C. Steven: Hi, and welcome to "The Writer's Mind." Today, we are talking with Kimberly O'Hara. Kimberly O'Hara, and I'm reading her bio right now, is an intuitive book and story coach. Now, I love that title so we are gonna have to definitely talk about that. She has also been a writer and a producer for the film industry. So we're gonna have to talk about your Hollywood years as well. And then you are now involved in doing...I don't see it on here but we did quickly talk about it, meet-ups, and again, I want to talk about that. So first of all,  , welcome to "The Writer's Mind."

Kimberly: Thank you for having me. So happy to be here today.  

C. Steven: Thank you for having me, or allowing me to do the interview. So tell me, right off the bat, what is an intuitive book and story coach?

Kimberly: Absolutely. There are story editors and book editors, and I found that people that are writing books often come to me after they've been thinking about writing a book or trying to write a book on their own for a very long time. They've had many people tell them they should write books, they've had maybe multiple drafts in well, a file cabinet depending on how far back it goes, or on their laptop if it's in current years. And they really don't just know how to either believe that they are a writer, that they have the right to make a book happen.

And they have a lot of resistance, but they want this really. They want it. And so they come to me for that extra push. I give them structure, I give them a belief system in themselves, I help them to understand that they are a writer. And then I go into parts of their story, often their memoirs, and help them see the bigger vision that they want to write about that was hard for them to see when they were just sitting at a room by themselves.

C. Steven: And so are these people then who have...they just have a problem getting started, they're sitting at the computer, or their notepad and just nothing's happening, or they are easily distracted by, "Oh the mail's here. I must go get the mail." Or things like that.

Kimberly: There is annoying knowingness about them that they carry around. It pervades all areas of their lives and weighs them down. And when they come to me they are ready to have a solution to their problem. Some people come to me they are not 100% ready, and I send them to my monthly workshops where they can spend a couple hours with me, or they'll spend a private day with me where we'll break down their story and I'll help them see that it has potential in the future.

C. Steven: Now would you say that most of these people are people who are wanting to write their story, their memoirs, their life?

Kimberly: I particularly enjoy working with memoir. It sometimes goes into business hybrid. I do have one client who's writing a libretto, and that's exciting.

C. Steven: Opera?

Kimberly: No, isn't a libretto for the play? I think that's the structure for a play.

C. Steven: Oh, then, my ignorance. I always thought that a libretto was like the words to an opera, but...

Kimberly: Oh God I don't know.

C. Steven: I don't know, I could be wrong too.

Kimberly: I needed a word for it, because I kept saying, "That script for your play." And I felt well that doesn't sound very eloquent. And I Googled, and it told me libretto. So I've run with libretto, and said it quite publicly many times and people have nodded. So, either nobody knows or I'm right. Like I don't know. I'm pulling it off.

C. Steven: You're probably right, and besides, if you can't trust Google, who can you trust?

Kimberly: That's right, I mean I Google everything. Like, "What is the size of a doughnut sprinkle?" And I accept an answer.

C. Steven: So you talk to...So this person is actually writing a play.

Kimberly: And it's about her life, but they are fictional characters. So there is that area that I'm starting to dabble in. Because I come from the movies, so I come from creating fictional characters. But the fictional characters I always loved were always characters that came from people's lives, something that they experienced. And I guess that's true with most stories, they all are derivatives of something we've experienced. Fiction more so than memoir.

So memoir is straight up this is their life story, and that they've experienced may feel like it's profound enough that it is not serving the better good of them just speaking it as speakers or recording a YouTube video. They want to put pen onto paper and they want to it to get it out to the masses, in long form. The book is in long form. You're able to tell the story in more detail.

C. Steven: Okay, and I will circle back to your Hollywood time because that was my background.

Kimberly: Sure.

C. Steven: So I always like to talk about old Hollywood times.

Kimberly: Of course, you could do that forever, right?

C. Steven: Yeah, no kidding. But, we wanna stay focused on memoirs for a minute, because I mean that is something that is intensely personal. Even though I consider people who write fiction stories made up in their head, they're still coming from them. It's like they say in a dream, everything is you. You're the person chasing you, you're the airplane that you're in, the bus, etc. So, why isn't it like, I don't know, especially in this political climate, why isn't it like the greatest act of indulgence to write a memoir?

