TCC Podcast #418: Writing Your Story with Allison Fallon

Want to write a book? There are plenty of experts who will tell you how. But Allison Fallon has an approach that’s different from all the others—at least, that’s how it felt to be. Allison is the guest for the 418th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast and when you hear what she shares about the process of writing, I think you’ll agree, she does this a little differently—and it might just be the approach that works for you. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

 

Stuff to check out:

The Power of Writing it Down by Allison Fallon
Write Your Story by Allison Fallon
Indestructible by Allison Fallon
Packing Light by Allison Fallon
Allison’s Website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh: As a copywriter or a content writer or someone who is thinking about exploring these career paths, you’ve probably toyed with the idea of writing a book. Maybe you’ve got a great story that absolutely has to be told. Or perhaps you’ve heard that a book is the best business card and can open doors with clients who then hire you to write for them. Or maybe you’ve got a screenplay you work on for a few minutes after your client work is done. More likely… you’ve thought about one or more of those things, but haven’t yet put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.

I’m always thinking of ideas for books, some of which I have started, others I’ve put away for later. And to help me as I process these ideas, I’ve read several books about writing books… how to do it, what to include, all that stuff. Recently I came across another book about writing books that was very different in its approach. It changed the way I think about writing… books and other things too.

Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, and my guest for today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is author and book writing coach Allison Fallon. You’ll hear me say it in the interview, but Allison’s book, The Power of Writing It Down, felt more like therapy than another book about putting together your book chapters in a particluar order or writing scenes or character development. After reading it, I wanted to talk with Allison about her approach and what it means, particularly for writers who might be writing to a non-fiction audience. I think you’re going to like this interview.

Before we jump in with Allion…

Last week I mentioned our special free report called How to Find Clients. And I want to share that again because it features more than 20 different things you can do, starting right now, to find your ideal clients. It also shares the 4 mistakes you absolutely can’t afford to make when looking for clients—if you do, you are dead in the water… and it also shows you five things you need to do before you reach out to the people you want to work with IF you want them to say yes. This isn’t some dainty one page PDF you’ll forget about in a day or two… it’s 36 pages jam packed with ideas that either we’ve used in our own businesses or we’ve seen other successful copywriters use to grow theirs.  You can get your free report by going to thecopywiterclub.com/findaclient   that’s all one word. Thecopywriterclub.com/findaclient. Get your free report now.

And with that, let’s go to our interview with Allison…

Allie, welcome to The Copywriter Club Podcast. I would love just to start with your story, and I know you’ve got a really great story, but how did you become an author, speaker, founder of Find Your Voice?

Allison Fallon: Yeah, I have always wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember. I often tell a story about being in fourth grade, and that was the first time that I really realized that I had a teacher who pointed out a skill I had for storytelling. And I just remember feeling like, oh, I can like something and be good at something and be acknowledged for it. And so that kind of started the spark for wanting to tell stories and in a longer format, like writing a book. I just can, through my high school and college career was always very focused on that I would be a published author someday. 

And then, you know, when I was in high school and college, I also had a lot of really well-meaning adults in my life who would say, that’s a great thing that you want to be an author, but you also need a backup plan because writers don’t make any money. And so I, at their advice, got a master’s degree in teaching and started teaching in the public school system in Portland, Oregon, where I’m from, and taught for about three years. My plan was to teach and kind of do the writing thing on the side. I thought like, well, I have summers off, right? Like two months off every summer, which is a misnomer. I mean, for any teachers out there, like you’re saints and you really don’t get – you don’t get that much time off in the summer. You’re curriculum planning. You’re, you know, especially as a new teacher, you’re like setting up your classroom. Like there’s so much to think about and do. And you’re probably working a second job on the side because teachers also don’t get paid very well. 

And so when I realized my plan wasn’t going to work very well, I took this giant leap, which I write about in my first book. My first book is called Packing Light. And I took this big leap out of the teaching profession to do the thing that I had been wanting to do forever, which was to write a book. So I didn’t renew my contract for the following year. And I did kind of like a gimmicky, stunty sort of thing with a friend where we both quit our jobs. We sold all of our physical possessions. We packed our stuff into a Subaru Outback. And we spent almost a year traveling around the United States. We visited, we drove to all 48 states and then in the end flew to Alaska and Hawaii to kind of check those off the list and wrote a book about that called Packing Lights. So that was my first, you know, published, published work. That’s how I became an author. And there’s a lot more that I could say, but I’ll stop there. What questions do you have about that?

Rob Marsh: I mean, first of all, hitting all 50 states is an accomplishment in itself. Now I’ve got to go back and listen to that book, because that sounds fantastic. But I’m curious, because as a writer today, what are some of the specific skills from teaching that translate directly into writing? And part of the reason that I ask this is, our audience is copywriters, content writers. There are actually a ton of people who have been teachers who move into writing for all kinds of reasons. And maybe one of the reasons is because, you know, copywriting selling in a huge way is actually teaching.

