Write a Book?! | Stories With Traction Podcast

SHOW NOTES:

SERIES: This podcast episode is part of a book-writing series with Amy Lynch on the Stories With Traction Podcast.

SUMMARY: In this episode, Amy Lynch and Matt Zaun discuss systems and creativity in book writing.

AMY LYNCH BIO: Amy is the founder and a writer at Fernling Creative, a premium writing agency that generates exceptional content in your voice because words sell everything.

For more info, check out Amy HERE.

MATT ZAUN BIO: Matt is an award-winning speaker and storyteller who empowers organizations to attract more clients through the art of strategic storytelling. Matt’s past engagements have catalyzed radical sales increases for over 300 organizations that range from financial institutions to the health and wellness industry.

Matt shares his expertise in persuasion with executives, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs, who he coaches on the art of influence and how to leverage this for profits and impact.

For more info, check out Matt Zaun HERE. 

 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors

 

Matt Zaun

Have you ever thought about writing a book or blog posts or how to think more creatively?

If so, this podcast episode is for you. Today I'm joined by Amy Lynch, the founder and a writer at Fermland Creative, premium writing agency that generates exceptional content in your voice because words sell everything.

Welcome to the show, Amy.

 

Amy Lynch

Thanks, Matt.

 

Matt Zaun 

so glad to be here. I'm excited. There's a long time coming. I've been anticipating this episode. I've learned so much from you over the last couple of years.

And I want to dive right in because you've written a lot of books. And I want to dive in by asking, why do so many people desire to have a book in the world?

What is it about us culturally speaking that someone would want to have a book out into the marketplace?

 

Amy Lynch

Yeah, let's do it, Matt. So there's a lot of reasons that people want books. Now I work with a certain kind of person that wants books.

So I don't work with anybody who wants a book. I work with high level professionals that are really capturing their life work in a book.

Now oftentimes the people that I work with don't necessarily capture their expertise in their industries in their book. They're capturing their experience and what they've gained as professionals and experts in their industries.

So a lot of it is applicable to life, applicable to the workplace. It's a lot about their legacy and leaving meaning and impact on their industries, on the business marketplace, and on interested individuals based on 20, 30, 40 years of experience in their field.

 

Matt Zaun 

So one of the things that fascinates me about at least the book realm is the individuals that you're talking about are very high achievers.

They're go, go, They've achieved a lot in their life. And what's amazing to me is a lot of different industries.

When you're successful in one, you can be successful in another. So someone is really, really successful in sports that can carry on into the business world and so on.

But what's interesting to me is a lot of these high achievers, they start writing a book and then they can't actually complete the book.

fact, they don't get very far at all. So why would a highly successful individual struggles so much as it pertains to writing a book.

 

Amy Lynch

Right. This is one of the very first conversations I have with clients. And you know, time when I really sat down to capture who is my client, because my client is a certain kind of person, there's like seven qualities of clients that really my group has in common.

And one of them, this is kind of, you know, this is kind of a laugh out loud one, almost all my clients have half of one chapter of a book written that they bring to me with, you know, a sheepish look on their face.

I tried. I really wanted to write a book. I thought it would be easy. I have 40 years of experience.

So I sat down to write it. And here's half of a chapter. And this, this is as far as I have half of one chapter written.

And honestly, Matt, it's super logical why this is the case because these are these are individuals that are true experts in their field and in their industry which could be I'll just look at my job board it could be medical policy it could be international youth ministry it could be that they're experts in finance and and like running hospital systems but why should that person also be an expert in creative writing or non-fiction professional writing it's it's just not logical that a person like I nobody wants to hire me to run their accounting books I'm just not an expert in that field I'm an expert writer so it's not logical that I would also be an expert in internal medicine or in running hospital systems so I just think it's just basic

common sense that these people are true and authentic experts in their field, but shouldn't also be experts at writing a book, which is one of the most difficult tasks in the literary and the writing world.

Writing a full-length book takes months of strategic effort. It's just not something that a person's going to pick up and do naturally.

It takes a lot of intention and just it's a systematic effort that nobody should be expected to know how to do because they're an expert in their own field.

 

Matt Zaun 

So if you could think back to these half chapters, you mentioned that there was a reoccurring theme. lot of them had half of one chapter.

What was within that half of one chapter? Was it them going back to the start of their life and trying from the moments that they took their first steps and then they write and they get to when they're ten years old and then they start.

stop or was it more than focused on where they are in their career and then they try to work back?

there a reoccurring theme as it pertained to that half of one chapter?

