Episode 29: [GUEST] Using Screenwriting Techniques to Enhance Your Writing with Brooks Elms

In this episode, Elizabeth talks with Brooks Elms about using screenwriting techniques to enhance your writing. With examples from Hollywood blockbusters to stories from our own lives, you won't want to miss the insights and writing guidance provided by Brooks Elms. 

From Brooks in this episode: 
There's a generosity and a curiosity that drives professional storytelling.  and it's not better than or less than, it's just different,  but it's really important that you get it clear. 

Who is Brooks Elms?

My stories feature personal characters & gut-punch tension in thrillers and drama 👊🏻 I've written 40+ screenplays, a dozen on assignment, and have a few projects currently set up with A-listers.

I've taught 500+ students at UCLA Extention for 5+ years, facilitated 1000+ personal growth processes in his men's group over 20+ years, and started my coaching practice in 2021 where I've supported amateur writers become pro with results like: setting up projects, getting representation and making money as a writer.

Where can you connect with Brooks and get on his waitlist for a 1:1 coaching session:
https://www.brookselmscoaching.com/

We invite you to subscribe to our email list to be the first to know about our weekly podcast episodes and upcoming group programs for writers!

If you prefer video versions of the podcast or want to leave a comment on this specific episode, you can find all of them on our YouTube channel.

Transcript

0:01

Welcome fellow writers to the Inspired Writer Collective podcast, your go to hub for all things writing. We're your hosts, Elizabeth and Stephanie. Whether you're a seasoned wordsmith or just dipping your quill into the ink well of creativity, we're absolutely thrilled to have you with us. Drawing from our experience in publishing diverse writing genres and the daily grind of showing up for yourself, we're here to be your writing companions. Expect insightful discussions, expert tips, and a dash of inspiration as we navigate the twists and turns of the writing journey together. So whether you're listening on your commute, during your writing session, or just relaxing at home, get ready for an immersive experience that celebrates the art and joy of writing. Hi,

Elizabeth: 0:50

All right, listeners, you're in for a treat today. We have another guest episode today. I'm here with Brooks Elms and he is a screenwriter in Hollywood. He's written over 40 screenplays with a bunch of others in the works as well as He's taught a bunch of students at UCLA Extension and facilitated some coaching and personal development. And he's here today because he has started working with supporting amateur writers, becoming pro, and turning their works into screenplays. So today we're going to talk a little bit about memoir and how it is potentially translatable into movies. You see examples like Wilde. And we'll talk through a couple of things like that. Like is your memoir a movie? Does it have potential or maybe your narrative fiction? Is there potential there? What that looks like and even how we can add elements of screenplay methodology of showing to our writing to help that process as well. So welcome, Brooks. So thankful that you were able to join us today for this.

Brooks: 2:06

Thank you. It's exciting to be here.

Elizabeth: 2:11

So why don't you kick us off, tell us a little bit about what written works make potentially good movies. What are some of the elements that a memoir or a story needs to have in order to make it a good movie?

Brooks: 2:31

So, I think, if you're talking about a movie, or something that Hollywood is going to want to buy, like at the biggest level, you're really talking, at this point, gigantic IP. So, they're not even interested unless you have a kajillion books sold. That's at that level. there's lots and lots of

Elizabeth: 2:55

And for the people who don't know, what is IP?