Allison Fallon: It is. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, capturing an audience’s attention, I will say, you know, as challenging as it can be to capture your audience’s attention in a book, or if you’re a copywriter, like in a sales sequence or something, it’s easier than capturing the attention of seventh and eighth graders. So yeah, so I took some of the skills that I learned in that teaching profession, I suppose, and transferred them to writing. Although, I will say since my teaching stint was short, it was just under three years that I was teaching. I think there’s a lot that I’ve learned as a writer that I could also maybe translate back to the classroom if I ever wanted to. 

But the biggest thing that I did, when I published Packing Light, And it hit the market, you know, as an author, a first time author, like you don’t have any idea what to expect. And so I went into it very blind. The book did really well. Like it’s sold, I think it’s sold somewhere around 30,000 copies now at this point. So it did well. It made the publisher happy, you know, it bought out my advance, all of those things that you want it to do. And what was shocking for me is that even though it sold really well and everyone’s like, yay, and I’m getting all these pats on the back, it wasn’t generating an income for me. And so I was like, oh, maybe all these adults were right who told me you can never make money as a writer. So I was like, I’m going to have to pivot and figure out, even though I was living really lean at the time, I was living like in a $500—I think I was paying like $500 a month for like a tiny 500 square foot apartment in the city. And I was literally sleeping on a mattress on the floor. I was living very, very lean. And I can remember going to Trader Joe’s and spending like $30 for the week on my groceries. And still, whatever royalty checks I was getting just weren’t even, you know, they couldn’t support my life. And so I was like, I’m going to have to figure out a way to generate revenue. 

And that was really how I got into coaching and teaching other authors. And that’s where The Power of Writing It Down, the book that you read, that’s where that was born from and where Write Your Story, my most recent book, was born out of that experience because I pivoted to use my curriculum development skills to start teaching other people who also wanted to write books how to do that.

Rob Marsh: So let’s talk about The Power of Writing it Down. Before we started recording, I mentioned that this book is unlike any other book about writing books that I’ve ever read. And I’ve read a bunch of them. There are plenty of books on how to write a business book, how to write fiction, all of that. This felt, in a lot of ways, like therapy to me. And I don’t know if that was intentional, but talk a little bit about that book and why you wrote it.

Allison Fallon: Well, my dad’s a therapist. So I kind of wonder sometimes if the therapy element of the way that I teach writing comes from just growing up in that environment. So that’s, I’ve definitely, you know, like gotten a little bit of that from him. But also, This is born out of my personal experience because the evolution was that I wrote Packing Light. 

It came out. I realized, oh, this is not going to pay my bills. So I’m going to have to figure out another way to generate revenue. So I started coaching and teaching other authors who were either aspiring authors or who had written books before but needed help kind of crafting their outline. Or I was doing some ghostwriting, too. So I was actually writing manuscripts for authors. And one of the things that I realized while I was working with all these different authors is regardless of what you are working on, If you’re working on a business book or a self-help book or a memoir or a fiction novel, whatever you were writing, the writing was having an impact on your personal life. It was like watching someone write a business book and their business suddenly was functioning better or watching someone write a book about relationships and it was forcing them to kind of confront these issues that were happening in their relationships and really getting them to ask deeper questions and have this very transformative experience the act of writing. 

And so I started noticing that this was happening. And it was like a flag for me. Like, I was like, wow, is this just, am I just biased because this is the work that I do? Or is it really true that writing about our life experiences actually has an impact on those life experiences? And while that was happening, I also went through a massive um, like upset in my life. I went through a divorce. It was, I was in business with my now ex-husband. And so our business dissolved. It was a really tragic situation at the time. And I started writing about what was going on in my life. I just started like, it was like, I couldn’t stop myself. I was supposed to be working on this other project and I couldn’t get myself to focus on that project. All I wanted to do was write about what was taking place because it was like this life raft for me. It just felt like, This is the only way that I can try to make sense of the absolutely senseless stuff that’s happening around me. And so that experience, which later turned into my book called Indestructible, a memoir about leaving that marriage, that experience really solidified for me that writing about our lives can be deeply transformational and healing and can totally shift your perspective and change the course of your life for good. I mean, I think of that book, Indestructible, of the four books I’ve published has sold the fewest number of copies. I think it’s sold not quite 10,000 copies. And that book is my, it’s my favorite book. It’s the most important book to me because that book changed my life. 

I really believe if I hadn’t written that book, I wouldn’t be married to my current partner. I wouldn’t have the happy, like really happy family life that I have right now because that book gave me this opportunity to shift my perspective about what was unfolding inside of my life.

Rob Marsh: You actually write a little bit about that in The Power of Writing It Down, how the first draft of that book was not at all what ends up in the last draft of that book, which I found really interesting because, especially when it comes to personal narrative, like the going through it process is very different from the reviewing it process. Will you talk a little bit about that?

Allison Fallon: Yeah. So the first draft of the book, what I share in The Power of Writing It Down is that the first draft of the book, which was just like guttural, it was from, you know, like the raw, the most raw part of me just telling the story exactly as I would tell it to a best friend sitting across the table from me. And when I went to go back and reread what I had written, what I realized is the hero of the story, who’s me, but it’s kind of detached from me because I’m telling it on the page… the hero of the story as I’m reading it, I don’t like her very much. Like this horrible thing has happened to her and she’s been victimized in many different ways. But also like she’s complaining, she’s whining, she can’t see the opportunity that’s been given to her. When you’re watching a movie and you just want to scream at the main character, don’t walk down that hallway. That’s how I felt about her. She just keeps complaining that she lost this dude who was horrible to her. 