 

Amy Lynch

Yeah, I would say that yes, there is a reoccurring theme and even though it's different person to person, it is usually them going back to the beginning.

It could be literally the beginning of their life because that's just a knee-jerk reaction for all of us. We're going to tell a story, we start at the beginning.

That's such a reasonable thing to do. Some people will literally go to, I was born in this place to these people.

Some people will jump into the day they got started in their industry. So they might go to the beginning of their business career or their professional career.

As a freshman in college and I heard this person say this and so I decided I'm going to become a medical internist.

so you know, they'll pick a beginning point and then then get lost like, well, wait a second, this I'm looking now at 30 years that I'm trying to express and I don't know how to, I don't know if I'm starting at the right place or if I, what kind of buckets to put things into and so it just, the task is overwhelming and then they hit a pause and it's just, they're not sure what the next step is so they never come back to it and honestly, I think that's really understandable.

 

Matt Zaun 

Yeah, so I appreciate you mentioning going back to the beginning. So this was a struggle of me of mine for years.

a lot of people listening, know, that was a political speech right or for some time and the first few years were agonizing because I was trying to write how I was taught, how my professors taught me, which was stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Beginning, middle and end and a lot of people have heard that. listening to this. The problem is I was writing it like an email from start to finish, which really caused me so much stress, so much frustration.

I remember so many days I wanted to rip my hair out because I was trying to write from the beginning to the end.

And it wasn't until I focused on a foundation, a foundation of my stories that it really took off. So lot of people listening, you will recognize when I say emotion is foundation, and I'll talk about that quite often on the podcast.

So emotion is foundation, we zone in, we focus in on a specific emotion. And then from there we build building blocks of the story, and it's a lot quicker to do it that way.

So almost back to your point, you mentioned a systematic approach. So clearly there's not a systematic approach when someone is writing half of this chapter, because if they had a system they would continue to write, but because there's no foundation, there's there's no friends,

framework, if you will, it falls apart. So can we talk a little bit about frameworks and go back to your the comment you made regarding systematic approach?

Is there a specific system right out of the gate that you'd recommend an individual start with when it comes to writing a book?

 

Amy Lynch

Yeah, there is. I, because this is the common problem, how do we swallow an elephant? and the answer, of course, is you can eat an elephant if you eat it one forkful at a time, but you have to have a system.

Anyone, most high-level professionals are also project managers of some type or other, know, running a business has a lot to do with project management, and writing a book is, in essence, a massive project that needs to be managed in a systematic way.

So I did. I developed a program in Ferling Creative that I call the Book Incubator and it's just six steps that a client and I sit down and we work through six steps and at the end of those six steps without fail we always produce an awesome professional quality expertly written book because it's a project that needs to be managed and it needs to be managed in an orderly way a creative way but an orderly way so that it can be accomplished on a timetable in a time frame that that's doable so it has to be broken down into chunk size pieces like like any other project but it has to be done in the right chunks in the right order to produce a book that people want to read because the goal of every book is that people will read it and when a person's reading a book

they have to be led in a way that's interesting, that's engaging, that's impactful, that they're getting meaning out of.

We want them to turn from page one to page two and then page two to page three and then chapter one to chapter two, we want them to keep turning the page and there's a system that helps people enjoy the book they're reading while they gain the meaningful content and it has a lot to do with storytelling and it has a lot to do with emotion like you're describing but it is a system too so I call it our book incubator there's probably other ways to do it.

mean I'm in friendly creative we're primarily writing non-fiction books by high-level professionals in they have to do that are related to a topic but that necessarily don't cover say finance issues it's that person's experience in the in the finance industry.

 

Matt Zaun

So I appreciate bringing up the analogy of eating an elephant. think a lot of people have heard that. And as you know, one of the problems is that there's parts of an elephant you can't eat.

There's parts you want to stay away from. So when we're talking about the book incubator, is there a reoccurring theme about something someone should stay away from when they're in the early stages of writing a book?

there one thing that you would say you shouldn't even be thinking about this at all when you set out to write a book?

 

Amy Lynch

So what would that one thing be? Right. Well, I'm going to flip that question to answer it in a different way.

What you should do at the beginning of writing a book is create a core concept that every single thing in the book is tied to.

So if we think about like the a bike tire, the spokes on a bike tire, at the center, all the spokes on a bike tire, there might be 200 of them, they all can.

connect at the center in a little silver circle, that little silver circle is the center of a person's book.

So one of the first things we do, the third thing we do in our six step process is identify the core idea of that book.