Kimberly: Well, there should be no indulgence about it. We all have voices, they all need to be heard. If someone believes that they have a story that's going to have an effect on someone else, even if it's an effect on them, I say often to my clients, write the memoir for you. My clients will often see transformation around chapter six, I don't know what that is all about. But inevitably it's become a pattern that I can't ignore, that they can't ignore chapter six. Big things start to happen in their life, of opportunities start to come, big vision starts to come for them, they change the course of their life, because they're seeing, "Oh my gosh I've done all this stuff. Look at me. I am more than I thought I was. I have more to say. I've had more life."  

And it all starts to become very cohesive. I work right now, and I'm not opposed to working with younger people, but primarily my clients are between their 40s and their 70s. So they're going through that really profound laughing of that second stage of life, let's look back at what we've done and let's think about what we're going to do. And the book and the memoir really helps to flesh that out. And then I also say, "And you're going to have a book that could make you money, that could give you more opportunities, you could get clients," all the possibilities of having the tangible book. So it's not indulgent. I don't see indulgency in anything I've just said.  

C. Steven: So I don't know why I think this, but I just get the sense that I suspect a lot of your clients, if not most of them are women. Is that true?

Kimberly: I have had two male clients, and one he's very prolific. Working 60 hour work weeks with a private practice, writing in between clients, came up with a patent for a product in the middle of writing his book. I mean, just a force to be reckoned with. Very passionate about what he does and what he's done, and again a product of seeing, "Oh my God, wow. I know more than I really even thought I did." Kind of epiphany. But primarily they are women. I'm not opposed to working with anybody.

They just need when they come to me they have a certain level of readiness to say, "I'm going to write a book." Typically I have them do it with me in the first draft in 12 weeks, and then they often hire me for the second draft. It just flows in and we do that in six weeks. And the second draft is even more profound than the first draft because we've gotten all the gook out. We've done the dump, as I like to call it. And so it has to be someone willing to do that. I've just started a 12-month program for people that want to move a little slower, because that's perfectly acceptable as well. Some people financially want to move slower, creatively want to move slower. But typically my clients come to me, they're ready to write a check, they're ready to write a book.

C. Steven: So in terms of story coaching and in helping them bring out what it is they need to free themselves up so they can get it essentially out, what is the difference between that and let's say an editor? Do you act as an editor later on in the process or, are you constantly editing? How does that work?

Kimberly: I want my clients to be led to a certain way that their voices that I show them, so that they can then start acclimating themselves to writing in that new way. If I constantly am editing them, then they are not going to have the practice to see how to do it themselves. So in the beginning of the process I might do a little typing into their chapter, which I'm going to send back to them. I'll review it, I'll do some typing within the chapter, I'll send it back to them. But in the coaching call I'll say, "Here is the reason why I wrote that sentence that way." It'll either be, "I see that you have potential to throw a lot more humor. I'd like to see you explore that."

Or, sometimes there might be vagueness in a point that you are making. Do you see that possibility, is that something that you'd be willing to explore?" That way they'll start to catch themselves and they'll say that to me and some still can call and say, "Oh I was about write and I thought of you, and I changed it." And they're so...It's exciting, I mean anytime we learn how to do something, it's exciting. And so if I did it for them then they wouldn't have that joy, and that thrill, and that learning curve.

C. Steven: Okay, so this is two follow-up questions, and I meant that at some point, the book needs to go through an edit just proof-read and just content and, where you want to...much the way you edited the questions I originally sent you.

Kimberly: I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.

C. Steven: No, that's okay. But I mean is that something you do, or do you actually hook them up with a third party person to do that?

Kimberly: No. So my processes is we do a five-hour meeting before they start their book. And I don't know if it's because I come from so many collaborative meetings in the movie business, having to deal with six people with all different opinions. When I'm only talking to one person about their life, I could focus in really, really fast on story lines and through lines. So we have a pretty good structure and a developmental process before they even begin their book. So there's not a lot of structural editing that needs to be done. When we get into the second draft, I'm moving paragraphs around like crazy for them. Like I'm moving entire...chapter seven has become now chapter two, and half of chapter two is now chapter six.