Seeing her as the main character in the story, I really wanted her to take life by the horns and file for divorce and just decide that this is the best thing that’s ever happened to her. And so that really informed the way that I wrote the second draft. It shifted my paradigm so completely that I was just like, oh, that’s the kind of hero that I want to be in the story. And I was able to kind of write her into the story as I was becoming her, if that makes sense. I think that’s how writing, how it has that impact on us is that we both become the character we want to be as we put that character on the page. And then sometimes we put the character on the page or we put the words on the page and we think like, okay, that might be true for me today, but I don’t want to be that person in the story anymore. And it gives us a chance to kind of upgrade the story to the next draft.

Rob Marsh: So one of the things that I struggled with as I was listening to and reading this book was the kinds of books that I want to write are definitely not personal narratives. And I started, it’s like, I want to write about a business book, or I’ve got like five different ideas for novels that I’ve sketched out, outlined, whatever. And your book made me stop and think, well, wait a second, you know, maybe I should add in more journaling or more, you know, of my own personal narrative. I wonder, like other people, as you coach them, as you work with them, like, how are they feeling about that same conflict? Because they feel like very different writing styles and processes.

Allison Fallon: Yeah, they are. I teach an online course called A Book in Six Months. And in that course, I teach people to delineate whether they’re writing a story driven book, which would be like either a memoir or a novel. or whether they’re writing a content-driven book, which would be like a business book or a self-help book. And there’s some gray area in between, but I can almost always help them divide their book into one of those two categories because they are different. They operate differently. They follow a different narrative arc. And so you need to know up front which type of book am I writing so that you can organize it in a way that makes sense for the reader. I will say, as far as a novel goes, you said you don’t really think of yourself as wanting to write a memoir, but you do have these ideas for novels. 

There’s a ton of research that shows that novel writing is as impactful to the human psyche as memoir writing is. In fact, Jessica Lowry wrote a book called Rewrite Your Life that’s all about how writing fiction has an impact on our actual lives, that as we write about these characters, that we actually transform and change as people too. And I believe from 10, 12 years of doing this work, that writing content-driven books is the same. You know, you – even if you think you know what you want to say, you don’t really know what you want to say until you put it on the page.

And sometimes you put it on the page and you think like, I thought that’s what I wanted to say but that’s actually not right at all and I need to edit it and upgrade it. And sometimes you put it on the page and you go like, oh my gosh, I didn’t even know I thought that or I believed that. But yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. And it just shows you. It’s like looking in a mirror and this is what I talk about in Write Your Story, which is my most recent book. 

In Write Your Story, I talk about how putting your story on the page is like looking in the mirror and seeing yourself clearly, sometimes for the first time. Sometimes we’ve looked at ourselves like in a foggy mirror or like in the window of the car where you can sort of see your reflection, but not totally. And when you sit down to write whatever it is you’re working on, a business book or a story, you see yourself clearly as if looking in the mirror for the first time. And so sometimes you go like, oh, my eyes are blue. They’re not green. All this time I thought they were green, but they’re blue. And so that self-awareness and ability to adjust and upgrade the paradigms that we bring to our writing and to our life is a big part of why I think writing is so transformative.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. And I think you make it absolutely clear in the books that you write, like how transformative it really is. Some of the examples you share are really amazing. And a big part of why I wanted to chat with you today, because I just think that even as a writer, you know, like I’m a copywriter. I write every single day. I write emails. I write for clients. But most of that writing isn’t all that introspective. I’m selling things, that kind of thing. And so again, this is where I think your book really shifted a lot of my thinking around, maybe I should start writing down pieces of my life story for my kids to read. And I’ll share this—yy dad wrote down his life story. It’s an amazing book. It’s like four hundred and some odd pages long. And it is one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. I mean, his life story is great. Nobody would look at him and say, you know, it’s anything special. But obviously it’s special to me. But I will say the amount of things that he accomplishes in his life as I’m reading through it, I’m like thinking, wow, I’m a schlub. I haven’t done half of what he’s done. You know, I need to step it up. Yeah. I’m not really sure where I’m going with that comment. But, you know, again, just this introspective angle that you bring to, you know, what we should be doing as writers and the transformative power of that. I just it has my brain spinning in a lot of ways.

Allison Fallon: And, you know, to answer your last question more pointedly, I would say I am a big believer that what fuels your creativity is your story. It’s your personal experience. It’s your unique vantage point. It’s your, your, your 100% unique perspective. Like our perspective is as unique as our fingerprint, you know, no other person on the face of planet earth who has ever walked here or will ever live here in the future can have the exact same set of circumstances that you’ve had in your life. And so because of that, you bring this unique viewpoint to the world. And if we want to fuel our creativity, however, we’re, we’re, you know, using that creativity, if it’s toward copywriting, or a business book, or something altogether different, like, you know, maybe you’re not even a writer, you’re doing something different. 