So every single thing has to be one of the spokes on a bike tire that is tied tightly to that central idea.

So you're talking about things on an elephant that are not eaten, not included, like a tusk. So if it's not tied, if the story that the person is telling, if the idea that they have is not tied to that central idea of the book, then it's the tusk that we we just say we're going to separate this out.

I often save those ideas or stories in a separate bucket, but I say this is interesting, but it is not tied to this book.

the core idea of this book. So we're going to set it over here in a bucket on the side.

I call it a cutting floor. always keep for every book. I keep a folder called the cutting floor. I put it in the cutting floor, label it, keep it, but unless we can change that story to be tied to the central core idea like an elevator pitch, then it just can't be included because a reader will be confused.

A reader will be like, wait a second, what are we talking about? thought now we're talking about his grandmom and her cooking, but how does that tie in?

As soon as a reader feels that way, they don't know where we're going. They feel lost and like we're rabbit trailing or we're confused, then the readers put the book down.

So one of my main tasks is to keep everything in a book relevant and appropriate to the central idea of the book we're writing.

 

Matt Zaun 

So when you mention cutting floor, have you ever been an experience where you're you're doing all this way? with everyone.

They get the main concept of everything needs to tie it back to this one theme, almost like the bike tire.

yet they try to maybe take an experience or take something that they've learned that has nothing to do with the main concept and they try everything possible to somewhat make it work.

 

Amy Lynch

And have you ever had a situation where it's intensely painful for someone to allow that to fall on the cutting board?

And if so, how do you convince them otherwise? Well, what happens is, you know, the people that I work with, we become friends and they know that I have an extreme respect for them and their knowledge and their experience in their field.

But the same thing happens, they begin to realize as we work together that I'm pretty good at what I do too.

So when I say to somebody, I care about you, I care about the success of this book or I wouldn't be in on this project, I want it to be awesome.

I want it to be a book that's successful that really impacts people, that accomplishes your goals, whatever they are, and I know what they are, then I persuade them this item is detracting from the excellence of this project.

So we're going to set it aside. We're not going to delete it. We're going to set it aside. And sometimes, Matt, what happens is we realize that there's another book there.

If there's something that's really meaningful to that person, and I start to say, well, you have a lot of important thoughts on this side topic.

It does not relate to the book that we're writing, but it might be a second book, or it might be an appendix.

It might be another thing that needs to be published and created, but not part of this book. That happened to me recently.

recently, an author had really, really good content for teenagers. But the book we were writing was to leaders in his field.

But he was saying if young people could get this idea, and I was like, that's really interesting. It's not part of this book, but let's create a pamphlet.

Let's create a booklet, an e-book that we can share with those leaders that they can turn into a study guide to do with the teenagers that are in there.

So that person was speaking to leaders of youth. So it was a related book concept, but it wasn't part of the book.

He was training leaders in youth ministry. So we did create that second item as a booklet, as an add-on that could be offered to those leaders to use with the youth.

So that would be a perfect example of how something like that Is useful it's valuable but it cannot go into the book if it reduces the quality of the project we're in.

Is it common that when you start writing a book for someone there's other books that come from that one project is that a common occurrence oh yeah it happens and i'll remind you that the that the people i write books with.

Are experts in their field their c-suite individuals and d's and phd's that's my general client base so these are people with 20 30 40 plus experience years experience in their field so yes they have thoughts on central things but then they realize for example here's an example.

Meeting is being recorded. Baby Boomer, he's looking around at all of his peers struggling past their companies on, their children don't want it, or maybe they do, or maybe they're fighting over it.

They don't know if they should sell it or, you know, become a corporation. don't know what to do with the business that they've grown for 40 years.

Now, that's a separate topic, a succession book. So, yes, let's finish the book we're writing, and then write a separate book, a shorter book, on how to successfully and seamlessly pass your company on to another generation of owners, whether that's children or someone who will purchase it.

But that's its own topic, and it really, it detracted from the book we were writing, but it was a very valuable book, so that's book two.

That kind of thing happens very regularly.

 

Matt Zaun 

So, you mentioned individuals that are seasoned. And when I think C-suite, I think of not only successful individuals, but I also think of people that are fairly well organized.

A lot of them, they have really good organization instruction or calendars. Their offices are well organized. Their paperwork is well organized.

organizational chart is well organized. You go into their home and it might be well organized. So how does organization in one area differ from organization in a book?

Is there a reoccurring theme or structure in a book that you would say, hey, this is how you know it's a very well organized outline of that book?

