In the beginning...

Even if it’s not obviously an adventure, fiction story elements are there to keep the reader captivated and turning the page in any genre.

J KennyAugust 19, 2025writing process, writing coach, writing a book

Deus ex Machina

Deus ex machina. It’s a device we’ve all heard about from Ancient Greek theatre where a god was delivered by a machine, sometimes quite literally, to solve the problems of the players on stage. The famous example is when Medea needed to escape, the sun god Helios sends a chariot to save her. It wasn’t part of a subplot. It wasn’t something that grew out of lack of ideas. It was a device to bring a conclusion t a difficult position of the characters… and the playwright.

Even thousands of years ago, it wasn’t without its detractors.

J KennyAugust 15, 2025writing process, writing coach, writing advice, writing a book, finishing your book

On Ghostwriting

Collaborating with a professional ghostwriter is not just about word count. There are other values a ghostwriter brings to the partnership. Ideas. Narrative structure. A way to recognise elements for your story that you might have overlooked.

J KennyAugust 4, 2025ghostwriter, writing coach, writing process, writing memoir, writing a book

Riddle Me This

Riddles require you to make up the context of the scene and find what fits. Stories build that piece by piece. There’s no cathartic emotional revelation in having the context given like this. There’s no story. There’s no value placed on this information. There’s no tension other than trying to solve the riddle. Stories require that the information we need – hopefully – comes right when we need it in order to make sense of what has happened.

It's About Context

Scenes and events don’t have a meaning on their own. It’s the context of a story that gives these events any significance.

The difficult part in writing is in building the foundations earlier so the emotional resonance speaks through these scenes.

J KennyJuly 15, 2025writing coach, writing advice, writing process, writing a book

Writing Manually

There was a point while he was writing Fight Club where Chuck Palahniuk came to realise that the two characters – the narrator and Tyler – were the same. It wasn’t a twist he’d thought of before writing. It wasn’t a gimmick to string the reader along. He was writing a damning commentary on masculinity as he saw it in the mid-1990s.

J KennyJune 19, 2025writing process, writing advice, writing coach, writers block, writing a book

Three Points on the Inciting Incident

The power of your story depends on clearly locating your inciting incident.

The fundamentals of this are often misunderstood.

Story is about transformation. A story is in how a character changes. This change does not come easily but there is something that pushes the character out of their comfort to begin the journey.

J KennyJune 19, 2025writing advice, writing process, writing a book, story structure

The Lady With The Spinning Head

Collaboration is powerful because of these very reasons. Playing with ideas and perspective can be confronting, but going through that process can be exhilarating. It brings chills and goosebumps. It brings surprising results.

Collected Works

Writing is a process that uncovers what you’re saying. There are times to do it quickly but there must also be moments of revision, reflection, rewriting. And this is slow, sometimes painfully slow.

But that process is worth doing. It uncovers more layers of the beauty around your story, your concept, your idea.

J KennyMay 28, 2025writing process, writing a book

Stories Are About Risk

Stories are about risk.

The world shifts. Something is changed – for good or bad. The character reacts to this to either try to make things go back to how they were, or to make things better.

The Book Writing Blues

Blues music has been a part of popular song on radio and streaming for all our life. We’ve heard countless songs based on the structure. We instinctively know where it rises and falls, where it changes, and where the turn around is. Story structure is similar.

J KennyApril 29, 2025writing a book, writing coach, writing advice, story structure, blues music

Marking Character

As in marking a character in stone. So, a face that shows character shows that which has been marked. Or deeply impressed.

The term didn’t come to mean a person in a story until the late 1660s – a good fifty years after Shakespeare had, as he put it, shuffled off this mortal coil.

J KennyApril 29, 2025writing coach, writing a book, writing advice, writing process, how to write a book

What Can You Cut?

The key to creating a captivating story in a memoir or piece of non-fiction is balancing the passages and sequences to build meaning and emotion in your story.

J KennyMarch 3, 2025writing a book, editing, writing process

Images in Motion

We’ve seen the old zoetropes that put pictures in motion. Perhaps we’ve even made flipbooks when we were at school. The picture changes a little and the motion unfolds. Even as we watch the leaf fall, the dancer move, the horse gallop… we know that it is just small individual images moving fast to make it look like movement.

J KennyOctober 17, 2024writing a book, cinema, film

More Courage

Trusting the writing the process and following it where it goes takes strength and dedication. Finishing the song, putting it down to the record, then turning to the next tune is a cycle that meant they learnt so much in their process, and were open to new ideas to weave into the songs the next time around.

J KennySeptember 3, 2024creative process, creative collaboration, writing a book, writing process

The Value of Finishing

Beyond the obvious point of having a finished work in your hands, there is so much value in seeing through a project to the completion. Similar to how trees need the resistance of the wind to develop their strength, completing a project gives you the strength to grow. The strength to stand.

J KennyAugust 28, 2024creative process, writing a book, writing coach

Evoking the Muse and Watering Your Guitar

Frank Zappa had his guitarists to leave a little water out for their instrument if they weren’t going to play it for a few days. It was a way to honour the muse. To keep the communication open. To accept that there was something that was not so easily defined about the creative process.

J KennyAugust 21, 2024creative process, writing a book, Steven Pressfield, Bach, evoking the muse

Surrendering to the Environment

Work is never created in a vacuum. And if we try to do that, then that’s a mistake. The audience will never engage with the work in a vacuum. The book, or novel, or song, or film… is relative to everything around us.

J KennyAugust 14, 2024creative process, writing a book, Jeff Buckley, Jerry Lewis, Martin Scorsese, Andy Warhol

Hire an Elf

John Swartzwelder is a reclusive writer best known for writing a huge amount of the strongest early Simpsons episodes. He also wrote for Saturday Night Live. Now he writes novels. His writing process involves getting the idea out quick. Finish the first draft as fast as possible. Then work deeper in the rewrite.

J KennyAugust 6, 2024creative process, writing a book, writing process, writing advice

Experimenting with Structure

When you give away what you think you should be hiding, the story becomes something else. Sometimes the structure falls apart. You need to have things happen in a particular order. But sometimes changing it takes away the scaffolding that was just there to build the important structure. It’s worth experimenting.

J KennyJuly 30, 2024story structure, creative process, screenplay structure, writing a book