Ask the Author: Bonnie St. John
Answered Questions (6)
Bonnie St. John
Let's be honest, writing is hard. You can be inspired by an idea, but getting all the way to the end of a manuscript takes monumental perseverance. I believe a critical success factor is accepting help. For Micro-Resilience, I not only teamed up with my husband Allen, we had people in our office at Blue Circle Leadership helping to organize the "real people" in the book who tested the program and shared their results. That was a lot of work, scheduling the meetings, following up, transcribing interviews, and much more. My editor at Hachette is like an Olympic coach always pushing us to do better. We also got the advice of an instructional designer who ended up helping us systematize the language and frameworks. I tapped a neuroscientist to help critique our science writing. We even hired another writer at the end to smooth out some of the language and do extra editing. I had several respected friends read it through and give valuable comments...read the acknowledgements to fully credit the large cast of people involved in creating something like this! On my first book I refused to have a ghost writer and felt I had to do it all myself. Now my ego is less in the way and I have learned that relying on others makes a much more impactful book.
Bonnie St. John
I work with a lot of corporate clients and they wanted me to teach them how to have more resilience. It is a topic that is very personal to me since I have overcome disability, abuse as a child, divorce, and many other challenges. I studied it for myself, but decided to take it to a new level and really find the best ways to teach others to have resilience. My life shows that you can not only overcome the negative but really thrive and do things like olympic ski racing, too!
Bonnie St. John
Right now we are working flat out on the book tour for Micro-Resilience. I am not sure what the next book will be. If you write a book and want to see it succeed, you need to be willing to commit time and energy to promoting the book, speaking about it, and doing media interviews. I am stunned when people think they can write a book, publish it and keep doing their day job like nothing changed. That's like thinking you can have a child and nothing will change. You have to nurture the book you send into the world.
Bonnie St. John
Figure out what you want to learn and who you want to meet. Write about that. Things change so fast now, you don't have to do something for 10 years to be the expert. If you interview the 10 best people at something, you then have a unique, up-to-the-minute expertise.
Bonnie St. John
I call it a "license to hunt." Writing "How Great Women Lead" with my daughter gave us the right to seek out our heroes and things we were interested in. We met with Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, President of Liberia, an orchestra conductor, and a fighter pilot. Darcy was interested in "Seeds of Peace" so we visited the camp for a few days. We went to Facebook headquarters and wrote on THE wall there.
Writing a book gives you a reason to go places, meet people, and ask the questions you have always wanted to ask. Many people think writing a book is about showing how smart you are...I think it is a chance to learn the things you always wanted to learn.
Writing a book gives you a reason to go places, meet people, and ask the questions you have always wanted to ask. Many people think writing a book is about showing how smart you are...I think it is a chance to learn the things you always wanted to learn.
Bonnie St. John
There are many different approaches:
1) Take a break - do something different and come back
2) Interview someone on the subject--it will give you a fresh perspective. For "Live Your Joy" we held a weekly teleclass for six weeks to test our ideas and find out what people wanted to know about joy. For Micro-Resilience, we had 30 people do the program and then followed them.
3) Basically, listening to others is a good way to break writer's block
1) Take a break - do something different and come back
2) Interview someone on the subject--it will give you a fresh perspective. For "Live Your Joy" we held a weekly teleclass for six weeks to test our ideas and find out what people wanted to know about joy. For Micro-Resilience, we had 30 people do the program and then followed them.
3) Basically, listening to others is a good way to break writer's block
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