 

Amy Lynch

Well, the answer is yes and no in this case. So one of the, you know, the very first thing that a client night will do is just have an open conversation.

Tell me your story. What are you thinking that you'd like to accomplish? A lot of times, a would-be author doesn't know.

what exactly they're trying to accomplish with a book. And again, I just would go back to my original comment on being an expert at running a system of hospitals is not being an expert in understanding leadership, understanding a target audience.

They do understand their target audience people who need healthcare, but that's a very different skill set than understanding what keeps a person reading what will what will be the way to tell a story to an exact target audience that will be really moving and meaningful to and helpful to that target audience.

It's a really different way of thinking and there's a lot of creativity involved and a lot of times that's the bridge.

That's the that's the missing link so to speak. that's the world I live in. I'm not, so a lot of these books are non-fiction, so they're not fiction or total creative writing, but every storytelling effort is a creative effort.

How do we creatively tell a person's story that makes a person keep on reading? Just facts or just information, it will not turn pages.

People need to have their heart touched, their experience, know, touched upon what's important to that target audience. It has to be touched upon, and that's where creativity comes in, and that's a skill set that I have as a book writer, listening to a story and saying, because you, for example, if I'm thinking of one person, because you hit rock bottom at 39, that's something that almost everybody can...

relate to not that everyone hits rock bottom, but everybody has low points. Everybody has felt stifled or hit roadblocks.

Everybody knows what that feels like. So that's where we're going to start with your story, because everybody will engage on that in every industry in every field.

You know, everybody will relate to you as a person who hit a heavy roadblock and was really discouraged, thought they didn't want to go on.

And we're going to start there at 39. That's just, there's just no way you could know that kind of stuff if you're an expert in financial consulting, you know, you understand financial consulting.

So that's where I can really help people is to add that layer of creativity and understanding of the readership that will help them tell their story in a way people really want to receive it.

 

Matt Zaun

So let's touch on the creativity piece. I want to use an example that you just shared with us. So someone who's 39 and discouraged, so how would you get into that person's head?

How do you capture someone's voice when they may be in a completely different season of life than you're in?

So take us through, you know, someone's 39, they are incredibly angry, frustrated regarding a certain experience. How do you almost play almost like an acting skill to get into someone's head, to get their voice out of the world as if it's coming from them?

 

Amy Lynch

Mm-hmm, right. So really a tool that we often use, that my clients and I will often turn to, is voice recording tools, because when a person is writing a story, and like we've mentioned, these are well-educated, well-accomplished people, so they can write fine, usually.

People inherently, because they're trained in high schools and colleges to write, like you mentioned, a certain way, a certain format, checking their grammar, sentence, all that, they get really hung up when they start to write something down.

They feel, and then just working with a writer, people feel self-conscious with me, which really bums me out, but it's just a fact of, it's an occupational hazard with me.

They feel self-conscious, like they want to really clean up their writing before it comes over to me. So to avoid that, a lot of what we do is audio recordings.

So I'll, you know, like, let's say the individual I'm thinking of, CEO of a very successful company, we're writing the book at age 63, he hit rock bottom at 39 and literally ended up going door-to-door knocking on doors, because his company was failing, just totally failing, you know, his life was falling apart, he was in deep debt, a lot of personal problems.

So what I'll do is I'll, let's call him, let's call him John. So I'll say John, not his real name.

I'll say John, I'm going to give you 10 questions about that time. Because we've talked about it just ad hoc.

I'll give 10 questions that lead into interesting storytelling. And I say we use like an app called Otter or there's lots of voice recording where it takes your voice and it writes it down, it dictates.

It's just voice dictation software. So I just say the question out loud, like, did you know you were in trouble?

And then they'll start telling the story, just out loud. And then the next question will be like, what was the worst thing that happened?

And then tell about a really bad experience you had with like knocking on a door. And so I just lead them through storytelling and they voice record it.

Then they become animated. They're remembering all the. nightmare experiences of that year, you know, my hair fell out. My kids wouldn't talk to me.

We were fighting at home, you know, on and on and on. I lost my house. And they start to tell all the details of the pain of that and the fear and the discouragement.

And so I get it in their voice, but it's messy and it's back and forth and they'll jump back.

Well, wait, I forgot to say this and they'll jump back to something that happened, you know, six months before that.

So we just tell the story. And I just say, just send it to me. Just send me that file.

And then one thing that I'm really good at is I call it sorting the soup. So I get the soup of that really difficult time period.

And then I'm able to sort the soup into a story that is the way people want to receive stories.

