, I write nonfiction and I write business books, but it's a different approach than a narrative driven book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So talk a little bit about, you mentioned the, I think we were on, I think we're here recording. I've been doing too many interviews today.

3:49Sorry. But the idea of doing interviews for this. So in fact, you at some point did like 600 one-on-one calls with your audience. Yeah. First off, that sounds incredibly painful, but you clearly learned something from the nature of it. Yeah. So almost two years ago, back in November 2022, the business kind of hit a wall. And I realized through just things, you know, when it's just like this gut feeling of like, things are not working well and this is not going to grow. I don't know what's going on. something's wrong. And so a friend of mine, she was like, Hey, she started asking me questions about our audience and I couldn't answer them.

4:34And she's like, you need to get to know your audience better. She's like, you need to start doing just phone calls with your audience. And what she didn't know about me at the time is I'm like a fucking train. So like you tell me to do something and I just start doing it and I don't stop. And so now, so that was, I started doing calls in January, 2023. And now I've done probably now like 650 one-on-one calls with people. And I'm now scaling back from that, but you know, it's one of those like macro level, it was painful, but it's calls with people that are trying to be writers. Most of them are pretty fun.

5:11I like those people, but now I know my audience really well. I know why they write. I know how old they are. I know when they began writing. I just know them so deeply and well and changed the whole approach to marketing. And we figured out what we should be doing in the company in the process. About a year ago, I had a really big breakthrough again after I'd done probably the first two or three hundred. And now we're up 29.2 % in the business this year. In the previous three years we had been flat for three years and so we figured it out and now we're gonna we're gonna grow but it was just really like i just needed to get to know my people and so i started talking to them one at a time so it's funny for years we have developed marketing strategy for clients and a lot of how we develop messaging is by interviewing their clients because their clients talk about the problems that they get solved you know by that company and quite often it has nothing to do with the actual product, you know, it's stuff they're not getting, you know, in other parts of their life, even it's pretty crazy.

6:19And some of the verbatim statements that people have said, I was like, well, there's your core message. Yeah. It was like for too much of, well, one of the things I realized was we kept talking about like writing a book that'll sell well and writing your best seller. Yeah. After I'd done the first almost a hundred calls, I went back through all my notes and just read through them. I'm like, not one person talked to me about wanting to write a bestselling book. They want to leave a legacy. They want to leave something behind for their family to read. They want their kids or grandkids to be proud of them.

6:49And I'm like, oh gosh, I just like pulled all of that stuff out of our marketing. And it's all about legacy, being proud of, you know, doing the thing you've wanted to do since you were 14 years old. And, and I just, I didn't know that. Like it made sense after the fact, but I hadn't, I didn't know before I just talked to everybody. You know, writing is weird, isn't it? A lot of people, even if they say I'm a terrible writer, I would never do that. Or I'm certainly not going to make the time to do that secretly. Doesn't everybody want to write a book? As far as I can tell, I mean, I hang out with a lot of writers, but like, I think what it is, we all want to leave something behind that, that is, takes everything we've learned.

7:29We've all been through really shitty stuff. We've all learned really hard lessons and we want to leave it behind for other people and the seemingly most accessible way to do that is to write a book right it's hard to make a movie you know you know you can paint i don't think that gets the point across so like a book seems to be the way to do that and it does it really well and i actually think fiction is a better form than non-fiction because you know if i start telling you john this is what you need to do and here's what you need to think it's like i start like arguing with you or thinking yeah but But if you just tell me a story, you know, it's like it changes my mind without much effort.

8:11And so so that's what I've really dedicated myself to is, you know, being somebody that can write something great. And the shithead is the outcome of that. Like the early reviews of it have been really good. People love it. And it's having the kind of people are like emailing me saying I'm going to therapy after reading your book, you know, and so it's that's pretty gratifying, isn't it? I mean, to realize that you can have that impact and you'll hear, you won't hear from a lot of people, but you know, I mean, I wrote duct tape marketing, you know, 17, 18 years ago. And it just floors me that people today are like, you know, I built my business on that.

8:48I was like, Oh, really? I was just trying to feed my family. I had no idea. Yeah. I mean, I read it. I read it when it first came out. I remember buying it at my Barnes and noble when i lived in lynchburg virginia and i was like trying to get my business off the ground and i was like this guy knows what he's talking about like it was like the first time i felt like i read something that was something i could do it wasn't some like high-minded way of doing it so oh yeah yeah for sure so writing writing is a and it books go places you can't go by yourself yeah and so they like have a way of like going out into the world and touching people that you could never get to on your own.

9:30So I'll start basic and kind of start peeling into like the actual stuff. But what do you, when somebody comes to you and says, Oh, Tim, I really want to write a book. What should I do? Yeah. I mean, the first thing I try to do is talk them out of it. Cause like, I mean, it's cliche at this point, but it's like writing book and it depends on how you're approaching it. So like writing a nonfiction, like a business book. And again, I've written a few of these, So I love them. That's a different thing than trying to write fiction. Fiction is really hard to do well. And so and I like, yeah. So anyway, if somebody wants to learn how to write, the first thing they need to do is just start writing short pieces.

