My group coaching programs First Draft (for writers working on their first draft) and Final Draft (for writers in the revisions process) include weekly question and answer sessions and group discussions.

These are agenda-free office hours group calls where the writers in the group are given the opportunity to discuss whatever writing-related challenges they are dealing with or topics they have on their minds.

In this week’s episode of The Writing Coach podcast, I thought it would be fun to give you a glimpse behind the curtain and share with you fifty (!) different topics the group has discussed over the last two months.

What types of things do writers talk about when they come together? Listen to this episode to find out now!

The Writing Coach Episode #129 Show Notes

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The Writing Coach Episode #129 Transcript

Hello beloved listeners, and welcome back to the writing coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T Johns here. The summer days are flying by here in Ottawa, Canada. We have bad weather for most of the year. These nice, wonderful summer days are so rare. Summer for us is really only July and August. We get two months of nice weather and then it starts cooling it down again, pretty swiftly. And then by October by Halloween, sometimes we send the kids out in their snowsuits for Halloween. We often have to our Halloween shopping strategy, that costume strategy needs to involve wearing a costume, either over a snowsuit or under a snowsuit, or perhaps it’ll still be warm and you have no snowsuit need at all. You never know. You never know in an Ottawa autumn, but here we are. We’re still in summer and the days are nice.

Now, if you’ve listened to the last few episodes of the podcast, you probably heard me talking about First Draft and Final Draft. My group coaching programs. First Draft is a program for writers looking to get the first draft of their manuscript done in six months or less. And our model in the program is fun and focused writing. So we are very serious about getting our work done, but we also have a lot of fun doing it. And then Final Draft is for people who finish their first draft, they can graduate to Final Draft. Final Draft includes all of the features within First Draft, as well as several other additional resources, coaching sessions, all sorts of things. But today, today, what I wanted to talk to you about was our first draft office hours calls. So we have two coaching calls, two office hours calls every week within this program.

The second call of the week is a hot seat call. And what this means is one member in the program submits a scene about 2000 words to me a couple days before the call, and I go over it and I provide a critique. I provide advice. I provide developmental editorial advice, and we hop on a call and, we talk about these things. We go over them. It’s the same format I primarily use in my one-on-one coaching session. Someone gives me pages. I go over them, we meet, and we discuss the pages, and we use the scenes in someone’s manuscript as the launching pad for our craft discussions. I very rarely come into a hot seat or a coaching session saying, I’m going to teach this. Instead. We look at what’s there and we say, what topics arise? What craft elements arise from reviewing someone’s work in progre...