So there, any new script writer or TV writer, there's a pyramid, there's a way that stories are written that keep people so interested and they're able to follow it, they don't get lost, they see what's happening.

I'll sort it into, what the free tags pyramid is what it's called if if you're a nerd and want to look it up, I'm a nerd too.

So I sort a story into a framework such as free tags pyramid that make the story really captivating to the reader and that's how we, that's one of the ways that we use creativity to accomplish our goals.

We want the people to experience the different moments of a person's experience life and expertise and one of the ways is through just out loud storytelling that I take and then write it in a way that's, that's

It's expert writing and best practice writing so that it's really received by the readership.

 

Matt Zaun 

So you mentioned scriptwriter and this was fascinating to me. I learned this a few months ago that in the music or not the music, the movie world, there's something called environmental priming, where if you're on multiple different movie projects, so let's say you're writing a script for numerous projects or you're directing for numerous movie projects, where an individual will go into a room and that room is deemed this movie.

And then another room or another office would be exclusively focused on another movie. Do you do anything like that when it comes to your clients where there's different environments, maybe different sections of your house or different rooms or different corners, where you become that individual?

 

Amy Lynch

Do you do anything like that? I do, Matt, and this is about to get weird, so be warned. So, yeah, environmental timing for a TV producer maybe is a physical space.

For me, it's foreign languages. So if you're like a wine taster, a food taster, they use palate cleansers, certain kinds of items like parsley is a palate cleanser, removes all the previous food tastes before you try a new food and you're using like an environment, a room like a green space that will help people change from the horror movie they were making all morning to the rom-com that they're going to make in the afternoon.

And as a ghost writer, I absolutely live in that world. So I might spend the morning writing as if I'm John who we were just talking about.

But this afternoon, I need to write chapter four of Sarah's book, who Sarah is a medical professional and John is a finance consultant.

content. So I use foreign language because language is what I work in. Words are what I work in. English words are what I work all day in.

So as a palate cleanser, I immerse myself in a foreign language. It just clears out the morning. So if I was working on John's finance book on morning, I will watch half an episode of a Korean drama.

It really, I go out of English completely. I'm fairly competent in Korean and fully accomplished in Spanish. So I used to use Spanish for about 10 years.

Now I use Korean because I'm highly interested. So I'll watch 40 minutes of a Korean drama in Korean with Korean subtitles and just clear the whole English of John's financial consulting world out of

to my brain. And then I'm really have like a it's like a brain palate cleansing. I'm ready to jump into the world of, you know, medical policy, pardon me for the afternoon.

Weird, right?

 

Matt Zaun 

Well, I think it's, I think it's amazing actually. I'm trying to think of how I could use this philosophy in my own life regarding a palate cleanser, almost like a shift in mentality, almost like it, not necessarily that you're stressed, but it almost it wipes the stress away or wipes the the mindset away.

then you can start almost a new like a clean slate before you can dive into something else. It's almost like it's it's constantly positioning your mind for peak performance by utilizing that palate cleanser, which I'm just fascinated by.

need to think more about that. I've never heard it in quite those terms. I want to talk about almost like the mental health aspect of this, though, because I there's some

characters that I really respect. So one of them being Daniel Day Lewis. So a lot of people listening, I'm sure you've seen a Daniel Day Lewis movie and exceptional when it comes to acting.

But unfortunately, there were some mental health issues where situations where he got to into character and even his his wife has has made comments about how taking on characters that were not her husband, right?

I can only imagine how that how that can have ripple effects with a family and friends and life in general.

So would you say that the palette cleansing that you do is enough to get back to being Amy at the end of the day?

Or how do you how do you stick grounded with who you are as you're taking on so many different roles, almost like an incredible actor, if you will, playing the part of so many different people?

 

Amy Lynch

Yeah, I would say that being a ghostwriter is not as intense as being an actor. It just has to be a step, you know, previous to that, where, you know, they're doing just voices and facial expressions and bodily movements and in speech.

So I would say I'm in less danger of that A, and B, the kind of work that I do with C-suite professionals is it's professional, it's very personal, like these are oftentimes they're like business memoirs, like where personal experience is the main idea, but it's also professional.

They're often leaving a legacy behind for the next generation of people in that industry or I mean that they're also often focused on their children as well.

So I would say it's not as personal, so it's less danger of that happening. I really enjoy it. I, so I don't, I've never felt any kind of like I'm losing myself here.

have lots of funny moments, Matt, where, you know, as I work for six months with one of these people, we become friends and then I get invited to their retirement party or their anniversary party, whatever.