10:14So we're a big fan on the fiction side or the memoir side of writing one scene. Can you write one scene that gets somebody excited to read the next scene? And if you can't do that, you shouldn't be trying to write an entire book because it's like setting out for a road trip from L.A. to New York and you don't even know how to drive a car. You're going to put it in the ditch before you get out of the neighborhood. it. And so with business books, I find that they're easier because you're usually talking in your own voice, especially if it's from your expertise. So you're used to consulting, you're used to coaching.

10:47So like writing in your own voice is a little easier. So, but the biggest thing is like, can you write a blog post that people want to read? Like if you send, if you write a white paper and you send it to 10 people, do they want to, do they interact with it? Do they email you back? Do they like it? Was it helpful? And like sitting down to write a book first can be really daunting. And if you don't have a good guide kind of walking you through it and you've never done it before, it'll probably not be very good. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested.

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12:03If you want to do more and spend less like Uber 8x8 and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive at oci at oracle.com slash duct tape. That's oracle.com slash duct tape. Oracle.com slash duct tape. So I know in my books and in nonfiction books, I mean, I do kind of have a here's the through line, you know, here's the order you know of stuff a lot of really good fiction books actually work because stuff's out of order because it like has a narrative that you come back and go oh now i know why like when they crashed the car you know they didn't do x or something you know i mean and that to me is what i always find like do is that like you take the note cards and usually like rearrange them all or like, how do you do that?

12:51Yeah. So what you do, it depends on how you go about it, but the way that we've found works the best is you start with your theme, which is how you want the reader to change as a result of reading your book. Right. Right. So that's probably true of any good book, right? Yeah. Right. So it's like, what's the one, if I, if one change they make, right. So, so like for my book, the shithead, it was like, I want to move people from feeling like they're broken pieces of shit to their perfect and have everything they need. Right. I really, truly believe that about people. I believe that if that one change could happen across the globe, it would solve 95 % of our problems.

13:27And so I believe that. So then it's like, okay, now I start crafting a story that will, you can watch somebody descend into hell of believing they're a piece of shit and then come out of it at the end. Right. Right. And so, and it really is about the hardest thing is when you're writing a business book, you just put on the page the truth, like here, do this and there you go. With the fiction title, you have to just tell the story and trust the reader to get the message that you're trying to give them. And it's all about you being able to write a story that infers everything to the reader. So that's the hard part.

14:08But it's, you know, when you're at a restaurant and you're people watching and you see that couple across and you're like, oh my God, they're fighting. And you didn't hear anything. You didn't hear them fighting, but you can just see in the way they're interacting. So with writing a fiction book, you have to just show what I can observe and let the reader pick up on the fact that they're fighting. I don't want to tell the reader they're fighting. So if I'm a good writer, I should be able to describe it in such a way where they know what's going on. Yeah. That's one of the harder things about writing fiction is you have to just tell the story.

14:44You have to have the theme clearly locked in your head, but you don't put the theme on the page. You just let the reader figure it out. Yeah. You know, I wonder, I often wonder that, you know, it's like an actor in a play. I mean, they become obsessed with the character. Like when you're writing a book like this, does every conversation, everything you see, like the couple of next, you know, is that like they become characters or fodder, at least for characters? well again i think this is different depending on the writer yeah mine so this book was i took what happened to me and some stuff that happened to me and i built a novel around it so it was a very personal story so like it's definitely not a true story because there's some pretty rough stuff in there that didn't happen to me but like it's more about like it's almost like looking back So you're like, all right, I need something like this, or I need a character that did this.

15:40And you just start like pulling stuff from like other movies, other books, stuff that's happened to you. Like, you know, just like different things of like, but you have to be like, all right, I'm building this story. And I need something like this here. I need a character. So I get really firmly planted and I'm usually pulling from my life. So I'm like, oh, I'm actually, this character is that person. So I'm going to write that person into the book and just try to make them bigger than life, you know? So it's a little bit of both, but I try to shut it off because it's not good if I'm out to dinner with my wife and I'm thinking about writing.

16:17Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I suspect that's a great place for people to start, especially for a first book, you know, because they have a lot of firsthand knowledge. And, you know, you become James Patterson, you can go start like hiring people to research stuff for you, you know, but that first book, I'm sure. Sure. So do you have any tips for, I mean, one of the things, most people that I'm, that are writing, many people that are writing fiction, it is not their day job. It is something that they're doing kind of on the side, you know, to try to finish. So are there, you know, or do you have any tips for like, okay, it's going to be 58 ,000 words, you know, how do I get that done?

16:52Well, so the one thing I try to get people not to do is try to write a novel at the beginning, because novels are really hard to put together. And there's too many things happening. And okay, this is one of the things that if like, I have a stack of soap boxes and this is one of them, right? So people don't understand that writing is a skill just like any other complex skill. So if I have never played the guitar before, you play the guitar, right? I do. Yeah. So if I've never played the guitar before and you said, hey, Tim, just sit down and play Led Zeppelin, man. Come on. And I'm like, no, I can't.