But fueling that creativity comes from understanding our stories. I really believe that. And so even when I’m working with someone on a business book, a lot of times, we’ll have this cool moment where we’re like mapping out the book together. And they’ll be telling me this story about something that happened to them when they were four years old or six years old or something. And it’s like, oh, that’s why you do what you do. Now it makes so much sense. That experience that you had made such an impression in your physicality that it is fueling you. And sometimes we discover those things and we go like, oh, maybe I should heal that wound because it’s fueling me in a way that I don’t really want to go. 

Or sometimes we go like, oh, no, that just makes everything click because it makes sense why I would care so much about this cause or be working on this other thing. And so I think, you know, touching, touching into like your personal story and even what you mentioned about reading your dad’s story, when we start to understand how we’re connected to the greater, you know, family tree, the tree of life, that also helps us understand our place in the world. You know, like I mentioned a minute ago, my dad’s a therapist. It’s like, well, no wonder I’m so fascinated about people’s internal environments and what makes them tick because I grew up, you know, like I can remember being in fifth and sixth grade pulling books off of my dad’s bookshelf that were like on intimacy and marriage. And I should not have been reading those books, but I was always really fascinated by it. So I mean, some of that’s probably genetics and some of it’s been passed down through example, but understanding that connection that I have to, to my relatives can help me understand my place in the world.

Rob Marsh: So let’s say that I’m ready to write a book, right? I’ve had the book project in the back of my head for a long time. I know this is very common for people who come to you for help. How do we get started? Where do we need to be in order to start mapping out what does a book look like and what is the story I want to tell?

Allison Fallon: Yeah. A couple of things that I teach right off the bat is the first one is the controlling idea of the book. So we really need to understand what is this book actually about. And this will surprise a lot of people who have not written a book before, but a book can only be about one thing. Seems crazy that it can only be about one thing because it’s, you know, 50, 60, 70, 80,000 words. And that’s a lot of ground to cover on one topic, but it really can only be about one topic. If it’s about more than one topic, it’s not really a book, it’s a collection of essays or – I mean, you could pull a collection of essays together into a book and it still would need to have some sort of controlling idea that holds the whole thing together. So it’s not like – I think a lot of people have this mistaken idea, and this was true of me before I ever wrote a book, where like if I just write enough blog posts, I can kind of print them off and put them together and that’ll be considered a book. It’s not about getting to word count really. It’s about really understanding what’s the one thing that I’m writing about. 

And so helping people define that from the very beginning of the process is super important to helping them craft the outline and then helping them complete the manuscript. And what I teach people to do, this is unique to what other writing coaches do, but I teach people to write their book to what I call one perfect reader. So sometimes in publishing spaces, you’ll hear people talk about demographics, like, what are the demographics for this book? What’s the target market that we’re trying to hit? And I just find that in the writing phase of things, in the marketing phase of things, it helps to talk about demographics. In the writing phase of things, here’s why it doesn’t help to talk about demographics. Because if I put you on a stage in front of 1,000 people who were all of a similar demographic and told you to tell your story and put a spotlight on you so you can’t see anyone’s face and the whole audience, you’re gonna have a hard time knowing where to start, knowing what details to include, knowing how, you know, what is the narrative arc that I should follow? Versus if I put you across the table from your brother, or from your neighbor, or from your best friend, or from your grandmother, and say, now tell your story. 

And it’s one person who you’re looking at, and it’s someone whose face you know, and whose name you know, and who you recognize, like you understand how this person operates and you know them very well, you’re going to have a much easier time telling the story. And I just find working with authors that when I can help them write their book to that one perfect person, who maybe is representative of a target market, but when we write the book to one perfect person, it’s just much easier to actually execute the manuscript.

Rob Marsh: So to make this really understandable, can we talk through just a couple of examples of the controlling idea So for instance, your first book, which is Packing Light about traveling around the country. I mean, obviously the controlling idea isn’t just travel or travel with a best friend. How would you describe that idea?

Allison Fallon: The structure for the controlling idea that I teach is this story is about, or this book is about, and it’s a little different for a story-driven book versus content-driven, but a quick controlling idea for Packing Light, which I didn’t, I wrote Packing Light with no controlling idea.

Rob Marsh: Right. So this maybe came before you figured this stuff out.

Allison Fallon: Yeah. But it would be something like this story is about a young woman who is dissatisfied with her life, who decides to quit everything and go on an epic adventure to see if she can find herself.

Rob Marsh: Okay.

Allison Fallon: Then if you wanted to add to it, you could say what she discovers is that life is – I don’t know. Let’s see. The resolution of the story usually comes at the end of the controlling idea. What she discovers is that life is much more complicated and beautiful than she ever imagined. So it’s really, I mean, Packing Light‘s really a coming of age story. And then Indestructible would be the stories about a woman who leaves an abusive marriage, you know, dissolves her entire life only to discover that she’s stronger than she ever imagined.

Rob Marsh: And then a book, like your latest book, right? Your story, how would you define that controlling idea?

Allison Fallon: Yeah. So this story, I mean, I have a controlling idea for it somewhere. I would say this book is for, usually with content-driven books, you say this book is for. Okay. This book is for, oh, you’re putting me on the spot here. This book is for anyone who believes that there’s more to life than meets the eye and is willing to follow a trusted path to uncover the depth and beauty of their story.