And then they'll come up and say, well, this is my, this is my daughter, Jenny, she didn't and then of course I know everything about Jenny.

I know everything about everything with them. So we always have this like awkward, funny moments where I finish the story for them, never met Jenny before, but I can tell you about Jenny and the influence she had on her mom and whatever.

And you know, this is so and so the president of the company and I know everything about it. That's like the weirdest thing about it.

People begin to tell me things, but I, I literally know it all very intimately. Because I wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it and

until it was really compelling. So just a lot of funny, slightly awkward interactions where I'm like in their head.

I literally live in their head. So when they start to tell me things, I already know and it gets weird in a happy way.

 

Matt Zaun 

For sure, for sure. So I'm glad you don't lose yourself, right? And speaking of you, speaking of Amy, I am interested to know, is there anything in your background or with your upbringing that you can point to that you would say, hey, here's something that positioned me to be more of a creative person or sparked something in you to want to be creative, to want to figure out strategies, concepts in your life?

Is there anything you could point back to and say, Hey, this, this happened. And it really got me thinking.

And then from that moment, I was just obsessed as it pertained to creativity.

 

Amy Lynch

Is there any moment? or anything that you could point back to? Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I would say, yes, it's, I'll just speak very broadly for a moment and say, I don't think anybody who is like, I'm labeled a creative, who anyone who is a creative knows that they were born a creative.

But I think I was probably just born a creative and I was born to creative parents. So I grew up with the answer to all problems and the answer to all wishes and desires was use creativity to make it happen.

Like that was just the air that I breathed as a kid. So just, you know, for example, quick examples, my mom is a flower lady extraordinaire and just wanted to live year round in a flower garden.

We live in Buffalo, can't do that. So, in the summer, she grew massive gardens, I say massive more than any normal person would ever think of doing, but she only grew drying flowers, dried them in the winter, hung them on the ceiling, so that living in our home was, there was a garden on the ceiling that smelled amazing and looked amazing, was like fairyland, and she had a shop outside that was a fairyland, and you just make it happen, you want to live in a garden, you make it happen, and my dad is an inventor, he's a mechanical genius literally, and so every problem has an answer, so he creates the solutions to problems and wishes, so you know, keeping with my mom's love of drying flowers, we had a creek on the property, but it was down

on the hill as creeks always are. So there's no electric power out to the creek. So dad created something.

He calls it Roger Ramjet. I don't know if that's like an official scientific name. It might be or it might be his own name, but he created a non-electrical pump that uses gravity even though it runs uphill, which nobody can understand.

None of us want to take the time to understand it, but he used physics and his mechanical genius to create a pump that is not powered by anything as far as I can tell that runs water uphill to water her gardens.

And that's just the way we lived. We solved problems by creating things, inventing things, making things happen. that's what I did.

I'm always like have some pet project. I'm making soap, I'm making wine, and making bread from scratch. love that kind of stuff.

But as far as like serious professional creativity. I started by reading intensely, and Matt, I became a Brit lit nutcase.

I loved the British classics 1870, no 17, 1780 to 1840, like that 50, 60-year period just became my passion.

I read everything for about 15 years under the sun, over and over, and then I couldn't find anymore. I'd gone to every mountaintop bookshop to find obscure volumes and whatever.

So I got to the end, I just want one more perfect, typical British classic from that period, and so the answer was to write one.

So that's how I got started, like really seriously writing, was emulating the British authors from the classical period that I really, really valued.

and loved. So, you know, I won't name them, they'll bore everybody with that. But, and then trying to write what I would call a neo-classic, a neo-British classic exactly as I wanted it.

And that's what my parents had always done. So that's what I did in a different vein, but very similar.

And so I wrote, my first novel was a neo-British classic that was my baby. And I loved that. And then I went on to, to write other genres, currently have a dystopian fiction, a redemptive dystopian fiction that I'm working on.

Those are my pet projects, know, passion projects during off hours, during the day. know, with my clients, I write nonfiction, a lot of, you know, business memoirs and legacy projects.

 

Matt Zaun 

All right, so this is fascinating to me. So, You clearly are, you have an obsession with British literature, so you're reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, and then when you go to actually writing yourself, it's almost like your subconscious mind kicks in based on your parents' innovation and creativity, but instead of building a physical innovation, you are innovating and being creative as it pertains to the writing.

 

Amy Lynch

That's fascinating to me.

 

Matt Zaun 

Absolutely fascinating. So I want to talk about that a little bit more. So tell us a little bit more about that, how you've used different creativity aspects as it pertains to your writing, but like in a different manner, because that's just, it's a very interesting background, growing up with parents that were so innovative, but then you, you transition this into the writing world.

