Russell Nohelty, as the Complete Creative, the Fiction Writer on a mission to help you build your Creative Career. He is the AntiFool.

In this episode, we’re going to talk about building worlds in fiction writing.

If you are an aspiring writer, you’ve had a lot of thoughts about all the worlds you want to build, the characters you want to write about and more. But starting can be overwhelming. Writing a novel can be intimidating. Where do we start?

Who best to hear about having a successful creative career than Russel Nohelty?

Russell is a USA today, bestselling author, publisher, and consultant. He runs the small press publisher, Wannabe Press as well as the Complete Creative, which helps creatives build better businesses.

As a prolific writer, he’s run successful Kickstarter campaigns for a lot of books like Katrina hates the Dead, My Father didn’t Kill Himself, Cthulu is hard to Spell, the Godsverse Chronicles, and many more raising over six figures until now.

In this episode, we talked about:

  • Russell’s origin story, from failed entrepreneur to known comic book writer
  • The struggles of becoming a prolific writer, building an audience from scratch while jumping from medium to medium
  • Writing tips for first time writers, and whether or not you sohuld write in your favorite genre
  • Phase two: Transitioning from writer to having a business mindset, and creating a sustainable career

Enjoy!

For the full transcript, click here

Timestamps

  • 4:25 Writing 20 novels in 20 months, and the business reason why
  • 5:50 Larger boxset launches vs. multiple smaller launches
  • 8:21 “I had 4 companies that blew up in my face” Russell’s origin story
  • 10:43 How writing comics led Russell Nohelty to novels
  • 13:17 Producing multiple projects, and the purpose of his anthologies
  • 15:53 In movies, “You spend 80% of your time hiring and your job’s pretty much done as a director”
  • 19:10 “Every person who reads them creates the world in their brain” The relationship between novels and readers
  • 21:08 Co-creating creative projects and stepping back to let them thrive
  • 22:15 I want to write a book. What should I know first? What should I do?
  • 24:33 Don’t write in your favorite genre when learning to write
  • 27:12 The work isn’t in the writing
  • 30:03 What is a Russell Nohelty book?
  • 33:26 Russell Nohelty’s policy in his twenties
  • 34:58 Comparing aspiring writers to successful ones, Amanda Hawking
  • 37:50 The secret behind successful writers is they’ve done a lot of prior writing
  • 42:05 JK Rowling’s secret to writing success: Her circles
  • 44:22 The hard work of transferring readers to a new medium
  • 46:53 The secret to trans-media: worlds have to be successful first
  • 49:55 The mediums Russell Nohelty is focusing on now
  • 55:08 Russell Nohelty’s Memento
  • 57:49 Russell Nohelty’s Walkaway Wisdom
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”Ira Glass