The 7 writing styles

See if you can find yourself and your writing style in my article below where I detail The 7 Kinds of Writers. You may have a laugh. Are you an 'over-writer' an 'over thinker' or a 'lots-of-folders writers'? Hmmm let's see.

But first, my very own new book has just been released this week and I am going to ask for your support to buy it.  As you are going to find out on your own author journey, book sales really matter for a book and the author. In fact your first three months of sales determine if your book is stocked in a shop again.

The Other Side: Journeys into Mysticism, Magic and Near Death is about my own month-long near-death experience, and a collection of strange and mystical moments and people who have crossed to the ‘other side’ or those who can contact it. It’s a crazy story and I have crazy friends and authors who are in this book. It’s a bit of a wild ride and I would love you to order a copy.

IN SOUTH AFRICA? It’s in all bookshops but Takealot has a 31% discount for 250 buyers (rush rush). Use this link + Coupon code: TAL15

NOT IN SOUTH AFRICA? Please buy on Amazon here.

But here's the question we all ask. What if my book sucks?

It doesn’t matter how many books you have written; this is a nail-biting time for any author. This is my 5th book under my name, and my 16th overall (the 11 others are ones I have ghostwritten for other people). I should be supremely confident, and I am confident on a level. I know this is a solid book. But putting yourself ‘out there’ is so very exposing. 

What if everyone hates it? 

What is you are seen as a fraud? 

What if it fails and nobody even notices it?

These are the very real questions every author faces. Trust me I represent many top authors and they still feel this. It happens….and even to the best of us.

Take a look below at a Goodreads review for superstar Bloomsbury author Sarah J Maas. 

"Her writing is bad. It is structurally bad, the characters are written thinly and poorly it's littered with terrible clichés."

Or here’s another

"Verdict: Poor pacing, choppy phrasing, lack of sentence variety, an excess of run-ons. All crutches of an incompetent writer, and it was suffocating to read."

But guess what? Her books have sold over 38 million copies in English alone. I think she is okay with a few bad reviews eh?

And EL James of the 50 Shades of Gray fame? That book was panned critically (I think we can possibly all agree on that) but went on to become a bestseller a million times over. 

Even great authors get destroyed. How about this Amazon review of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy?

"It took me a couple hundred pages of squinting hard to see the truth: there is no story."

Actually writing at all is exposing. It is far easier NOT to write. It is far easier to be one of those FB or Insta ‘cruisers’ who just watch everyone else create content. 

So anyone who writes, and shares it, is brave, big and wants to make a difference in the world. 

So if you want to be an author buckle up, strap on your protective armour and finish it. 

I can only write under pressure.

I am asked so often about my own writing techniques, being a professional ghostwriter and author. The truth is I wrote my last book The Other Side in three months. And deliberately so. I was a journalist for the better part of 15 years and during that training you learn to write under pressure. I got to like that. 

In a weekly newspaper like the Mail & Guardian you file a story once a week. Then I moved into radio. Well that was a buzz. I was the radio news editor for Business Day radio and we had a news bulletin every hour and headlines every 20 mins. How’s that for a deadline? Eventually the pace of radio and news was too much and I moved into the slower cycle of magazines. Aaaah the relief of a monthly deadline. And then books. Books are such a change. They are long and slow things. Most often they take over a year to write and another year to get to market.

So take your book slowly as you write it. Or don't and do it fast like me! 

THE 7 TYPES OF WRITERS

GOOD UNDER PRESSURE WRITERS

You wait until three months before the deadline before you start. This is very common amount journalists and professional authors. Often all the interviews are done and transcribed, and the book is brewing in your head. You just need a lot of pressure to perform well. These authors get the job done. 

FEAST and FAMINE WRITERS

You pick up your piece of writing and you can’t put it down. For three months you are obsessed, you write every day, you are on fire.  Then you put it down for the next year. You pick it up again when you are ready and the process starts again. This is a great style, just don’t leave it for too long. I think 3 months is a good gap. 

DAILY GRIND WRITERS

Thanks Julia Cameron for suggesting that morning pages are a good thing. Many of my authors write this way, some with a word count. My one novelist simply writes 500 good words a day. In 160 days she has a full novel with a word count of 80,000. Not bad going if that is your style. 

LOTS OF FOLDERS WRITERS

These are authors who come to me with a million little folders of writing .Chapters, notes, files, folders. They have  gathered them over years. Problem is these don’t have a flow and they are all over the place. This is an ok start, but the first step is to get them all into one document. A lot of writing is actually document management – and we need a single document and not a load of them. 

THE ‘OVER WRITERS’

This happens all the time. A writer comes to me with their book and its 400,000 words long. Yikes. It has taken YEARS to write. This is also a better place to be than the last category, and the process will now start to cut this book down to 80,000 words. Problem is they often don’t want that. They start again and do another 250,000 words from scratch. I often see that this kind of writer loves the process of writing. It helps them understand their world and make sense of their message They don’t necessarily want to publish. 

THE OVERTHINKERS

These writers agonise over every word. Each sentence is carefully crafted. Each paragraph packed with information. This is useful, but it can hold you back. Most often these authors have too much information they want to share and are not sure how to pack it all in.  Readers tend to read a book fast, they like simple sentence structures and value personality over information (in a non-fiction).

NON-WRITERS

These are the writers who ‘think’ about writing, but don’t actually write very much. This is a bit like watching a marathon from your couch – you are not actually in the race. They dream their book, journal about it, talk about it. They plan it, and most over overthink it. Draw the cover. Flow diagram the information. But actual words on the page? Not really. These writers often like a lot of calls during a mentorship. We can chat forever, I tell them, but that is not going to get your words on the page. 

About The Other Side:  Journeys into mysticism, magic and near death

by Sarah Bullen

"This is Supernatural Africa. We have seers, mystics and magicians, many in touch with ancient knowledge systems and the mysteries of death and beyond." Taz Singh Metro FM

What happens when we die? How are some people able to see or communicate with spiritual worlds beyond our own? Can they offer answers to some of our most burning questions about life and death?

International author Sarah Bullen explores these mysteries in her new book as she gathers riveting stories of people from South Africa who have crossed to the ‘other side’ or those who can contact it. It is a journey she has made herself. From the author of Love and Above: A journey into shamanism, coma and joy, this book follows on from Sarah’s own life-altering near-death experience in which she was in a coma for a month and travelled into other realms and worlds.

This new book takes forward her quest for answers as she finds other who have travelled this path. It is in Africa where she finds a fascinating collection of individuals who have gone through near-death experiences, out of body experiences or had epiphanies. She has also spoken to teachers with special abilities, and those who can communicate across worlds using mediumship, gifts, trance and plants with the question – what is on the other side?

Meet and learn from a man who was shot seven times and woke up on a stretcher on the way to the morgue, a spiritual teacher who survived death experiences on an operating table, a psychic rabbi who can speak to the beyond, a radio host who communicates with the departed. You will also learn from a former corporate executive-turned-sangoma who runs a traditional clinic and has travelled into other realms himself. You will meet shamans and neo-shamans from across the continent including a Bwiti shaman who takes souls through a journey of death and rebirth. All from extraordinary people who came back from the other side with visions and messages to share.