Write First, Edit Later: The Professional Writing Session | The Exceptional Scribble Show, Episode 205

This is the complete conversation from Richard Lowe’s return for episode 205 of The Exceptional Scribble Show with host Sage the Poet, joined by caller Gene Posniak, lightly edited for readability. Music breaks and the host’s segments after Richard’s departure are omitted; Richard’s full session appears as broadcast on March 6, 2018. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

The introduction

Sage the Poet: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to episode 205 of The Exceptional Scribble Show. It is March the 6th, 2018, and March truly is coming in like a lion; we are bracing for a nor’easter tonight. Our feature artist in the spotlight is published author and ghostwriter Richard G. Lowe Jr., and for tonight’s show our topic is professional writing: what does it entail? The focus is The Writing King’s professional writing services. For those who weren’t tuned in last Tuesday: Richard G. Lowe Jr.’s dream has always been to be a professional author. Richard is the business owner and senior writer for The Writing King, a bestselling author and ghostwriter. He has written and published 63 books, ghostwritten 16 books [113+ authored and 54+ ghostwritten as of 2026], as well as hundreds of blog articles. So ladies and gentlemen, rolling out the red carpet, the one and only Writing King himself, Richard G. Lowe Jr. Welcome, Richard.

Richard Lowe: I am here.

Sage the Poet: We’ve weathered one storm and we’re due another through the night, so everyone stay safe, charge your phones, check your batteries and flashlights. But at this time, we’re going to discuss professional writing and what it entails. Richard, fill us all in, because a lot of writers out there are listening, and some of them are writing as a hobby: short stories, pieces in magazines and journals. They’ve never ventured into professional writing as a career. The mic is yours.

Rule one: know how to write

Richard Lowe: Let’s start from the beginning then. The first thing being a professional writer requires is that you know how to write, which sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many don’t. Knowing how to write entails knowing grammar, knowing spelling, knowing style. You should be very familiar with one of the style manuals; I use the Chicago Manual of Style, and there are others. Before you do anything, you should know how to write. And I don’t necessarily mean writing classes. I’m not convinced writing classes in college are of extreme value; they teach you some things, but usually they teach you to write in a formula, and formulas don’t sell that well. The best way to know how to write, besides reviewing a style manual, is to write. Writers need to write.

When I hear writers tell me, “I worked all day and managed to get in a couple hours of writing and wrote a hundred words,” it’s like: you’re not going to be a professional writer at a hundred words a day. If you want to be a professional writer, you’d better get that word count up into multiples of thousands. If a writer has an eight-hour block of time, four hours in the morning and four in the evening, he should be able to write five or six thousand words. Ten thousand is good. I can actually do 20,000 words in a single day, because I use voice dictation that goes directly into Word, and I can talk a lot faster than I can type. I don’t usually do that much, because it’s stressful and straining. My typical rate is 6,000 words a day.

Why should you separate writing and editing?

Richard Lowe: Here’s how you get the word count up. Most people who write, not just writers, write and edit at the same time. You write a couple of lines, then you go back and look at them, and you change them, and you look again, and you change them again, until they’re quote, perfect, quote. Then you write another paragraph. What happens with that is you roll yourself into a ball and you get writer’s block.

Don’t do that. Just vomit it on the page, so to speak. Write, write, write, write, write. Then, and I usually do it when I finish a chapter, go back and edit. I might spend an hour or two writing a chapter, then an hour editing it. Then the next chapter, then edit it, maybe edit both together, then the third and fourth, then go back and edit one through four. And when you’re done with the whole book, you edit the whole thing. If you separate editing and writing, you speed yourself up and you let your ideas flow. You’re not constantly interrupting yourself asking, is that perfect, is that perfect, second-guessing yourself. To heck with that. Just write. Let the creative juices move through you, through your hands, or in my case through my voice, to the paper.

Breaks, backs, and the fixed stare

Richard Lowe: Also: take breaks. Writing while sitting is very hard on the back and the body. The blood pools in the feet. So every 45 minutes I stop, get up, and spend 15 minutes doing something else: make a snack, take a walk around the block, stare at the ceiling. Two phenomena happen when you’re writing. One is the physical toll. The other is that you’re staring at a screen at a fixed distance, and that leads to writer’s block. If you write for hours staring at the same spot on the screen, your mind jams up. If you’re also editing while writing, you’re going to jam yourself into a corner and lose interest in writing entirely. Breaking those two habits alone will improve your speed.