Brooks: 2:58

Already proven creative material. So a franchise movie like star Wars is intellectual property and then it can be merchandise and it can be just built into other businesses or other movies. And if you look at the box office, the top box office movies from probably the last, I don't know, 20 years. Something like 95 percent of them are all you know intellectual property. So Barbie, the Barbie movie last year, right? Although Oppenheimer was not, Oppenheimer was I think completely original. I don't know if it was based on a book or anything, but, but generally they're based on a bestselling book a play, you know, a toy whatever, or previous movies. Because it's such an expensive endeavor to get aware of a movie and excited and get them to come in and pay now a significant amount of money to go see it in a theater, or even spend time to see it on streaming. That becomes a really important part of the equation. And if they're already familiar With something, the marketing efficiency is significantly greater. So if they have to build, you have to tell somebody about something and it's all new characters, all new world, all new, whatever, that takes a lot more marketing energy, time, and money. so Hollywood is completely in the game. It been for a long time and that's not changing. It's why you see a skill in superhero movies. it's why you see Variations on superhero movies would have been like other movies, you know, maybe in the nineties or eighties, but they just kind of, kind of cram them into, you know, like Joker not a movie about Joker, the character it's really Todd Phillips a story of, you know, it's a character study, but he kind of puts it into the DC universe so that, so that it plays into the IP so that now it can be a movie on a big scale and made a billion in box office. So your memoir a Hollywood movie? If it's a bestseller, there's a chance if it's not, then it still could be a movie. It could be an independent movie. It could be something else. You know, streamers involved and, you know, you know, there's, they need so much product. There's a lot, there's a lot more variation there, but one thing I'll say that I think could be helpful for your audience is, I started out kind of like a memoir storyteller. Well, when I first started out, I made movies with my friends and we made very silly parodies. We made like a goofy Western and like a goofy, like gangster movie. And like, you know, they were terrible and delightful and really fun. And then I went to NYU film school and they got very serious, very serious. I started making personal stories. So I I I won a screenplay award for my senior thesis film at NYU. it was based on the things that happened to me the year previous. So I brought my, my college girlfriend home for the summer I loved her and I love my best friends, but they didn't love each other. so the following year I turned that into a movie and, you know, and it got received. But like. And then I meant, and I went that summer after I left NYU, I made a feature film that was basically about my friends on the NYU soccer team. So it's memoir type stuff, right? Like nobody cares about the NYU soccer team. It's a division three. We weren't great. We weren't terrible. It was just, it was literally, it was like dazing and fuse. It was a hangout for hangout film with my friends. I loved it. And people that saw it was like, Hey, this isn't half bad, but like almost nobody saw it. And that's the thing with memoir. like important to you because you lived it. But like, to what extent are you tapping into what's true to you and true to somebody else? So learned that transition significantly in my own career. There was an inflection point when I'd written a bunch of sort of memoir type. I mean, the, the, the independent film or screenwriting version of it is just like personal drama. And so I'd written a bunch of stuff that was like that, that I loved. And that was good for it. It was good character development, but Hollywood was not all over me. And a producer came to me and was like, look, I like your stuff, but like like write me a genre movie, dude. Like, I can't do anything with your personal dramas, but like, if you write me a genre movie, I can help you. And I was like, Oh, I don't write genre. And then I was at that meeting with another producer friend of mine and we walked away. And I basically in, in storytelling terms, I refused the call to adventure was like, Hey, I can get you to the next level of your adventure. Write me a genre movie and I refused the call. I go, no, not me. I can't do that. I'm an artiste I do personal drama and my producer voice like dude, he's basically offering you a job. What are you doing, man? Write a fucking genre movie and I was like, oh Yeah that like he's right. Like why am I why am I pushing away opportunity? So then I, with a bit bite of humble pie, started thinking more broadly and there are some genre movies I actually do like, know, I don't like the bad ones, but I love the good ones. why don't I just write a good genre movie that has the personal characters and that is the, is the ticket really free? So that, by the way, then got me signed by the best agent in Hollywood and started, I actually being able to sell scripts. Right. I started doing things, I did what I liked in the personal drama space, but I did them in a way that a big audience can relate to, right? Because they can relate to, so I started, so specifically the project that kind of broke me through was it was an alien invasion movie. but it plays out in a very grounded way with very real characters and all, it plays out like a shooter event or like a terrorist attack. then it scales up and it's actually a full on invasion. So they loved it and that. So if you can do memoir tapped into intellectual property, if you could do memoir that's elevated in some sort of genre, so it's so, but it's, if it's actually, you know, you know, Larry Smith in Kentucky and his story about whatever, it has to be told in such a way that's. But again, like you can tell that story and an independent producer might be like, I love that story. And then make it for, I don't know, a hundred thousand bucks, five, 5, 000, 500, 000 or whatever. And it could be a beautiful indie film or whatever. So like you have options, but like, here's, here's the last thing I'll say is you just want to keep in mind that like the audience size will grow when you, when you tell stories in primary colors, right. And, and like the, the core genres, thriller. Comedy, action you know or if you can tell a memoir story within those primary genres, the audience size grows. If it's just personal drama, it's fine, but it's a tiny narrow audience. if you're doing memoir, like maybe you don't even need an audience at all. Like maybe there's so much personal growth value for just writing down your thoughts. don't even want it. And that's totally fine. Like, it's a great way to spend your time and organize your thoughts and, you know, be part of the journey. But if you've done that and you're like, no, no, no, like this is more than just journaling for me. I want to journal for me and journal for an audience. Like, that's really what you're doing as a professional. telling your own story and your audience's story at the same time. And and just be clear, like, You might not really be at that level where you really want to tell somebody else's story, which telling your own story is enough for you. And that's fine. The problem is when you, like, I was talking to this one woman this one time, it was kind of heartbreaking that she just, she was still working through a lot of stuff. And she kept thinking that she had this material that was ready for like professional storytelling. And I was trying to tell her like, I don't think so. Like, I think you just want to work through this stuff on your own. Because the difference is like we go through life is life. So there's real trauma and challenging and whatever, and everybody's life and memoir is a wonderful way to make sense of it. And that is an ends in itself. And if you can do that and be comfortable with it, and you want to then play a whole other game on top of that, by it or whatever in a way that's also, it's totally true to you, but in service to somebody else, that's a professional thing and it's different. And she wasn't ready to do that. She wasn't at all generous. She just felt so deeply about her own thing. And mean she was literally on a conversation with me like crying. I was like, you know. My friend, like, you're not, just because you feel it deeply yourself doesn't mean other people are going to feel it. There's a generosity and a curiosity that drives professional storytelling. and it's not better than or less than, it's just different, but it's really important that you get it clear. Like if you can't even have a conversation with somebody without breaking into tears because this thing is so, you're so tender about the subject. You're not ready to tell a professional story about that because professional storytelling is just iterating like you don't care like I'll try this I'll try this I'll try this because you you're dancing with the audience you want to make sure you're playing to the ones that are like oh I love that okay then you find the nexus between what's true to you and true to them that takes a lot of iteration to get that right.