In the second draft I get more heavy-handed with them, and they are appreciative of that, because they're now needing to smooth out and write into me moving chunks around. Because I'll say, "Hey, this is amazing. Look, chapter 10 turned out differently than we expected. What a gift. Now we get to write chapter 11 to jump off of chapter 10." And sometimes chapter 12 is an all new chapter." So I love the second draft, it's a very different experience from the first draft. And then they go to a red-line editor. The red-line editor, and I have someone I just started to work with for my clients, makes sure all the sentences are complete.

C. Steven: So you make verb tense agreement and things like that?

Kimberly: Yeah.

C. Steven: Okay. So, and correct me, which I know you will, it seems to me that...

Kimberly: Red-line.

C. Steven: ...that what you really helping these people do, and this is something that all writer need, at least all the writers I've met, well except for one, is to help silence that inner critic. That's the thing that we often...it's a parable in terms of stories. People will be sitting there typing away. And they'll go, "This is great, this is great." And then they'll go, "This is terrible, this is terrible. Why am I doing this? How do I stop this? Why am I wasting my time?" So, what tips do you have for just a general writing audience, not anyone in particular, just the general writing audience for silencing that inner critic so that you can just get the word out.

Kimberly: I don't know if I have any tip to silence the inner critic. It is always going to be in all areas of our lives. It's setting a foundation so that you have the tools to manage it when it comes up. Laugh at it, and have it work in your favor. Because those inner critics, sometimes our voices that you are not writing in, that can actually talk in a way that you think...I've had conversations with inner critics who have been like, "Shut up, F you." And then the inner critic is like, "You're..." And then I thought, "Hey, my inner critic is actually a character. I'm going to develop that character."

Next thing you know, I'm writing about some like bad-ass chick in Oklahoma. I'm like, "I don't know who that is." So you gotta listen to these voices because they could be characters that you are suppressing. That's one thing that I've discovered. That gets more into TV and film of course. But the first thing I tell to people even when they come to my meet-ups and they don't even know if they are writers, as I say to them, "The first thing you do when you walk in this room, even for two hours, is you say I'm a professional writer just for now." I'm not interested in anything else.

C. Steven: Well, circling back though, how do you help people who get to that point with the inner critic, so that the inner critic doesn't just stifle them completely and stop them from doing anything?

Kimberly: Well, I mean, that's where the coaching comes in. So I have a client who sat for 10 hours in front of her computer working on a chapter, and then we talked the next day and she happened to mention this had happened. And I said, "You call me on hour one next time." So people don't realize that there's someone out there, like, I'm there, right? So I'm not just there waiting for the chapter to arrive, you can call me at any time and say, "I'm really....I can't push through this." I've had clients call me up and say, "You know, I've witnessed three times, and it just feels like it's the biggest pile of crap." I'll remind them what we talked about in our coaching call. And they'll realize, oh my God, it's not...you know, we'll turn the crap in. You know, I guess there is a saying on that to turn something into fertilizer. It's evading me at the moment. Some metaphor in there.

But they...I show them how what they're thinking actually they've forgotten. See we forget and that's when those inner critics come in. They go, "Aha. They've forgotten how brilliant they were." So sometimes you just need someone to put you back on that course of your own brilliance. And that's why there's continuing weekly conversations, sure them up when they're out there. It's really dangerous to be out there on your own, writing all the time. There are a lot of writers that do it, and they fight through a lot of those voices I'm sure from just having the skill and belief that they're professional writers. Which I think is the number one mindset.

C. Steven: I imagined, I was just thinking about this the other day because I started book three.  

Kimberly: Wow, congrats.

C. Steven: Thank you. But the thing is that...

Kimberly: How do you do it?

Kimberly: C. Steven: How do I do it? That's a long story, and I'll be happy to be on your broadcast to answer any questions about it. The thing is though, what happened was I wrote that all important first paragraph. And when I wrote it, I was so happy. I was like, "Oh this is fantastic." So, I look around the room, and there is nobody here, and the dogs are looking at me but they don't know what's going on. So I call my wife. My wife is at her office, and she doesn't have time to listen to me. And so there was that moment of frustration where I had no one to share that excitement with. I imagined that for you, especially with your clients, they call you when they have those "Aha" moments, or those great moments of excitement.  