Rob Marsh: OK. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. And so again, when I think about the books that I want to write, which are probably more content books or more business type, like let me show you how to do this thing. That controlling idea is going to be related to both the person who’s reading it, but also the thing that I am teaching.

Allison Fallon: Yes. So the controlling idea is built around the problem, the one big problem that your reader is facing, the path out of that problem and the resolution. So yeah, if you’re writing a business book, it’s like this book is for any small business owner who’s stuck at under a million dollars and wants a trusted process to triple their revenue or quadruple their revenue or whatever it is.

Rob Marsh: Which is actually a pretty familiar formula to a lot of copywriters because it’s basically a sales page. You’re talking about, here’s your problem, here’s the solution, the way you solve it, and here’s the result.

Allison Fallon: Yeah. And I mean, the skill of copywriting is such an amazing skill to bring to book writing. I really like how I was trained as a writer and my natural bent with writing came more from poetry and essay writing and storytelling. And I think, especially in my early years as a writer, I leaned more on the beauty of the prose than actually making a point in the story. And so that was a weakness for me as a writer, that I had to learn along the way. I had to learn how to be like, well, what’s the takeaway for the reader? What’s the point that we’re making here? What’s the moral of the story? Because the story has to be pointed somewhere or people lose attention, no matter how beautiful the prose is. 

Now, on the flip side of that, if you’re a copywriter, if you’re trained as a copywriter and that’s your skill set, you almost have an advantage to me because you come at this understanding the structure of how a chapter should be put together, of how to keep, you know, capture and keep human attention. And when you understand that, anybody can go back through and make the prose sound more beautiful or add more stories to make it, you know, flow a little nicer or make it more interesting or whatever. But understanding the structure is, in my opinion, really the hardest part. 

And so I teach this to a lot of writers because a lot of writers come to the process of writing a book and they think, oh, I could never write a book because, you know, I don’t have a degree from a fancy university or I don’t, you know, I’ve never been published before or I’m really not that great of a writer. I’m not good with grammar. I’m not good with spelling, whatever. And I think that’s actually a huge misnomer, that if you understand the structure of how to capture and keep human attention, and you know how to put a chapter together, that’s really all you need to know to write a book. And everything else along the way, in my opinion, can be learned. I mean, even the structure can be learned. I teach a lot of that in my courses, too. But it’s the first thing that has to be learned.

Rob Marsh: OK. Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. So let’s say I have a controlling idea. I know who my perfect reader is. What comes next?

Allison Fallon: So the next thing I would do in my courses is put together a robust outline. Okay. And that’s a really involved process. I use three by five note cards with my clients when we put together outlines for books. And we do that by writing a paradigm shift for each chapter, the controlling idea for each chapter, a paradigm shift, what stories we’re going to tell in the chapter, what the takeaway for the reader is. And I have a formula that I follow that we put that all together. So once you have the outline written, the writing of the manuscript actually becomes quite easy. I share this story in Write Your Story, but when I first wrote Packing Light, I wrote the draft to that book and threw it away probably three times. Well, maybe two. So wrote it, threw it away, wrote it, threw it away. And the third time I wrote it was the draft that actually went to the publisher. A big reason for that is I didn’t know where I was going with the book. I just knew I liked writing. I had a story I wanted to tell. I was like, I knew these interesting things were happening to me, but I didn’t really understand what the point of the book was. And so understanding what the point of the book is, is a major obstacle to overcome.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. That’s the whole reason to do the outline is the point of each chapter of the point of the entire book. Exactly. You put it together. And then like you said, once that’s done, the writing part should be easy. Do you have tips or tricks for the actual, okay, I got to put my butt in the chair and I got to crank out, you know, a thousand words today or 4,000 words or whatever it is.

Allison Fallon: Yes, my first tip is to implement your writing time into your schedule long before you are on a deadline. So essentially, to have times of day and times of week that are dedicated to your creative writing or to this project. So if you have times of day that you’re writing for copywriting or writing for your job or whatever, that’s not the same as writing for your book project. So I tell people to keep this really achievable. So don’t say to yourself, I’m going to get up every morning at five o’clock in the morning. I’m going to write for three hours before I go to work because you’ll think you’re going to do that. And maybe you do it for one week or if you’re really disciplined, you do it for two. But then you start to falter and fall behind that insane expectation for yourself. 

And then people get in this cycle with themselves in book writing where they’re just like, I’m not disciplined enough for that. I tried to do that once. And, you know, I told everyone I was going to write a book and I was a complete failure. Instead, say to yourself, OK, what can I realistically do inside of the life that I’m currently leading? Could I realistically write one or two days a week? Could I realistically write for an hour at a time? Maybe I do set my alarm earlier one morning and get up at 6 and write for an hour before I get my day started. Or maybe I choose one day a week. Maybe it’s a Saturday and I write for three hours at a coffee shop while my spouse handles the kids or whatever. Build that writing time into your schedule now. Before you’re on a deadline, you’ll be much more likely to succeed when the time comes to actually complete the manuscript.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, to me that feels like one of the biggest challenges because like you said, life happens, all of those good intentions, you know, I’m going to be writing it and suddenly you’re so far behind and maybe even it’s worse if you don’t have that deadline with a publisher, if it’s just your own personal project because it’s so easy to let ourselves off the hook for doing that.