Elizabeth: 13:27

Yeah, absolutely, you know, and I that this is like a theme I've been talking to a couple other people about I know we'll have some other Podcast guests that come on and talk about this and it's also something that just I've seen come up at a recent writers conference And it's this idea that like yes, there's so much personal healing that happens and goes on As you're working on your memoir, but that doesn't mean that you have to keep your stories in a traditional memoir form, right? So, you may find that a different medium is the better source of expressing those emotions or those struggles or that growth. Whether you need to fictionalize the story in order to feel comfortable sharing it. Whether it would play better as some kind of, you know, documentary or fictionalized movie screenplay we've had a guest come on and she talks about her one woman show, her monologue that she wrote. And I've seen other memoirists who took the very gut wrenching process of writing memoir and took individual threads from that and then used that as their motivation and their inspiration for poetry. So there's so many valid forms of writing. And I think that's a really important part of, of, of, of telling our personal stories and embedding them into other creative works, right? And you know, you, you see this all the time with fiction writers, you know, they're constantly pulling from. Either their own personal experiences or they model a character after like one of their parents or their best friend or whatever And if you know that person that author personally you can see You know those threads of like, oh you borrowed this from this local town's person and I see your your inspiration for that We pull inspiration from You know our personal lives all the time and and that's Really? It's also helpful in expressing these stories and potentially making them more broadly You know viable or interesting And that's something that I talk a lot about In the memoir course that I help people work through is from the beginning figuring out What is the problem that your memoir is providing a solution to that is a problem that you can solve for everyone, meaning that it's not something that's reliant on external resources, because not everyone's going to have the same resources that you had, but what is that sort of intrinsic problem that you were able to solve? You know, do a reframing of a perspective shift you know, a new belief that you can guide your reader through so that they can access and solve the same problem with their own resources, you know, because we have to make sure go ahead.

