You may have a character who does bad things but do you know why that is? Give your villain a backstory and find out why they do what they do. 

Watch my video below, or read the post, to find out why your villain needs a backstory. 

Hello my lovely writers!

My family and I became obsessed with Traitors, the reality TV show. We watched the UK one, we then went on to watch the Australian one and we just finished watching the US one last night. So, yeah, you could say we’re a bit obsessed! 

Last night was the US final and Cirie, the winner, talked about what drives her. It really hit home how that show utterly exemplifies why baddies do the things they do. Not that Cirie is a baddie, but she’s a traitor in the show so she is deliberately deceiving, manipulating and throwing red herrings out there to do her best to make sure she’s at the final. She even made sure she was the final traitor so she didn’t have to share the winnings with the other traitor who made it through to the end. 

What’s the motivation?

When you listen to the reels behind the scenes when they’re doing the interviews, we see Cirie’s motivation and find out why she’s doing this. She’s working in healthcare and made it plain she’s not earning a lot of money. She rents at the moment but would like to buy a home. She has a lot of people depending on her as well as an elderly mother who she needs to look after. 

These are all really powerful motivators and drivers for her to do whatever it takes for her to get to the end of the show and win that $250,000. 

When you see poor Andie – one of the runners-up – she looks hurt, betrayed and heartbroken. She can’t believe Cirie has done this to her. But for Cirie, this had to have a good ending and she was absolutely motivated to win. She doesn’t see herself as a baddie, she sees herself as a hero, simply doing what she needed to do to make sure her family came out on top. This is what all of them were trying to do, even the faithfuls, who wanted to get to the finish line too. 

Give your villain a backstory

Traitors really exemplifies why not all baddies necessarily come from a bad place and that they’re not all psychopaths. When you’re writing about your villain or your antagonist, do you think about their motivation? Do you know why they are doing what they’re doing? 

It’s too easy to say all villains were born with a screw loose and it’s just in their nature, but very few people are born evil. Very few people are born with a screw loose in that way and it’s usually experiences, something that has happened, that has driven them to behave in the way they do. Remember that old phrase, ‘They’re a hero in their own story.’ 

Give some thought as to what your antagonist has been through and what has led them to make the decisions they make. What has led them to try and kill the person they’re trying to kill or do whatever it is they’re doing, because it’s not come out of nowhere. When you give thought to that and delve deeper into your villain’s backstory, it’s going to make for a much more layered, interesting and exciting story. 

So, get thinking and give your villain a backstory. 

Emma xx

Emma Dhesi

Emma Dhesi is a Certified Author Accelerator Book Coach and bestselling author who helps writers let go of perfectionism, self-doubt and writer's block through her signature programme, Unlock Your Creative Block.

She is the host of the YouTube Channel, Emma Dhesi, where she interviews debut and experienced authors alike.

Through her 1:1 coaching programme, Emma helps new authors start and finish their first novel.

Emma provides personal written feedback on their pages and guides them through the emotional rollercoaster that is writing a novel!

How to find your writing process isn’t always easy when you’re at the beginning of your writing journey. 

Watch my video below, or read the post, to find out how to trust you already know what you need to know to start writing. 

Hello my lovely writers!

I had a super-duper question come into my inbox recently about how – if you’re at the beginning process of your writing – do you find your process, your method, your system, without getting overwhelmed with all of the information you’ve taken in? 

Most likely, you’ve done a lot of webinars, taken a lot of classes and read a lot of books. Perhaps, like many people, you’re addicted to writing courses. You’ve absorbed all this information and taken thousands of notes, so how do you make sense of it all when you’re at the beginning of your writing journey and trying to figure it all out? 

Unlock Your Creative Block

This is something I go into in a lot of detail in my course, Unlock Your Creative Block. This course is perfect for you if you’ve got mindset issues around writing and you’re feeling blocked. If you’ve been writing the same story for years and years and years and just not getting any further with it, there’s something else going on. Unlock Your Creative Block will help you delve into that and get to the bottom of it and find out what’s really stopping you from writing. 

How to find your writing process

Something to think about and get started with is, if you’ve been doing a lot of courses and webinars and have been reading books and taking all these notes, you’ve been taking it all in via osmosis. 

You come to a point where you’ve got to trust yourself. You’ve got to trust yourself that you’ve taken in enough information and you’ve done enough practice to get you to where you need to be right now. 

Does it mean you’re going to win a Pulitzer Prize? No. Does it mean you’re going to write a bestselling book? Probably not, let’s be honest. But does it mean you are where you need to be right now? Yes, it does. 

Everybody starts somewhere

Remember, everybody starts somewhere. I started somewhere. You’ve got to start somewhere. Hilary Mantel started somewhere. Stephen King started somewhere. Everybody starts somewhere and that’s where you are now. 

You just have to take what knowledge you have right now and go with it. Don’t overthink it. Don’t over complicate it. As humans, we have a tendency to do this. Just get writing the story. Don’t think you’ve got to plan everything out – you don’t. You’ve got an idea in your head, which you’ve been thinking about for a long, long time, or it’s a new idea and you’re very impassioned about it right now. 