 

Amy Lynch

Right. Yeah, I just ended up being a little bit more of an academic personality than my parents, but at book writing is kind of a mixture because it is more academic and a little bit more abstract than my dad works primarily in wood and metal and physics mechanics.

My mom works in florals, I work in words, words are what I love, and I would say maybe I would look back in ninth grade when like every other complete English speaker with no background on any other language stumbled into their freshman foreign language course, Spanish course.

And I sat there Matt on the first day and I said, are you kidding me? This is a thing.

I can speak in a completely different language and somebody can understand me. It was like magic, but like there was like fireworks.

The lady was like super old, I can see her now, black hair and big glasses, maybe 70 years old, but it was pure magic to me.

I thought, This is too good to be true. This can't be real. I can do this. I can master this.

so just, you know, I had no background. Nobody spoke any other language that I knew, but I just went on a quest to learn foreign language.

Just words are so interesting, Matt. And so I did learn to speak Spanish really well. I went to the University of Madrid for undergrad, which was very, very difficult because at the time when I went, I'm dating myself, aging myself.

I didn't have a cell phone or a laptop. I did, I had a paper dictionary, and I was attending a university fully in Spanish with textbooks in Spanish.

So it was sink or swim. It was like learn to speak academic Spanish or fail and go home. Those were the choices.

So I spent 10 hours a day reading one chapter of a textbook and was sinking, sinking mostly. and then, you know, four months later, the lights went on, and I was able to speak Spanish at a professional level, and it was just a dream for me.

And what is so enriching is that ideas and concepts when you can speak a foreign language, they're just expressed differently, different people groups, different word formations, sentence structures, will express a concept a little bit differently.

So just an example that's very attainable with Spanish because so many people have learned it is just the word to dream.

In English, you might say to your husband and your wife, hey, night I had a dream about grandma. So we had a dream about grandma.

But in Spanish, that same person would say I dreamt with grandma last night. And it's just things like that that are so meaningful, are so enriching, that are so interesting.

And so I love that, and foreign language has just been a really important part of my life personally. And now I'm really captivated by the Korean language and what got me started is that is Korean storytelling.

So there's a lot of really great art and literature coming out of South Korea and has been through, most people think of K-pop, the music, which I don't dabble in because I feel like I'll lose my soul in K-pop.

So I don't go there. I stay in Korean literature, which is interestingly based on web tunes, a format called web tunes, super, super interesting.

You would think that it's very graphic, graphic novel kind of stuff. You would think that it's very shallow and light, but it's very deep, very meaningful.

very enchanting, and then those graphic web tunes are translated into Korean drama, which is a world. And it's a wonderful world.

And the storytellers and their storytellers, they're not movie makers, they're not TV producers, of them. So just a group that I follow intensely is Studio Dragon in South Korea, who positions themselves as premium storytellers, that's what they care about, that's what they do so well.

So I got really captivated by Korean language and storytelling, which then, you know, I said I was a nerd in my nerdly way.

I got a textbook and started on page one and said I can learn Korean, which is actually anybody can because it's alphabet like English.

So I just got really interested in that and began learning to read and write Korean, and I'm actually heading to Seoul next month to just wander around.

and look around and speak Korean and see if anybody can understand me.

 

Matt Zaun 

So you're obsessed with language, multiple languages.

 

Amy Lynch

You're fluent in three languages.

 

Matt Zaun 

You read like crazy. You love writing. You love getting into people's heads so you can tell their story. So why launch Fernland Creative?

What was the intention behind it? What are some things that you're excited about?

 

Amy Lynch

You're proud about Fernland Creative. So I was in education, Matt, for a while. And while I was teaching, I taught advanced placement Spanish and my employer paid for me to go back to Villanova and do a master's degree in communications.

And so I'm interested in communicating with words. So I avoided a lot of the video and the advertising world that is also communications and I really focused on

and communications writing, and had some great mentors at Villanova who just looked, I did all the independent studies because I wanted personal attention.

So I got experts to just look over my shoulder and say, I'm just going to write product descriptions. Look at it, tell me how effective, teach me the right ways to do it, so I got really interested in communicating in business, the business world, communication that's not fiction and creativity, and storytelling in the fiction realm, and I just got really interested in business writing.

I'm using that term very loosely and broadly, so that's also like PR work and stuff like that. So at the end of that master's degree, I said, let me just see, let me see if I'm any good at this.

knew I was a good writer, what I didn't know is if I could make a little living in business writing.