Kimberly: Well, I give them the permission to. Whether they do or not, they are probably looking at their dogs and calling their spouses as well. This is why I've started creating a program that creates more of a community. Because I feel like as working writers we need a community where we can put on Facebook, or make a call to an accountability partner. And that person is there for you that says, "Listen to that paragraph you just wrote. That paragraph is amazing." No judgment, no criticism, just pure celebration. Let's just rethink this as we celebrate this. I did a LinkedIn article recently about criticism. Is it okay if I just address that for one second?

C. Steven: Of course.

Kimberly: Because it is pretty important. I feel like a lot of unsolicited criticism is in the writing world where people say, "You know I was really great, but can I offer you your..." Here's what I think about that. It's like, "Not sure if I really need that right now. Can we just celebrate that just wrote." In the movie and TV industry, well the movie industry specifically, there was a lot of constructive criticism that dashed a lot of dreams. And I'm not going to be a dream dasher.

C. Steven: "Dream dasher, see movie executive." I'm sorry, go ahead.

Kimberly: I'm not going to be a dream dasher. Who am I to tell somebody? I want to create a community of celebration where people say, "I just did this. I just did that. Can I post this." They are all over the place on the internet, but it seems like a lot of unstructured people just dumping their stuff, just praying someone listens or reads, it's not ordered. And so I want to create a community of people that all know each other, and are in a program with me that can do a book and celebrate.

C. Steven: Now do you step outside of the memoir genre, do you help people with fiction as well?

Kimberly: I have not yet.

C. Steven: Is that something that you wanna do or...

Kimberly: Absolutely. Because I have pipelines to the next step which would be the lease. The memoir comes along that could be a great movie, I have a pipeline to that for clients. There hasn't been one yet, and fiction would be something that opens those doors as well. So I'm really excited about that next part of my business. It's just that I've been really focused on what my clients need just in the writing space right now.  

C. Steven: Okay, so, one of the things that I noticed on your website was you talk about not being creative enough. What does that mean, 'Not being creative enough.'

Kimberly: People believe that they are not being creative enough. Like I'm not a creative enough person to write. Like, "Who am I to write?" And like they have this image that if they are not wearing a leather jacket, and carrying a beat up guitar, and contemplating life all day over a cold latte. If they are not in like Berlin they're not creative. That's a farce. We're all incredibly creative. We all have creativity inside of us in some way. And we all have a story inside of us. So, people that wanna write that story, they have enough creativity to do it. It just needs to be tapped into. This definition of creativity.

C. Steven: Do you keep a journal? Do you encourage your clients to keep journals?

Kimberly: I'm in a new journal mindset, and...

C. Steven: A new journal mindset?

Kimberly: I'm in a new journal mindset, I have done away with the journaling as of now. I have clients that are on a 30-day no journal policy, who are reaching out to me. They are in journal withdrawal. And I've done this because they are using the journals now as crutches to keep writing the same co-dependent crap over and over and over again, and they're not writing their books.  

C. Steven: I'm gonna ask for a little more elaboration on that, what do you mean by co-dependent crap over and over again? This sounds like something that's more about what's happening in their lives than necessarily what they are trying to put in a book. Is that correct?

Kimberly: When I wrote for movies and television, I know that I was held down by a lot of stuff from my past, family history stuff. And I fill journal after journal after journal with the same angry stuff. And when I found those journals I realized that I wasn't journaling, that was all great for that time of my life. But when I was getting ready to get really serious as a writer, I needed to put the writing into actually a tangible project. I needed to stop saying, "I don't really wanna write today, I'm gonna do a little journaling."

And then I journal about like my mom, or I journal about l journal about the guy and whatever. And I'd be like, "I wrote." And I didn't write, I just tinkered. And nothing really...occasionally something would come out of it creatively, but you have to sit down. You have to open your laptop. You have to have a purpose and say, "Today I'm gonna write on my book. I'm not going to journal, I'm going to write on my book." So when I see resistance with clients, or people that aren't even clients yet, and I say, "Where have you been writing?" And they say, "Oh well I journal every day." I'm like, "Yeah, we probably need to stop that for a little while till you start writing your book."