Treat writing like a profession

Richard Lowe: The third thing: set aside time. Treat it as a profession. Every morning I get up, do my morning routine, and I’ve got a customer at nine; we’re writing a book together, collaborating, and he’s paying me for it. We spend an hour writing, then I take a break and write an hour on my own book. It’s almost religious: 11 o’clock is when I start my book, 11 to 12, then another customer for an hour, then another customer, then my book. I schedule the day, actually the night before, and I don’t let anything get in the way. Obviously, if the house is burning down, you let that get in the way. But you let the family and the kids and the dog know: at this time of day, I’m writing. Don’t get near me, because my claws will come out.

What a lot of writers do is treat it amateurishly, as a hobby. “When I get time. When I feel like it. When the mood’s there, when the creative juices flow.” No. Sit down and write. If you keep doing that, the juices will flow, and you will learn to create on demand. You want to train yourself to be able to write, not train yourself to be unable to write. By giving in to the temptation not to write, you create that habit. You wouldn’t stroll into a work meeting 30 minutes late saying, “I didn’t feel like coming in on time.” You wouldn’t last in your job. Treat writing the same way. In fact, put on at least casual professional clothes. Don’t write in your jammies.

And the final basic: get yourself a room that’s comfortable to write in. I have an office, a whole room, with my library around me, a butterfly collection on the wall that calms me down, pictures I like, a computer at the exact right height, a chair that’s good for the back with pillows. Make sure you don’t have physical discomforts, because sitting for hours puts stress on your back and neck. Be comfortable, and get that word count up, because if you want to make a living as a writer, you need to hustle.

A 12,000-word working day

Richard Lowe: Take me. I have on average three to five customers a day that I work with. We collaborate on articles or books; those are ghost collaborations where I’m helping them, not credited, just paid. For each of those customers, we bang out about a thousand words in an hour, talking and yakking the whole way. I’ll be doing that right after this show, at 10 o’clock tonight. If I have four customers, that’s four thousand words. Then I’ve got a couple of books of my own, and I’ll bang out two thousand words each: nine thousand. Then a blog article: ten thousand. Promotion material: eleven thousand. Emails and social media to network for more customers: twelve thousand. By the end of a good eight-to-ten-hour day, I’ve written twelve to fifteen thousand words, and those are words that are ready to go. Ready to send to the proofreader.

And writers always need to send their work to proofreaders. Do proofread your own writing, but don’t depend on it, because writers are blind to their own errors. You need a second pair of eyes.

How do you outline a book without overplanning it?

Richard Lowe: Now, whatever your genre is: I do some fiction writing, and some people plot to death, outline and plot until every detail is perfect. If that works for them, great. What I’ve found is I make my outline, outline each chapter roughly inside it, define the characters, and start going. My main goal in outlining is to define the arc of the story: where the crises occur, where the battles occur, and the climax, where the hero almost gets beat. Then the character arcs: how does this character grow through the story? Think of John McClane defending that building: he almost gets killed, and he learns. That’s a character arc.

In nonfiction, you do the same thing. You define in your outline where you’re going, what you want your reader to know, and how you’re going to get there. Say I’m writing a book about how to host a radio show: chapter one, I want to teach them how to speak in public, so my goal at the end of that chapter is that they understand its importance, and the outline maps how we get from beginning to end.

Outline first, but don’t beat it to death. You’re going to change your outline; don’t worry about it. It should take an hour or a couple of hours, not more. Define the background information you need, but don’t flesh it out to death: you’re selling your story, not your background. What I do is define my characters as I go along. I’m writing chapter one, and this character comes out: okay, she’s pretty, she has blue eyes. I write that down, real nebulous. Then I get into the story: she’s covered with tattoos. Write it down. She’s kind of mean. Write it down. The other character is straightforward and conservative. I build the character as I go, rather than all at once at the beginning. For some authors, defining everything up front works. I’ve found building as I go works better.

Promote every single day

Richard Lowe: Where I’m going next is something many writers have trouble with: marketing and promoting themselves. Actually, many people have trouble with that, not just writers. But if you don’t promote, it ain’t going to sell.

There are many kinds of writers. You could be a ghostwriter, like a lot of what I do. You could sell articles to magazines, write for websites, newspapers, blogs. You could write your own books, write advertising copy. I’ve done basically all of it. Whatever you do, you need to promote. If it’s your own books, you promote yourself, your knowledge, your expertise, your credibility for nonfiction; for fiction, you promote the story itself, not the book so much as the story: this hero who’s going to do this, this person in this jam and we’re not sure how they get out. Publish snippets. But you have to be promoting constantly. I promote every single day as a writer, because otherwise nobody knows you exist.