It’s only by writing do you begin to reduce that overwhelm, begin to find out what your process is and begin to understand how you work individually as an author. You can read as many books as you want, but it’s not until you start doing the do of writing, do you figure out your own process, find out what you’re good at and where you need to improve. 

I hope that’s given you a starter but, if you’re starting out and feeling overwhelmed by everything, you’ve just got to get started. Acknowledge you’re feeling out of your depth, but how will you get any better if you don’t get out of your depth and start going?

So, get writing. 

Emma xx

Emma Dhesi

Emma Dhesi is a Certified Author Accelerator Book Coach and bestselling author who helps writers let go of perfectionism, self-doubt and writer's block through her signature programme, Unlock Your Creative Block.

She is the host of the YouTube Channel, Emma Dhesi, where she interviews debut and experienced authors alike.

Through her 1:1 coaching programme, Emma helps new authors start and finish their first novel.

Emma provides personal written feedback on their pages and guides them through the emotional rollercoaster that is writing a novel!

Someone recently asked me how to balance book writing and marketing. What a great question!  

Watch my video below, or read the post to find out when to concentrate on your writing and when to focus on marketing. 

Hello my lovely writers!

Someone asked a good question recently and I wanted to share it, and my answer, with you.

The question was, how do you balance book writing and marketing?

Particularly as an indie author but, more increasingly if you’re a traditionally published author with a small press and you don’t have the budget from the big houses, you’ve got to do a lot of the marketing yourself. So how do you do it? 

How to balance book writing and marketing

Balancing writing and marketing is an ever-changing tide. If you’re between books and book launches, it’s a quieter time, which makes it easier to do both writing and marketing. You can devote a good chunk of your time to writing and then, depending on the time available to you, you can focus on marketing. 

In between launches, you can spend less time on marketing unless you’re actively doing promotions, putting a sale on a book or bundling some books, etc. But when it comes to launch time and you’re gearing up for a book to be published, marketing your book becomes more intense. I have certainly experienced that over the course of this year because I had three books coming out. 

That was a pretty intense time marketing-wise, as I had to let people know about the books, get them excited about them and let them know when they were coming out. Then, when my books were out, I had to ask people if they knew the books were out and point them in the direction of the reviews. 

You need to get information out there and let people know your book is available because, if you don’t let anyone know your book exists, how do they know it’s there to buy? Think of marketing as letting people know about your book. 

You need to build an email list

Like everything we do in life, there are tides, and the amount of marketing you need to do and where you focus that marketing is going to change as your career evolves and where your interest lies. 

But the most important thing to do is to build an email list. Creating an email list is the first thing you’ve got to do, as it’s the most potent part of your marketing.

If you need some help with email marketing, I have an online workshop that covers this called Email Marketing for Authors.

I hope this has helped you balance book writing and marketing.

If you’re an indie author or with a small press and you’ve got to do some of your own marketing, have a think about what time you have available to you and where you want to spend that time letting people know about your book, then just get stuck in there. 

Happy marketing!

Emma xx

Emma Dhesi

Emma Dhesi is a Certified Author Accelerator Book Coach and bestselling author who helps writers let go of perfectionism, self-doubt and writer's block through her signature programme, Unlock Your Creative Block.

She is the host of the YouTube Channel, Emma Dhesi, where she interviews debut and experienced authors alike.

Through her 1:1 coaching programme, Emma helps new authors start and finish their first novel.

Emma provides personal written feedback on their pages and guides them through the emotional rollercoaster that is writing a novel!

I have a dilemma! 

Watch my video below, or read the transcript, and let me know in the comments what you would do in my situation. 

Hello my lovely writers!

I want to share something with you I think everybody will go through at some stage, and I’m hoping this is just a rite of passage for me. 

I’ve got my new book coming out later this year and I’ve been sending it out to early readers for feedback. This is a new experience for me but I also thought it was a valuable one to share with anybody who is either in this situation or who is likely to be in the future. 

The feedback is mixed. On the whole, people are enjoying it. It’s had some high ratings but some feedback has come in telling me there’s quite a big problem with it and, if I really want this book to do well, I’ve got to fix that problem. 

I have a dilemma

So, what do I do? I have a dilemma. I’m feeling rubbish and sad about it. I’ve worked hard on this book for the last two to two and a half years, and I genuinely believe this is the best story I’ve written to date. I’m very, very proud of it, I’ve put a lot of work in and yes, I’m proud of it, but at the same time, it’s clear there are some issues. 

What I could do is say, ‘Okay, let’s leave it there. I’ve worked hard on this, just put it out, just publish the book quietly, put it out into the world and don’t make a song and dance about it. Draw a line under it, learn from it, then move on and continue with the next story.’ 

I’m reluctant to do that because I have worked so hard on it. The other alternative is to take a deep breath, have a little mope, maybe have a little cry about it and feel sorry for myself for a day. I could do that and then get back to the work of being a writer and problem-solving and troubleshooting this. 