C. Steven: So are you familiar with...blanking on the name.

Kimberly: The artist way?

C. Steven: The artist way, writing on the left side of the brain...drawing on the left side of the brain, things like that. She does morning pages. She talks about morning pages.  

Kimberly: Loved morning pages.  

C. Steven: How would you make the distinction between morning pages and journaling?

Kimberly: I did morning pages and in actual artist wake class with this amazing woman called Kelly Morgan. She's also a writing coach here in Las Angeles. I have enormous amounts of respect for her. And I did a six-week or eight-week course with her. And she's someone who should be on your show by the way. I needed that at that time. I did not know who I was anymore as a writer. I did not know who I was as a creative, I was nowhere near being a book coach, I was coming out of the entertainment industry. So I needed to journal my way through that precipice big time. And those were organized journal entries. They had structure.

The artist way is a very structured process of taking you through journaling. So, it was journaling on another level. It wasn't just me journaling amok. It was journal with direction. And that brought me to more clarity, for sure. So I urge anybody to do the artist way, I think it's fantastic.

C. Steven: First of all I'm writing down the term 'journal amok' because somehow I'm gonna use that somewhere, I don't know where, but thank you for that.

Kimberly: You're welcome.

C. Steven: So, then, let's talk about your story. Let's talk about how you arrived in this area. You started out as a poor white child, I don't know how, what happened?

Kimberly: I was a poor white child that was an incident. Well, middle-lower class. I always wanted to be in movies from the very, very beginning. My dad would take me to Charlie Chaplin, what do you call those when they play movie after movie after movie?  

C. Steven: Marathons?

Kimberly: Marathons. 'In Martha's Vineyard' actually when I was a child. And it was one of the most exciting...I just remembered it was one of my most... It just was so wonderful. So I had the bug really early, and so I always have been a reader, and I've always been a writer, and I went into the movie business.

And then I didn't wanna be in the movie business anymore. I didn't know that I didn't have my soul in the movie business because I wasn't evolved in my own maturity yet. So I had to do some soul-searching, I had to deal with some trauma that came up, and I had to write my own book about the trauma, and in the process of writing my own book about the trauma, like I talked about earlier in this interview, new doors started to open for me. I started to see a bigger vision for my life. Things stopped being black or white, movie or nothing. I got a business coach, I got a life coach. I would have never contemplated hiring those people when I was in the movie business. So it's in higher book code, you just dealt, you just suffered, right?

C. Steven: Right.

Kimberly: And that's when someone said to me, "You're gonna be a book coach." And I thought, "That sounds like a really good idea, I've no idea what that means." And it worked out. It worked out really, really well. So that's how I've come to this place.

C. Steven: Well, let's talk about your time in Hollywood. What was that like, how did you get started? What did you do? I know you were a writer, I know you were a producer. What happened?

Kimberly: I did the chain of command, from intern to set PA to office PA for Ted Hope back then when he was making his first movies with Hal Hartley in New York, and Ted Hope is a well-known movie producer. And production coordinator, line producer, production manager, till I finally was like, "I want to run the show. I want to be in charge." And that's a really...Raising money for movies is...So I did all the meetings, and all the money raising, and all the script finding.

Had a couple stints working for a Hollywood producer and made about 8 movies, made one of Calista Flockhart's first movies. She was Ally McBeal. And worked with Tom Sadoski before he...now he's on News Room. As well...you know, Leslie Bibb before she was somebody, Anthony LaPaglia [SP] and Eric Stoltz. Just top amazing talented people in these little independent movies. And had a big movie that was supposed to go, it was supposed to be my first $10 million dollar picture with America Ferrera, who was gonna be the star when she was on 'Ugly Betty,' and the housing bubble burst. It was 2008, and the project went away, and I just was...I had a little kid, I was living in San Jose, and I just went, "I can't do this anymore. I can't do it anymore." And I just stopped for about six years.