Allison Fallon: Yeah, I teach my writers to put it on their calendar. Like whatever system you use for calendaring, I use iCal, so I’ll put my writing time in my calendar. And if my writing time is in my calendar from 7 to 8 o’clock, then that’s what I’m doing during that time. And I teach my writers to treat that time just like you would any other appointment in your calendar. So you know, you and I had this scheduled, I don’t know, four weeks ago, five weeks ago, something like that. And unless I’m sick, or my child is sick, or there’s some other kind of emergency, there’s no way that I’m gonna text you or email you and say, I’m so sorry, I’m not gonna be able to make it to the interview today. I just didn’t feel like it. Just I slipped in instead. You know, So treating our writing time just like we would any other appointment in our calendar, where of course there are times when you cancel it. If your family member passes away, you cancel it. If you have an emergency work trip, you might cancel it. If your kid is sick, you might cancel it. But otherwise, you show up, and you show up for yourself. And I also teach people, because people will say, well, I’m feeling really stuck in my writing, so I just didn’t do my writing time today. And one of the things I teach people to do is if you feel like you genuinely can’t make progress in your writing, you do something that feeds and nourishes the writing. So maybe that’s a walk. Your 7 to 8 AM is scheduled, and that’s your writing time, and you honor it. Maybe you don’t feel like you can get any writing done, but maybe you just go for a walk. Or maybe you go for a drive. That’s something that my husband will always do when he’s feeling stuck on something. I like to go to a yoga class, something that kind of clears my head. Maybe you sit at your computer and just have the discipline of sitting there even though you don’t get any words on the page. I’ve had it happen before where I think I’m stuck on a writing project and so I just force myself to sit at the computer even if it’s for 30 minutes. And at 28 minutes into my 30 minutes, I have an idea and I write for 45 minutes and make some progress. So, you know, any little thing that you can do that feeds or nourishes the writing is considered, you know, part of that writing time.

Rob Marsh: I don’t know if this is an apocryphal story or not. I think it was told about Alexander Dumas, who when he would sit down to write, I think he would take off all of his clothes and leave them outside of his office so that he couldn’t leave the room because he’s naked. Like I said, I’m not sure if it’s a true story or not, and I’m not sure that I would recommend that to anybody either as a writing practice. But if that’s what it takes to get you to sit down and actually do the thing, maybe there’s some value in… I love just… If you have to sit and look at a blank page for 30 minutes, then that’s what you’ve done. I just think that’s a great practice.

Allison Fallon: And just keep in mind, this is one of the things that I’ve really come to recognize over the years of working with hundreds or even thousands of people. is everybody processes really differently. And so when I first started doing this, and I was young in my late 20s, I, I was a very disciplined person. I would have classified myself that way. I didn’t have any children. I wasn’t married at the time. And so my way of processing information and my way of you know, executing on a writing project was very specific. And I taught other people as if everyone else should sort of like fit into this little box. 

And one of the things I’ve learned with just working with so many different people is everybody’s different. Everybody’s life circumstances are different. And we have to find a way to make writing fit inside of the circumstances that we’re actually experiencing. So I’m not saying that it never makes sense to change your life circumstances. But, you know, like, for example, I have kids now. I have two little kids who wake up super early in the morning. And I don’t set an alarm clock because they wake me up. I mean, sometime like between 5.30 and 6.30 is when they wake up. And I used to do my writing time first thing in the morning. I was like, I was very disciplined about it. I would get up, I wouldn’t touch my phone, wouldn’t touch my computer, wouldn’t talk to anybody until my writing was done. I’d make myself a cup of coffee, I’d sit down, I’d write for two hours, and that was what I did every morning. And now that’s just not accessible to me. 

So instead of being like, well, I guess I’m not a writer anymore, I can just decide like, oh, what works for me is to drop them off. I drop them off at 8.45. I come home and I’ve got, you know, some time from 9 to noon where I can get some writing done. So you have to figure – and another example of this is I used to book a cabin somewhere or, you know, like I’d go to the beach or I’d go to the woods for a couple of days to get a writing project done. 

That’s how I wrote Indestructible. I booked a little condo at the beach for 10 days. and wrote almost the whole manuscript while I was at the beach. And I used to really like proselytize that, like, this is the way to do it. It’s the way to get your writing done. And now I’m like, as a mother, I’m like, I could not disappear for 10 days. Like, what would my family do for 10 whole days? I mean, they would survive physically, but I think it would be a big strain on the family. And for me, you know, it just wouldn’t work for me to – I don’t want to be gone for that long from my kids right now. So it doesn’t have to happen that way is my point. It can happen a lot of different ways. And I want people to hear that and know that whatever life circumstances you have, and however you process information, some people process information better when they’re not sitting at the computer. Maybe you’re walking around your backyard and you’re voice to texting, and that’s how you write a chapter. That’s fine. There’s no one right way to do this.

Rob Marsh: Do you think that everybody has a book? I believe everyone has a book in them.

Allison Fallon: I’ve been strongly refuted on that by other podcasts and stuff that I’ve been on, but I believe everybody has a book in them.