I could let it just collapse me and think, oh my gosh, why am I even trying? This is so hard, why am I even bothering? No one’s paying me to do this, I’m doing it because I want to.

So, what do I do here? 

I do want this to be a book people love. I do want to get good reviews. I do want people to enjoy it. So I have a dilemma and I’ve got to decide. Am I going to dig deep, do the work, step back into it, revise it and see where I can fix the holes that are there and move on and make this a better book and a better story? It’s a tough decision and I’m sure either you’ve been there or you will get there and you’ll have to make this decision for yourself as well one day. 

What would you do?

With every story I write, I feel confident I’m getting better and better. I could just draw the line under it and say, ‘Okay, the next story’s going to be better than this one,’ or I come back and work on it. 

What would you do? If this was you and you were getting some feedback and it wasn’t quite where you wanted this book to be but you’re so close to putting it out in the world and publishing it, would you decide, ‘I’m going to draw a line under it and move on,’ or would you say, ‘No, I’m going to go back and revise this and do the difficult job of getting back into the weeds with this story and do another round of revisions.’? 

What would you do? I don’t know what to do. The easy option feels like it would be to just put it behind me and move on and the difficult decision is to get back into the weeds. 

So, I’m curious. Share with me, what would you do? Put in the comments what you would do if it was you. You’d spent all this time on it. Can you give it another six to twelve months or would you just want to say, ‘Let’s move on’?

I’ll let you know what I decide. 

Emma xx

Emma Dhesi

Emma Dhesi is a Certified Author Accelerator Book Coach and bestselling author who helps writers let go of perfectionism, self-doubt and writer's block through her signature programme, Unlock Your Creative Block.

She is the host of the YouTube Channel, Emma Dhesi, where she interviews debut and experienced authors alike.

Through her 1:1 coaching programme, Emma helps new authors start and finish their first novel.

Emma provides personal written feedback on their pages and guides them through the emotional rollercoaster that is writing a novel!

Hiring an editor is scary but you need to frame it as an investment in yourself, not just an investment in your book. 

Watch my video below, or read the transcript, to find out why you are worthy of investment. 

Hello my lovely writers!

I’ve made a big step forward in my writing career and I wanted to share it with you because, on the one hand, I’m super-super-excited about it but, on the other hand, I’m also a bit scared about it. 

Hiring an editor is scary

I’ve just hired an editor for my next book and it’s scary because that person is going to be giving their feedback on my work. They’re going to tell me whether they think this is a job well done, along with what’s working but, crucially, of course, what’s not working and where they see problems. 

Now, for all I know, they could come back at any time and say, ‘It’s all a mess, it’s all a problem, you need to go back to the drawing board and start again.’ 

Of course, being a creative, hiring an editor and putting my work out there for someone else to critique, my mind immediately goes to the worst. My mind immediately makes the worst assumptions because it’s wanting to say to me, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Keep your work to yourself. Don’t show it to anybody because that’s the way you’ll stay safe. The way you can still feel good about yourself is by not doing something you perceive as dangerous.’ 

But I’ve got to do it, haven’t I? I want to make my work better. I want to make the stories better and improve myself as a craftsperson and as a writer. So it’s important I do it. 

There’s also the secondary fear that comes with spending money on hiring an editor – and not an insubstantial amount of money, either. That also brings fear because, obviously, there’s no guarantee working with this editor means I’m suddenly going to have this bestselling book and I’m going to recoup the investment I’ve made in my book. There’s no guarantees in that. 

Invest in yourself

I have to be brave and know I’m doing this for me and seeing it as an investment in myself, rather than an investment in the book. I’ve got to frame it that way for myself to make sure I view this as a worthwhile expenditure. That it’s an investment and I’m not just spending money for the sake of it because I’ve nothing better to do with my time. I need to tell myself this is going to help me get to where I want to be in the long term. 

Both of those things are scary. Both the spending of money because, as writers – and women in particular – we don’t like to spend money on ourselves. We find spending money on ourselves hard and we feel guilty about it, so I’m having to dig deep into that and trust myself I’m doing the right thing. 

Also, on the emotional side, I need to trust I’m doing the right thing by putting myself forward, investing in my craft and helping me in the long term. I need to trust the editor who’s going to be helping me is doing it with the best of intentions, wants me to succeed and wants me to do well just as much as I do. 

So, lots of things going on there in my heart and in my head but, I know if I do this, this will get me where I want to be in the long term. 

If you’re having these same mindset queries about whether you’re worthy or not, just know it’s the same for everybody and you do deserve it, you are worthy. Your books and your stories are fabulous and you want to put them out in the world. 

Emma xx

Emma Dhesi

Emma Dhesi is a Certified Author Accelerator Book Coach and bestselling author who helps writers let go of perfectionism, self-doubt and writer's block through her signature programme, Unlock Your Creative Block.

She is the host of the YouTube Channel, Emma Dhesi, where she interviews debut and experienced authors alike.

Through her 1:1 coaching programme, Emma helps new authors start and finish their first novel.

Emma provides personal written feedback on their pages and guides them through the emotional rollercoaster that is writing a novel!