Brooks: 16:20

I I love that and I think that it's really powerful and it might help you structure things for your, your, your, your community. What's that big life problem? How you try to deal with it the wrong way? Lying to yourself, being selfish in some way, self limiting beliefs, and, and slowly painfully realize that that, that way wasn't actually getting it done. And then you learned a better way. So for my own personal example, my dad. Wasn't around the way that I want them to as a kid. so and at one point my family actually split up. And so then that was the conflict, right? I was an eight year old kid. Dad was not living with my mom and my sister anymore. New school, new place, the wrong way to handle it, quote, wrong way. Which was the best I could do at eight. That's made sense of it was, Oh, I'm not good enough. I'm not really worthy of my dad being in my life. I need, I need to now prove myself. I need to fill this hole. Like all this stuff is, that a kid would create those ideas, but those are all limited beliefs. And so, and I was very much a good boy and not really directly dealing with the grief or the anger. So all these sort of. like ways I dealt with it the best I could were not really helpful ways to do it, but that was the best I could do. So those were, there was the conflict and those were the long ways, you know, the conflict. And then slowly I do trial and error. I was like this, you know, this wasn't working. And then I came fully around and I was like, Oh, well, you know, maybe I am actually worthy and maybe I don't have to try to prove myself. And maybe I, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's really what a beautiful memoir can do. but only when you're clear. And that, that, that woman that I was talking to before, as an example, like there was none of that awareness. She basically just was hung up on like a past relationship, she already remarried and was hung up on a past relationship and how this guy betrayed her and there was no ownership. There was no, I did this thing. That was challenging. And I got over it. It was just, she was still reeling from, you know, really in my mind, she was seeing herself as a victim and hadn't yet overcome it. And so she, you know, I thought the best thing for her was personal work and maybe absolutely writing a memoir for herself about it, but it was certainly, but she, the charge was intense, but it wasn't like, you You know, it wasn't the sort of thing that Hollywood was going to be knocking on the door for because it was about her and she wasn't in a place to be able to go, okay, this is how I felt that it was like volcanic for me. How do I create it in a way that's also volcanic for the audience? That's great. When you can be in that curious, generous place and she just wasn't there yet. And that's fine. It's only a problem if you're not there and you try to force it, you know, by the way, sometimes, you know, Hollywood gets a bad rap. You know, and they deserve it because it's not personal enough. There's, there's a vanilla quality to some Hollywood stuff. There's a generic quality, right? It's too similar to what we've already seen. There's too many cooks in the kitchen that water it down. You know, and that's, and sometimes those movements are popular or whatever, but like, you know, what's beautiful about memoirs, you're starting from a singular vision, know, the key is just your vision. And then the, your audience's vision and funding.

Elizabeth: 20:16

Right, and what you describe, for me at least, when I hear your description of that woman's process, is that she was still in, she was still writing an autobiography, which, to me, is a whole separate genre and different than memoir, because, for me, the essence of memoir, what makes memoir a memoir, I don't care what the publishers stamp on a book and say that, oh, this is so and so famous person's memoir. If it doesn't have a core message, if it doesn't have a misbelief, like you gave a beautiful example of from your own life, right? And you guide the reader through your stories, but you're you set the scene of how this misbelief was established and then how it was then validated through a number of life experiences until you started to get to the point where Something caused you to test it, whether you saw, you know, a mirror example of someone else having chose a different path, and it made you wonder. Oh, I wonder if I if that's true for me, too Maybe you dabble a little bit. Maybe you have some wins Maybe some losses like all of that I use the like the save the cat beats to help people structure their memoirs so that they can show those various stories of the The debates and the defeats and the little wins here and there and then the massive crash, but ultimately you come into, you know, you start act one with your misbelief and really setting up that that premise and then act two is a lot of the like experimenting, maybe seeing some different examples that you try some early wins, some losses and then by act three, then it's your, you're actually And Starting to really test this new belief of like, could this really be true? Could I really just be enough, you know, as I am and it's not based off of what I do for other people or what I accomplish or maybe love doesn't mean I'm going to be abandoned or, you know, whatever that that, you know, misbelief that you're overcoming in that story. And for me, and for, you know, the coursework that I lead. That's absolutely a tenet of what I preach to people about writing their memoir, about being able to take a step back from their own connection to the story, and, and really distill it down to the essence of this misbelief to new belief that, that they went on. And, you know, in, in you sharing that experience with that woman, I feel like that's a, a beautiful example of the, the common trap that I see people get stuck in, When they say that they're trying to write memoir is that that emotional attachment to the stories. And a lot of us have to start there, right? We have to do that work for ourselves to figure it out. But most of the time, those original versions of those stories. Stay on the cutting room floor, and we ultimately end up with an edited version that really does Think about the reader first right and it is crafting the story for the reader's benefit and so that the reader or the audience understands and goes on a journey and while they may Filter their journey through your various scenes that you show them. They're feeling themselves in the scene They're recognizing like the fact that you know I turn to alcohol as a way to fit in and feel more relaxed in a you know, big social setting They're also envisioning themselves in the ways that they may have done that and used Either alcohol or other substances or humor or whatever else to put on a mask in order to feel like they belong somewhere