For freelancing, I make a pretty good income by ghostwriting, selling blogs, selling LinkedIn profiles. I post to websites and social media, and I send emails, everything you can imagine, to let people know. And it has to be the right people: people who will buy. It has to be focused on them. You don’t talk about yourself; you talk about what you can do for them. “I could write a great book for you, and it would help you promote your business and make you more money.” You don’t talk about how wonderful you are. Nobody cares. You talk about the problem you’re going to solve for them. Same with book promotion: people worry about features, and they need to talk about benefits. How is this book going to benefit me? How is hiring you going to benefit me?

And that can be a challenge, because society has this idea that you shouldn’t talk about yourself, shouldn’t make yourself look good. That’s garbage. Of course you should talk about yourself. You have to, in order to sell. If you’re an entrepreneur, you have to look like the best person in that area. If you’re an author: why am I going to buy your book? Because you know what you’re talking about. You need to tell me that and demonstrate why.

Who is going to buy this book?

Richard Lowe: If I were going to name one of the most important things for writers: before you start writing that book or article you want to sell, find somebody to buy it. That doesn’t mean find a publisher. It means find who the audience is. When somebody wants to hire me to ghostwrite a book, that’s literally my first question: who’s the audience for your book? Who’s going to buy this? Sometimes they have an answer, sometimes they don’t. I wrote a book on the Internet of Things, and I asked the client: who’s going to buy this book? “Nobody’s going to buy the book,” he said. He wants to use it to get speaking engagements at Internet of Things events and to be introduced to CEOs of companies. Okay, good. We’re going to aim the book at those people. And that worked very well.

Sage the Poet: For those who aren’t as knowledgeable about target audience: what do you mean by “who’s the audience”? Some people may think everybody.

Richard Lowe: That’s exactly the trap, and I’ll come back to it before we finish: audiences need to be laser targeted. An audience of “millennials” is probably too wide. It’s really hard to advertise to a wide group; you want to advertise to a very narrow group. It might be millennials who are currently in school and living at home, or millennials who are having trouble with the law. The narrower the target, the easier it becomes to promote to it, for nonfiction and fiction. You can have more than one target. But the wider the target, the more impossible it becomes to reach, unless you’re Stephen King or the Game of Thrones guy; they’re unreachable pillars to me. That’s the same with my ghostwriting: I’ve got a very narrow focus of who I go for. Entrepreneurs who want to add credibility to themselves, and it tends to be one-or-two-person shops. That’s my target.

Sage the Poet: And it’s good to ask those questions before the fact, not after the book isn’t moving in sales. Ladies and gentlemen, Richard’s reference guide on all of this is Make a Living as a Professional Self-Published Author: Laying the Foundation, the Steps You Must Take to Create a Six-Figure Writing Career, available on Amazon in Kindle and hardcover. Am I right on the pricing, Richard, about $28.95 hardcover and $9.99 Kindle?

Richard Lowe: Something like that. Yep.

Gene’s question: promoting a novel

Sage the Poet: We have Gene Posniak on, published author of an amazing sci-fi novel. Gene, questions for Richard?

Gene Posniak: I’ve been trying to dig up a question for the last 15 minutes and I’m drawing a blank. For me, I’m one of those people that took writing as a hobby; it took 18 years to finish my novel. Now that I’m retired, that’s what I’m working on: making it more.

Richard Lowe: Good. Well, pick up my book and take a look at it, and it will tell you how I did it.

Gene Posniak: I will. And I want to say, the advice to promote the story, especially for a fiction writer: I think I did that once, with the blurb on the back cover. But promoting the story, the struggle of the character, that’s probably better.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, and there are lots of ways to do that. You could get on talk shows, do it in social media, in your email list, public speaking engagements. All kinds of ways to promote. Explore them all, because some work better than others, and some people are better at some of them. You’ll find out what works for you.

Closing

Richard Lowe: To finish up: I’m Richard Lowe, and you can go to my website, thewritingking.com/, to find out more about me. Feel free to go there, read my blog, comment on it; I love getting comments, and I like to answer them. You can also write me at rich@thewritingking.com. And you can find my books at coolauthor.com, which goes straight to my Amazon page, all the books published under my name, not the ones under pseudonyms. Feel free to send questions. I’m happy to get them.

Sage the Poet: Thank you again, Richard. We learned so much from you during both interview sessions, and we look forward to having you return, maybe even a feature once a month if we can work that out.

Richard Lowe: We would love it. I would be honored. Feel free to ask.

Sage the Poet: We’ll talk off the air concerning it. Good health to you.

Richard Lowe: You too. Bye-bye.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.