So I went to my friends who own businesses and I said, hey, I will write for your business for this semester, my last semester for free.

Only thing I asked for was if you publish it, like on your website or send it to your clients, that you also let me use it in my portfolio.

And everyone's like, fair deal. So everyone took me up on it. And I began writing product descriptions, landing pages about us stories, inner client interviews, like client success stories, company newsletters, and e-books, like marketing e-books.

I just started all that stuff, business, communications writing. And it went really well and I created a really, no one ever looks at my portfolio, but I did create a really great one that way.

But nobody ever cares. It was word of mouth. That's all anybody cares about. But so I created a portfolio and at the end of that, I realized it's long form writing that I really like.

So I wanted to do longer form blogging and book writing, short books and ebooks. So I went at the end of that first period, I went up to a CEO friend of mine and I said, John, I'm ready to side hustle as a writer.

Do you have any projects for me? Anything you want me to do? And he looked me back at the face and I remember it.

And he said, Amy, I want to say yes, but I don't know what I would have you do. I said, okay.

Well, think it over. So 24 hours later, he called me with a list of six things. He said, once I walked away from me, I said, how would I use a writer?

He said, I just started to have all these, all these things I would love to get done. then I don't have time to do.

I said, maybe you could do it for me. So I said, let's try. So I set my prices sort of low.

They're not low, but I did, you know, reasonable. And I started in on one client and honestly Matt, it was good luck because this client began to not be able to live without me.

It just became where I made his life so much easier and everything on his bucket list that he wanted to start a blog and he wanted to write a book and he wanted to write a book with a psychologist professional that he works with, like a two-person book.

That was honestly, my first post writing was for two people in one book. It was alternating chapters, one person A, person B, A, B.

So I started in the deep end of the pool, but it went so well that this client is a consultant for other business owners.

That's his job. So he... he began to offer my company, me, as a service to solve the problems of his clients.

So it was just, I'll say straight up, good luck, good fortune, that I just kind of sat here at my desk and people began to call me.

And so the business grew and grew. And so it's, I love, I love the business. My clients are just wonderful people to work with.

I like it so much. But I've never done any advertising or marketing. It just went word of mouth. And the thing that I found to be the most effective was trying to do amazing premium work every single time so that that same person comes back again.

And then when other people say, how did you get this book written? I know you're like jet setting all over the world.

And I say, well, she made this happen. I mean, I wrote the book as his content, but another person solved.

the problem of getting the book written and it's just really attractive to the kind of client I work with and so that's how the business started and grew and and I love it.

 

Matt Zaun 

Thank you for sharing that. I feel like you and I could talk for hours so I appreciate and there's a lot more hours that we can pull from different concepts that you had mentioned.

I'm so excited that you're willing to do a series so I'm looking forward to diving into systems and more of your creativity and other episodes but thank you for your time today.

really appreciate it. There are three specific things that I got out of our conversation today that I'm going to take away with me.

The first thing that you mentioned was you create a core concept that everything in the book is tied to almost like a bike tire.

I really like that and I think more people should do that especially leaders. think a lot of our concepts and maybe themes can get lost if it's not built

around a common theme, a common purpose, so I think it's really important for everyone to think about not just from a book perspective, but everything we put out into the world, whether it be content or blogs, it's really important to zone in and to focus on one core concept that everything is built around.

really like that. The second that I really appreciate you mentioning is the voice recording tools, and I appreciate you mentioning that a lot of people get hung up when it comes to writing.

They're focused on the editing as they're writing. I think that voice recording tool mindset is very freeing, almost liberating, if you will, that you can just speak into an application and it can transcribe the conversation, and then you could go back and you can edit it for sure, so I appreciate that.

And then the third and final piece that I really liked was the Palette Cleansing concept on positioning your mind that once you do a bunch of work for someone to go and have that Palette Cleans to transition your

mind to the next project. really like that third point. So thank you for that, Amy. I appreciate it. If anyone listening wants to get more information on you, what you do, they want to reach out to you for you to write a book for them.

Where's the best place that they can go to get that information?

 

Amy Lynch

All right, just hop right on my website, fernlingcreative.com, all one word, and you can take a look at LinkedIn are the typical things I do.

And at the end of that is just a, you know, a contact me opportunity.

 

Matt Zaun 

Just send me an email and we'll set up a time to chat and go from there. Awesome. Thank you.

I'll include all that in the show notes. People could just click and go from there. Thanks again for your time.

 

Amy Lynch

You're welcome.