Rob Marsh: Let’s talk about that. Why? I don’t have a strong feeling one way or the other. I feel like I’ve got 30 books in me that would love to come out if I will let them, but I can imagine that there are people who think that they don’t have anything to say.

Allison Fallon: Everybody has something to say. Everybody’s fascinating. I mean, it all has to do with the way that you look at the life that you’ve led. And sometimes people will come to me and say like, you know, everyone tells me that I’m supposed to write a book. Some people just have details to their story that are just extra fascinating. It’s like they’ve been through, you know, so many different wild things and so many synchronicities have happened to them. Some people just have life stories that are like that. Some people have life stories that are a little more vanilla. But it’s a matter of how you look at it and how you structure the story, what you focus your attention on. 

Think about when you’re putting a book together, you get to choose as the author what details you want to include and which ones you want to leave out. And so you get to decide what the reader is going to pay attention to. And I think that there’s something to be gained for each of us in taking a look at our life setting, like, you know, what have I experienced in my life? What have I been through? What’s happened to me? What have I accomplished? And really thinking through, like, what would I want to put someone’s attention on? What do I want to be remembered for? What parts of my life do I want to remember? What parts of my life are most important? And not everybody’s going to want to do that. 

And again, as I’ve matured, I feel like I’ve moved away from convincing people who say they don’t want to write. I don’t feel that I need to convince them that they do. But if someone comes to me and says, listen, I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I’m not sure I have anything interesting to say, I’m like, try me. Let’s talk about your life. I promise you, I will find something interesting. And people inevitably, it’s like human nature, people bury the lead to their own stories. They’ll tell you the 10 most mundane details of their life first. And then you’ve been talking with them for an hour and they finally drop the one nugget that you’re like, wait, what? An hour to tell me that part of the story. That’s definitely the most interesting part. So we just have a way of burying the lead or not seeing what’s most interesting about us. And I think that’s the thing that, you know, if we’re all given like a gift, a thing that we’re good at, you know, in this lifetime, I think my gift is being able to see what’s most interesting about people. and really believing everybody is interesting and being able to find that nugget.

Rob Marsh: I think from the standpoint of the person who may be thinking or who isn’t able to say that most interesting thing early on, it feels to me like fear is a really big here where sharing something, even if it’s an amazing thing, amazing accomplishment or experience or whatever, fear holds us back in so many ways.

Allison Fallon: 100%. Yeah, I mean, people are scared. What’s wild is like the thing, I believe the thing we want most, the thing we’re most hungry for as human beings is connection. And connection comes through vulnerability. So it comes through me showing you the truth of who I am. And also showing you the truth of who I am is the most terrifying thing I could ever do. Because it’s like handing you the weapon to say, here’s the most tender part of me, if you really wanted to hurt me, you could now because I’ve shown this to you. And so I think we’re terrified of that. And also, it is the window to being connected to others. And I think that’s a lot of what I’m teaching people when we’re working together on a book. Not every person I work with finishes their book. And sometimes people will get really hard on themselves like, you know, I put all this money and time and effort into this and I I did never publish the book. And it’s like, well, did you transform? Did you change as a person? Oh, yeah. I’m a much better leader. I’m a much better dad. I’m a much better person because I wrote that book. Well, then, you know, it wasn’t a wasted investment just because it didn’t hit the New York Times list.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that’s a whole other reframe, I think, when it comes to, you know, if you’ve read a book, you kind of want to see it on the shelf at Barnes & Noble, which, again, is terrifying, but also exhilarating, right? So we’ve talked a lot about the stuff that we should be doing or should be thinking about if we want to write a book. What are the things, the big mistakes that we make as we approach these kinds of projects that hold us back or keep us from succeeding?

Allison Fallon: Okay. Well, the biggest mistake, I talked about this briefly earlier, but the biggest mistake that I think a lot of authors make is not understanding if they’re writing a story-driven or content-driven book. And like I said, there is this kind of weird gray area in the middle where it’s harder. Like there are some books that are very obviously story-driven books. Any memoir, any fiction book is obviously a story-driven book. Yeah. Harry Potter, story-driven. Wild by Cheryl Strayed, story-driven. Then there’s books that are obviously content-driven, like any, you know, leadership book, textbook, business book. If you go into the business section, every book that you pull off the shelf there is going to be content-driven. Then there are these, middle ground kind of books, like a collection of essays, I would make a strong argument that a collection of essays is usually content driven. Even though the essays are stories, the collection is making a statement about a topic, which is content driven. Another example would be like, Glennon Doyle, her book, Untamed, is one that a lot of people mentioned when they’re talking about a story driven book, and I would argue that book is content driven. Even though it’s, I don’t know, 100 chapters of various little short and longer stories from her life, it is a book that teaches the reader, you’re tamed, you shouldn’t be tamed, you should be untamed, and here’s how to become untamed. So I would argue that that’s a content-driven book. And making the decision about which category your book falls into is the first choice you really have to make in order to know how to structure the book.

Rob Marsh: Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that book, but that sort of feels like a story-driven content book as well. In fact, it’s got to be one of my favorite books that I’ve read and shared.