17:30I don't know how. So when people say I'm going to sit down and write a novel, it's like you don't know how. Just because you know how to type words doesn't mean you know how to tell a story. And there's basic skills. Just like if I want to learn to play the guitar, I got to learn my scales. I got to learn how to play chords. I got to learn how to strum. I got to learn how to even tune the guitar. Right. Right. And I have to learn all of these skills. And then I learn how to put them all together. And now I can go perform. See, again, guitar, you separate practice and performance, right? Same thing with like woodworking.

18:02I practice cutting cheap pieces of pine before I cut the$80 piece of oak. And writing, we just smush them together. And we're like, I'm going to learn how to write while writing something I want to publish. That doesn't make any sense. And the way that you get better at something is deliberate practice, which includes short feedback loops. Well, you can't short feedback loop an 80 ,000 word novel, right? So the biggest thing I want people to do is like focus on one scene. Can you write one 1 ,000 word scene that is really good? And when you send it to 10 people, they write back and say, hey, what happens next?

18:39Right? Probably not. So let's focus on writing scenes first. And then once you're consistently writing great scenes, then we start building up from there. And so that is the number one mistake writers make. And I made that mistake for like over a decade of just like, oh, this novel didn't work. Let me try another one. Let me try another one. Let me try. And it was like it was that again, like I said earlier, it's like setting out for a road trip and I don't even know how to drive. And so I want people to separate practice and performance, understand their skill development first. And then once you have the skills, you can go write whatever you want.

19:17Just like once I'm really good at playing the guitar, I can go play whatever song I want. and now I can get good at playing those songs. But every fucking guitarist, whether they were playing rock or they're playing country or whatever, got to learn the A chord and got to learn how to strum. They all have to learn the same basic skills and then they can start like going in a direction they want to go. And so I wish more writers understood like it is a skill development process. And if you just focus on the skills first, it makes everything so much easier in the long run. Yeah. So, yeah. So where do you come down on, and, you know, disclaimer, you guys offer workshops.

19:56Yeah. So where do you come down on like that kind of like public, like writers groups, workshops, you know, as a way to get that feedback, but it also could be a little soul crushing, right? Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah. This is, I mean, this was my big breakthrough as the CEO of the company is about, about a year ago, I started looking around. I'm like, we were running seminars and trainings and all these kinds of things. And I'm like, nobody's actually getting better. What is going on? And I'm like, oh, they're getting better here. Like in this one program we're running. And then I got better. What do those have in common?

20:32I'm like, it's the expert feedback, right? So even in masters of creative writing programs, your feedback comes from your peers, which is the stupidest fucking thing I can imagine. If like, if you don't know what you're talking about, I don't want you giving me advice on your, on my writing. And I don't want to give you advice on yours. Cause I don't know what I'm talking about either. And so expert feedback, I mean, and it's like, well, you know, we run work. That's why we run the workshops. Cause it's so hard to get expert feedback. That's objective and not subjective. And it's like, well, you know, I also have a coach I pay in jujitsu and a coach I pay and CrossFit and everything else, because it's like to get better at something, I need to try it.

21:15Have a coach look at me, tell me what I did right and wrong, and then go try again. And so I think this is what holds writers back for literally decades, is they're just, they're in an echo chamber of their own head or other peers that don't know what they're talking about. And that's why nobody's getting better. And so, and that's what held me back for years and years too. I'm 43, but I've been trying to write fiction since I was in my early 20s. And it's not until the last five years that I was able to quickly get better because I was getting that expert feedback. All right. Last question. Who's your favorite author?

21:51Ooh, right. The last, well, okay. I'm going to give to you. I'm going to cheat. So Ann Tyler is one of my favorite. I think she's a master of making boring things really interesting, right yeah her books are not thrillers they're about just like married couples and stuff yeah so good the other one that nobody so accidental tourist is my favorite one of hers and then car this guy named carlos ruiz zafon z-a-f-o-n wrote a book called the shadow of the wind and it is one of the most beautifully written books i've ever read it's so good it's like a mystery and a coming of age and a love story all wrapped in one.

22:32And that book, I have more highlights on my Kindle than any other book I've ever read. It's just so beautifully written. And he has a whole series of books called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, something like that. But the first one, the shadow of the wind is just wonderful. Yeah. All right. Well, do I get to share? You want to know? Yeah, of course. So Cormac McCarthy, I just absolutely love, you know, the road has probably become his most famous because of the movie, but the whole border trilogy. I mean, he just gets inside of people's head. The inner dialogue is unbelievable. And then Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker.

23:07That's kind of an old one, but he just, the whole story is so absurd, but he just makes it believable. Tom Robbins? Yeah. Yeah. He's written a handful of books, but that's my favorite one of his. Awesome. Well, Tim, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Tell people where they can find out about the workshops that you do and StoryGrid in general, and obviously find a copy of the shithead. Yeah. So storygrid.com. But really, if you want to know what we do, go to just look up story grid on YouTube. I've got about a hundred videos on there and that's the best way to really dig into who we are and what we do.

23:39We run the workshops every month. I highly recommend those. And then, you know, shithead's available at storygrid.com, Amazon, you know, all the places you buy books. Awesome. Again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you soon one of these days out there on the road, Tim.

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