C. Steven: Living in San Jose and trying to keep a Hollywood career, that's really impressive.  

Kimberly: It didn't work. I sold a couple scripts when I was there, I did do a bunch of writing, I did have someone but a script from me, I did auction another script. So I did keep writing through all of it. But I was really out of the loop.

C. Steven: And so that was when you decided to chuck Hollywood?

Kimberly: That's when I decided to chuck Hollywood, and kind of wandered about for a while. I became an editor of a food magazine, and then I got into some more personal recovery. That's when I started to realize that the insides were not healthy.

C. Steven: You've alluded to this a couple times. And I don't want to make you uncomfortable, and I don't want to dig deeper if you don't want me to. But I'm curious, and I'm sure people listening are curious, what happened? What was the trauma that occurred in your life, and when did it occur?

Kimberly: Well, and this is what my book's about, and it's, oddly enough, a journaling memoir because I did journal my way through recovery. And I teach people how to do that in this book. I was sexually abused when I was about...you know, early years, till I was about 10 by my dad, and did not remember, really. I think I made an executive decision that that was not going to be my story. But you cannot repress something that has happened to you of that magnitude. It will seep into every area of your life. It will seep into your marriages, it will seep into your parenting, it will seep into your career, it will create addictions.

So I had a dream one night and I knew. And once you open that door, and you're willing to go to therapy, then you know it all. It's like you always knew. And then you're like, "Oh my God." And there were couple times that I remember one really impactful, I had started writing a book about it. My book's not about what was done to me, because I didn't have that story at all. It's more about the lie I told myself for so long. The other person that I lived as for so long.

And the three-year process to becoming the person I am today who has one of the most amazing, incredible lives full of love and joy. And how I got to that point. Someone said to me at one point when I was writing the book. You talk about my clients calling me and saying, "Oh, this is all crap. No one cares." I had one day where I said to someone, "What if none of this is real? What if like I'm making all this up?" And she said to me, "Kim, it's not like it's an attention grabber. It's not like it makes you popular. It's not like something someone makes up for attention." She said, "Nobody creates the story of incestual sexual abuse. Nobody." And she gave me that permission to keep going forward and I'm really glad that I did.

C. Steven: Well that's amazing. So I imagine that as you said, the initial trauma has infected your life in other ways. And that is kind of what your journey has been. Sort of dealing with all of the ancillary issue. Is that what you do with some of your clients when they come? It's almost like you are a book coach, but you are also helping them through their trauma.

Kimberly: Absolutely.

C. Steven: So that must make you amazingly popular.

Kimberly: Someone once said it's like book therapy.  

C. Steven: Okay, that's interesting.

Kimberly: Because I don't give any advice, I just hold space, and I direct them towards how that can be written about. We do find the...Like I said, some of my clients are writing about some pretty heavy stuff, and they can be funny. And, you know, we need humor in this. Dark needs light. Things happen to us in recovery from trauma that art can be funny.

C. Steven: Yes, I suppose so. On your website you have a word that I cannot pronounce. So I'm gonna mangle it, achalasia?

Kimberly: It's achalasia.

C. Steven: Achalasia. So what is achalasia?

Kimberly: So achalasia is a rare autoimmune disease that attacks your esophagus and makes your esophagus lose its motility. So it's not able to swallow food.  

C. Steven: And you had this?

Kimberly: Right when I started sexual abuse recovery. It hit out of nowhere. I wouldn't have believed there was a connection until I had clients writing about their trauma, who started to have physical reactions to. Then I went, oh the body...you know Louise Hay has this book called "Heal Your Life" and it's this profound book about...Well she heals herself from cancer which that's a whole other conversation, but she talks about the different parts of the body and how they react. So it wasn't a shock to me that it was my voice that broke, basically. And that was my voice in the movie business, that was my voice in every area.  

C. Steven: Can you eat?

Kimberly: I'm perfectly...I had a big surgery and I'm perfectly healed.  

C. Steven: Okay. So this actually has to be corrected with surgery then.  

Kimberly: It has to be corrected with surgery. It has to. You can't swallow, my bed had to be on a tilt, I got down to like 105 pounds, and I was in denial. That's another thing, as I didn't believe it. I thought I just had anxiety.