Brooks: 24:06

yeah, you know, it reminded me of this wonderful thing I heard Alanis Morissette, the musician say, she said that when she You know, writes a song, the first draft is a journal entry. It's exactly how she feels and her lyrics or whatever. And then she, you know, records it and puts it out. And then she said, now it belongs to the audience. And I believed her like the way that she said it. There was a real simplicity. wasn't like, you know, sometimes celebrities say stuff. They don't really mean it, but I felt like there was a real. Genuineness about how just like, you know, when I hear a great song, it feels like my song. I love this song. This might be my song. You might even say it that way. And that was how she saw it. She's like, no, no. Like these songs that I've done that are popular and people like, like these are, they don't belong to me. And I said like, yeah, it originated from me. Like I higher power came through me or whatever, blah, blah, blah. And she said like, I, when a song's rolling, it's like, I just barely work here. She's just kind of like, blah, blah, and then all of a sudden she sings it and what she's doing. My interpretation of her process is when she takes that experience, whatever, and then through her voice expresses it in a way that speaks to the audience's acoustic experience of her personal thing. And when she hits it in the right way, and then all of a sudden, she's right. She like, She vocalized her personal drama in a way that other people felt it spoke to their own personal drama. It's beautiful. There's another example from music that, that like Paul McCartney tells a story where he you know, the, the, one of the Beatles, if anyone didn't know who Paul McCartney is woke up one day and he was humming this song. It's beautiful. And he was like, yeah, I got this song stuck in my head. He's like, who did this song? He called up a friend. I don't know. Like, I haven't heard that song. Like what? No, it's so familiar. called up another friend. I don't know. After like three or four friends, he's like, oh, I like, I guess I created this. Like, or like came through me a hard time. It was like yesterday. It was like one of his best songs ever. Literally just came to him, whole cloth, as if he had already heard it from somebody and it was so good. He couldn't get it out of his head. And now he just went to the thing. And that's. And that's kind of what we're talking about here. That's like what we really are, have a light touch openness to like something bigger than ourselves. And we are just like the, the prism point comes from God knows where through us onto the page and then in service to that audience. It's beautiful. And we don't get stuck on me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. It's just Oh, this is just, oh no, no, it's like, no, it's like this. It's precisely like this. And then we know when the audience flips out for it, that we actually were able to reduce enough friction so that it really is in service to them and their life. And taught them things about themselves or we've shown them things in themselves that they're always there, that they weren't able to make that connection until they saw our art.

Elizabeth: 27:25

Exactly exactly and it's not to say that Those that process of the me me isn't going to be a part of the process It absolutely is a part of the memoir writing process You But you don't stop there, right? Like, you, you keep going at it, you keep revisiting it, you keep editing it until the vengeance is no longer there, the,

Brooks: 27:50

the way I

Elizabeth: 27:50

I need retribution.

Brooks: 27:52

the way I would say the professional. It's Like, I don't want to pretend it's not me because it is me. I am the filter that I need to work with, me with a light touch.

Elizabeth: 28:07

Mhm.

Brooks: 28:08

and to know that like, there's lots of parts of me, there's the more popular part of me, there's a more idiosyncratic part of me. And like, what do I care? As long as I create something through me also serves my audience. That's, that's the game of the professional. When we're, when we're just doing it to do it, then it really is just me in the echo chamber and making sense of stuff. even the professional has that sort of early, you know, like Alanis Morissette, she says she first writes as a journal, it's really just for her and maybe some stuff I'm sure it never gets past that journal for her. So we definitely have to kind of go, what's going on, why do I, why am I obsessed with this thought? Like what is going on? So it has to, that's when we want that sort of inner echo chamber just to kind of make sense of it. And if we never get past that phase with a particular idea, all right, cool. But if it's something thunders through us and it feels like it's just bigger than us, like we're speaking anthemically for us and our audience, that's the realm of the professional artist. know, I was thinking of Mario Puzo, who wrote The Godfather and supposedly, Like when he came up with that line make him an offer he can't refuse. he like saw, he, like, this is an iconic, like iconic line. Like it came to him supposedly in a way of like, it's, it's really interesting. And, and, and we all have those times where you, you just have a feel for iconography, right? Something that's like v and then something that's idiosyncratic, it's like, oh, just this little quirky thing that I do, whatever. so. When you write professionally, you want to become, train yourself to become more sensitive to things that are iconic, not cliche, just iconic, anthemic ways that you're speaking of the audience in ways they can't for themselves because it hasn't come through your prism.

