In this video I want to talk about feedback on your writing. Who should you listen to? What should you think about it? Feedback is our greatest ally and our worst enemy as writers.

It can unlock brilliance in your writing or it can set you down a very wrong path. Believe me, it happened to me. It can even shut you down if it's harsh enough, I've been there too.

Feedback can be a writer's best friend or a writer's kryptonite, so I'm going to tell you when, from who and how to get feedback so that it can be your most powerful tool and not your Achilles heel.

These are not tips. I'm not even going to play them down by calling them tips. These are straight up lifesavers.

One of the most common questions I get from writers I'm working with about their books is, how do I decide what happens next?

In this video, I'm sharing five of my favorite idea generating exercises. Okay, let's go!

Exercise #1: The open ended brainstorm

The first one is the open ended brainstorm. To do this, you're going to very open-mindedly ask, what could happen? Anything goes.

Aliens could land or a hurricane could hit. A couple could break up. They could get back together. A whole new character could be introduced.

In this video, I want to share with you my personal journey of writing my first book. One of the reasons I love sharing tips about writing, mentoring writers and my Book Incubator program is that it took me 99 years to write my first book. Well, it took took me six, but it felt like 99, and I don't want that for you.

So I'm going to walk you through the mistakes that I made before writing and publishing my three novels so that hopefully you don't make the same ones. Okay. So here are my mistakes, and what finally happened when I stopped making them.

If you're going to invest the time into writing a book, and you're not just writing it for yourself—which is fine by the way if you are—but if you want it to be a publishable book, how do you make that happen?

Okay. Here's a horror story. A man believes his life to be remarkable. He knows it's remarkable. Everyone tells him that he's lived a crazy life.

So he writes down his entire life story, but to his dismay, no one wants to publish his life story. He's crushed.

Here's the thing, if he'd have known the principles I'm about to tell you, he'd have known this would happen and would've known how to write his book differently so that it was publishable.

Let's talk about the secret to writing stories that are actually compelling. I'm going to give you five strategies for writing a book that people aren't going to put down after 30 pages. Let's go!

I decided to write a novel in 2011 and I'd never written a novel before. I'd honestly never even written a short story. I was a lawyer who had just left law to decide to launch a writing career.

I thought it would take me a year. Instead it took me six, six years to write my first novel!

I kept writing it to please other people. I was trying to fit a mold of what I thought they wanted. Who are they? People in the writing classes I was taking, or the teachers of those writing classes.

Maybe you know how to write a short story or essay. Maybe you could do that in your sleep.

But a novel is a different beast.

Having written and published three novels myself, I'm going to break down the full process of writing a novel into seven steps.

Let me guess, you're here watching because you don't want your dialogue to sound like a third grade play? "Hello there, sir. To whom shall I address this letter?"

I'm going to give you FIVE TIPS for writing dialogue that sounds like people actually talk!

Writing my first novel, When You Read This, my agent gave me the feedback that she loved it, but everyone sounded like me. Whoops. So how did I write like other people talk? I wanted to be realistic, but I also needed to capture different character voices in my prose.

When I was 18 years old, I signed up for my first college creative writing class, The Short Story. My experience turned me against feedback-based writing programs forever.

Here’s a confession: until I became one, I didn’t know what a book writing coach does.

I had even hired one by that point. But because she didn’t refer to herself that way, I didn't know that “coaching” was what she was doing.