C. Steven: So you didn't believe that you were actually sick, you thought that all of this recovery was making you sick.

Kimberly: Exactly.

C. Steven: Which though as...

Kimberly: Is possible.  

C. Steven: Possible. Okay.

Kimberly: But when you've been abused you already have a very low value for your body. So to go and take care of the body that carries you around all the time is a learning curve. So I had to realize that I had neglected my body this whole time for like nine months before I went in to the doctor. And when I went to the doctor the doctor went, "Oh my God. Have you looked in the mirror? How long has this been going on?"

C. Steven: Do you look back at that as a...Was that your turning point?

Kimberly: Oh yeah, that was a huge...that was such an epiphany. And I have a funny story about that. I went into surgery and my mom came in to help me which was very healing, it's part of my story. She stayed in the hospital with me, because I was in the hospital for about four days. And I told her, I said that I'm not gonna hold back ever again any of my feelings. I'm never gonna hold back my voice, I'm gonna say everything how I feel, and I'm scared about this surgery, and to make sure everybody knows. And she was just like, "Okay honey, that's great." And so when the anesthesiologist came I'm like, "I'm scared. I'm scared." I'm like telling him, "I'm scared. What are you doing? I'm scared." And he dealt with it, put me out.

She said right when the surgery was over, they were wheeling me to recovery, I sat fully up, like completely under, sat completely up and just started shouting, "I'm scared and I want everyone to know." She said she'd never seen a more freaked out post-op room of doctors and nurses. She said it was like they were looking at her like, "What're you gonna do?" She said she was gonna do this.

So it's amazing how the body, and the mind, and our subconscious, and the healing that we go through...This is just an example of all the different...I just told you about 10 stories in this short period of time we've been on, so many stories. And I'm just kind of an average girl. Everybody's got a lot of stories in them that they can talk about, and someone might hear this, they might have either been abused, they might have left the movie industry, they might have achalasia, and they might be like, "Oh, I better get to the doctor, I've been choking on food for seven months." And then who knows.

C. Steven: Wow. I would hope so, honestly, I really would. So I'm looking at my notes here and so I see something about you have something called 'story meet-up' and 'story sessions' which are monthly workshops. And what is that? Is this like a writers' group or what?

Kimberly: Every month, and I just started it, I've done them periodically and gotten such an incredible response that I've been asked to do them every month. And they're three hours. They're in West LA, and it's for people to come in and test-run their stories. So they come in, right now it's usually about six to eight people, and it's a community. It's a community that I'm talking about, where they come in and they talk about why they are there. They have hopes to become writers. So we make sure they know they are writers, and I have them write about...I typically know who they are before they come in, they've already told me a little bit about them, so I can create writing prompts that work for everybody. And then when people share on their prompts, they get feedback from the group on what that would look like in a book.

C. Steven: Now is this for clients only, or is this open to everybody?

Kimberly: Everybody, it's $97.  

C. Steven: Well that's not bad. That's per visit or monthly?

Kimberly: That's per workshop.

C. Steven: Okay, per workshop.

Kimberly: And that will be on my website which is www.astoryinside.com. There'll be a link now to every single day for people to pay in advance. What was happening was I had people say, "Oh I can't come on October." They'd be like, "Let me know." And I'm writing down individual names. "Let Jennifer [SP] know in September. And I can't do that anymore, I'm too busy. I'm like, "I'll just send out one email with every single day, and people can just click on them, "Oh, am gonna go in November." And then they sign up and they have their spot.

C. Steven: Let's go to the end of this now. So you have a client, they have finished their book. You've read it, everybody's in tears, everybody loves the book. What next, and how are you involved in that? How do they get it out there?

Kimberly: I'll try to be concise with this because I know we're almost out of time.

C. Steven: No, don't worry. We're not locked into anything.

Kimberly: Okay. Sometimes clients will come up to me and I will ask them straight-up, "Are you self-publishing or do you wanna go for the big book publisher. Are you going for St. Martin's press, or do you want a Kirkus Review? Do you wanna be a "New York Times" bestseller?" They say, "Yes." I say, "You should write a proposal then because book agents and booksellers, they're not gonna read a book." They're just not.