Elizabeth: 30:11

So I wonder in these last few minutes if you have any insights as a screenplay writer of how us as novel writers could impart a little bit more of like that screenplay element, that movie playing in our reader's mind a little bit more of the showing aspect versus the telling. What are just One or two things that you think really amplify that like kind of movie quality of a story, even if it's in just written form. Yeah. Yeah.

Brooks: 30:49

actionable tool that might be most helpful for your thinking about show versus tell is What does it look like with the sound off? So, if you were watching a movie, no sound, or you were watching something outside your window across the street what are the visual cues you would see that would tell you, that would show you what's going on? So for example, let's say it's a couple arguing I'm looking at them out my window, so I can't hear anything, but particularly the, you know, the, the curled, you know, lips and face and the jagged like thing and the, and the other character, like, like even like trembling and like backing up and then like, And then coming back together and like, there's, there's like a, there's, if you think of the blocking of it, if you think of the, just the, the chaos energy of, of what those two figures are doing and how one maybe dominates and like if you just speak to what you see and you can't hear, or maybe you even hear a murmur of it cause it's so loud that they're shouting at each other and maybe there's a prop one uses and jabs a thing at the other, like, you know, yeah. It was silly. They have a banana or whatever, but like then you start and the reason like why even bother show versus tell. And the reason is it sits more deeply in our psyche when it's visually potent and idea is up here. visual land more like in the heart and a deeper place in the psyche. So if you tell me, yeah, I got this. I got, you know, I got, I got in a fight with my spouse or whatever, but if I see that fight outside the window, it's like, it's just, it's, it's more immediate. And what you're, when, when a story, when a story is expressed in a way that's more immediate, it lands a deeper emotional flow and when we land a deep emotional flow, we're more deeply in service because we're teaching them a lesson about whatever the conflict is. So, so there's a hero, there's the, know, the goal and the conflict. And when we can express that visually and speak to what we're seeing, not necessarily what they're saying. And by the way, even when you talk about what they say, it's never about what they say. So if you're writing a love story, the last thing you do is have say, I love you. You know, it's like the old joke between New York and LA, know, in LA they say hello, but they mean F you. New York, they say F you, but they mean hello, right? And that's subtext, right? That's subtext. And so even when you're writing dialogue in your memoir or whatever, like it's what they're doing, it's how they're behaving. The dialogue often contrasts that or, or something totally different or really interesting the way they would, you know, maybe down, like something massive happens and it's like a little word or something tiny happens and they use massive words, right? You're looking for contrast because that's how humans really speak a lot of times. So the takeaway is See if you can write the blocking, the props, the visual cues without any sound. And then if you do, do dialogue look for contrast text and subtext.

Elizabeth: 34:42

That is such great advice. Thank you for sharing that with us. I'm definitely gonna, I'm going to put that up somewhere around my computer just to remind me like, What does it look like with the sound off? What does it look like with the sound off? Because I do think that encourages you as a writer to really dig into like the small visual cues and things of what's happening around. So thank you Brooks for being here with us today. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. We will have all of Brooks contact information in the show description. Please subscribe to this podcast. Please leave us a review. Let us know what you'd like. Share it with a friend, someone who you think might have some screenwriting potential or even just need some additional inspiration when it comes to writing their personal stories. So again, thank you for being here with us, Brux.

Brooks: 35:34

Thank you for having me.

35:41

Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of the Inspired Writer Collective podcast. We hope you found inspiration, insights, and connection to yourself as a writer. If you enjoyed this episode, please share, subscribe, and leave us a five star review. Remember, the power of storytelling lies within each of us, and by supporting one another, we can make a difference. We invite you to schedule a coffee chat with us on our website, www. inspiredwritercollective. com. Just like our style here on the podcast, our coffee chats are casual and a way to connect about your writing and discover if book coaching or joining our upcoming writing cohorts for memoir and contemporary romance writing are for you. You can also become a part of our community by connecting with us on social media. You can find us on Instagram and YouTube at Inspired Writer Collective, on TikTok at Inspired Writer LLC. Let's continue this writing journey together. You can find links in the show notes. Until next time, fellow writers, may your pens be mighty and your stories captivating. Happy writing!