Allison Fallon: It’s definitely a content-driven book, yeah, but it’s through the lens of storytelling.

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That’s good to know. Any other mistakes?

Allison Fallon: People make the mistake of not writing the book that they want to write. So people write the book that they think the market is asking for, Which, you know, I, I’m hard pressed to call it a mistake because there’s some value to writing the book the market is asking for. In some ways it can get you in the doors of publishing so that it opens doors for you to write, you know, whatever you want to write. So in some ways there’s value to that. You can, you know, write the book that the market is asking for. It opens doors for you in publishing. You can get a publishing deal. You can get, you know, the book in bookstores and that may open the door for you to write the book that you want to write later down the road. But I just find that authors will have a lot of regret about wanting to write one book and a publisher, you know, they have some connection with a publisher that wants them to write some different book. So they end up writing that different book instead. And then this book that they wanted to write just never really gets legs or gets off the ground. And I’m of the belief that when a book idea comes to you, it’s like the Elizabeth Gilbert Big Magic idea that like, it’s going to visit you. And if you don’t take it, it’s going to take off and visit somebody else. And so, you know, you may not get another chance to come back around to that book. I don’t, I don’t know. And I’ve worked with a lot of people who have some regret about wishing that they would have written the one book that they wanted to write instead of the one that the market was asking for.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, that feels like a really easy thing to do too. I mean, even if you don’t even plan on publishing or you’re only sharing it with your family or friends or whatever, writing to please them instead of the story that you want to tell feels really big. Well, I mentioned that I had read your book, The Power of Writing It Down, but you’ve got this new book, Write Your Story. Tell us about that book, what it’s about. I mean, it’s already on my list of things to read, so you don’t have to convince me, but I’m curious what else is in it and how you describe it.

Allison Fallon: Well, I wrote Write Your Story because I was teaching these workshops with Donald Miller. He and I together were teaching these workshops called the Write Your Story Workshops. And we started doing these workshops because we were meeting a lot of people who felt they had a story that they wanted to tell and they weren’t sure where to start. And some of these people had aspirations to publish a book, but not all of them. Sometimes people were just like, listen, one of the women was like, I adopted my two daughters. They’re twins. And she’s like, I want them to know their story. I want them to know where they came from. what was going on in their mom’s life that made them, you know, their adoptive mom’s life that made her want to bring them into her world. I want them to understand their biological mom and where they came from and all these different elements. She’s like, I could never tell this story publicly, but I really want this story to be passed down to my daughters. And you’d be shocked how many times I hear that from people who say, I could never publish this story, but I really want to share this story with my family and friends.

And so Don and I just started feeling like there was this need, this hunger from people who wanted to share their stories and just wanted to know, like, how would I structure this? Where would I start? What’s most interesting about this? So we started teaching these workshops and, you know, like 50 people at a time would come and tell their stories. And it was so inspiring to watch these people take stories from their lives and put them on paper, even if they had no plans to publish. And so I wanted to take the concepts that we were teaching in that workshop and put them in the book. So that’s what the book is. It teaches you a structure that literally anybody can use to take a story from your life and put it on the page. And it works if you’re wanting to write a book to publish, and it also works if you’re just wanting to tell a story to pass on to your grandkids.

Rob Marsh: I love that. Like I said, it’s on my list, and hopefully a few other people will add it to their list as well. If somebody wants to follow you, learn more about your processes for writing, maybe even engage you for some of your coaching services, Allie, where should they go?

Allison Fallon: The platform where I’m most active is Instagram. So my handle is at AllieFanelon on Instagram, A-L-L-Y-F-A-L-L-O-N. And I will post about all the different products and services that I have. to offer there and any new workshops I’m doing or where to get the book, all of that should all be on Instagram as well.

Rob Marsh: Amazing. And I mean, people can find your other books at the library, at the bookstore, wherever books are found. Yeah, it’s like I said, The Power of Writing it Down was a real paradigm shift for me as far as writing goes. And it just made me think about writing, the process of writing, the benefits of writing differently. And as soon as I saw that, I’m like, yeah, I want to chat with you on the podcast because I think it could be the same for a lot of other, those of us who do marketing writing all the time, but maybe there’s some other story to be told.

Allison Fallon: So thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Rob Marsh: I appreciate it. I want to thank Allison for sharing her process for writing and thinking about putting a great book together. If you like what she shared, you should definitely pick up her book, The Power of Writing It Down or her newest book, Write Your Story. I still haven’t read Write Your Story, but it’s on my list and I’m looking forward to that one. We also talked a little bit about Indestructible and Packing Light, a couple of her other books, which you might be interested in reading as well. I will link to those in the show notes, so you can check them out if you want to. 

What Allison shared about using writing as a tool for personal discovery, even for business books and other nonfiction, is, I think, unique. Sharing what you know, whether in a book or some other platform, isn’t just about landing a client or selling a product. Rather, it’s often about something deeper and you can’t discover that until you start writing. And it’s got me toying once again with the book or the books that I keep telling myself that I am going to finish. You should definitely look Alison up online. She’s at alisonfallon.com and you can find all of her books at Amazon and other bookstores. I’ve linked to a few of them in the show notes of this episode to get you started.