C. Steven: Right.

Kimberley: So they'll hire me to write a proposal. And it's a similar thing to writing the book because you have to come up with all the chapters. And then when the book is done, it's their responsibility to go to the agents, and editors, and sell their book. If I know somebody, because my network's always growing, am happy to make that introduction. Very happy to make that introduction. Because sometimes I'll have a percentage of it as well. I have an incentive of course to sell it. Other people that come to me that self-publish, that's the end of the line for me. So I'll send them to a red-line editor, and then I'll give them some tips. Or some contacts.

"Here's someone I know that does the Amazon upload really easily." "Here's someone I know who makes an eBook." "Do you need someone for a book cover?" "Do you need publicity photos?" "Do you need a book PR person?" I just network out for them and they just take that advice. And that's just me giving advice. That's just free.

C. Steven: Got it. Okay, so actually I have a couple of last questions. So which means that I have the penultimate question, how's that?

Kimberly: Okay, I'm scared now.  

C. Steven: Tell me, and when I say tell me, tell us, about your writing style. What do you do? Do you get up, are you early, are you late night, do you dictate, do you pen and pad, what do you do?

Kimberly: Oh boy, that's a hard question. I think it depends on what I'm working on. So, yesterday, I just wasn't feeling the motivation to do my own book proposal, so I went to the Beverly Hills library to the quiet room for six hours. And that helped me to get rid of the noise around my space. I love five in the morning, I think it's one of the most amazing times to write. I think five in the morning till eight in the morning is just such a fertile time to write if you can do that every day. And for a long time when I was writing my book I was up that time every single day. I have two little kids, and I have a business I'm running, and so that doesn't become sustainable for a long period of time.

So I think the best advice I would give to writers, based on my practices, is write every day but don't be hard on yourself if you didn't do it at the exact time you were supposed to do. Because I get some of my best ideas on a post-it in one sentence in my car, in line at the supermarket, at the auditorium watching my daughter's recital. I'm like, "Just have paper with you." Because I'd be like, "Oh my God. That's what that character is supposed to do." And I'll grab a pen and I'll write it down. And it's like I could have written for seven hours and not come up with that.

I think it's being open that writing is a fluid experience. We're not necessarily locked into sitting at our laptops every day and blaming ourselves if we don't do that. When you're a writer it's always happening, it's always out there, and I think just trusting the flow of that, that's one thing I've learned, if someone who sat in front of a computer for eight hours and is like, "I will write the winning screenplay." I see that that doesn't work anymore. That's my opinion.

C. Steven: So then I always ask this question, my interviewees are actually I say always am just starting to ask questions like this but, we're gonna be wrapping it up. So my last question is, is there anything that I haven't asked you, that you wanted to talk about? That you wanna feel that you wanna get out there?

Kimberly: Wow. I don't think so. I think we've talked about tremendous amount of material both personal and professional. I think that there is this belief that you have to have a certain mindset to be a creative person. Like you're supposed to be doing certain functions to be a creative person. And I think creativity is in everything and in everywhere, and one thing I did not do enough of when I worked as a screenwriter, and I tried to do it now as a writer in writing a TV show or finishing my book is, I tried to just get up out of my chair and go outside. And Anne Lamott just talked about this in her TED Talk, look up and look at the trees and walk on the beach, and go laugh with my kids, and go eat a nice meal because you've gotta be living life. So you're missing life, it's like passing us by, and it's all part of the process. And then trust you're gonna go back and sit down and do some more writing.

C. Steven: Great words to end it on. So tell people how they can get in touch with you.

Kimberly: Well, I'd say go to my website, which is www.astoryinside.com, or you can email me at kim@astoryinside.com. And I do offer complimentary story to success discovery calls. They have a value of 397, but I'll offer them to callers or listeners today who are at that serious point of writing a book. And so I'll open that up. They can email me and we can talk a little bit on email. Like, I'll do a little questionnaire to see if they're ready, and then we can go from there.

C. Steven: That's perfect. Kimberly or Kim, thank you very, very much.

Kimberly: Thank you.

Kimberly O'Hara talks about get that life story out of you.

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