What if you just want to write everything all the time?
How the willingness to experiment in storytelling across different creative forms made me a better writer
I’m on a plane to Seoul, Korea right now (for vacation!), so I invited my friend Russell Nohelty here today to be interesting in my stead. ; )
What I love about Russell is his fearlessness, and I hope his story will help inspire you to do whatever new thing it is that you’ve been wanting to try but might just be a little scared of.
Russell Nohelty is a USA Today Bestselling novelist, a successful comic book writer, a filmmaker, a publisher, and a creative entrepreneur who runs the very popular
, which teaches writers how to not only follow their artistic dreams but also how to make a living out of it.I initially wanted to do “5 Questions with my Favorite Authors” with Russell, but he had so much great stuff to share about his creative journey that we couldn’t fit it all into 5Qs.
Instead, Russell graciously agreed to write a whole piece just for you about the different forms of storytelling he’s worked in, and why the willingness to experiment ultimately made him a better writer.
Without further do, I turn you over to the multi-talented and very hardworking Russell Nohelty:
Hi friends,
I’ve always been a bit of a hot mess when it comes to genre, form, format, and medium. My manager would ask me to define a piece and I would tell him “It’s the thing I do. If you like the thing I do, then you’ll like it.”
It turns out that’s not the most compelling pitch when you’re out on submission. Even though I’m better now, I still generally think that I write the thing I write, and if you like what I write you should not worry so much if you like the genre and just enjoy it.
That’s why, against all advice, I have both fiction and non-fiction inside my publication. I literally teach this stuff for a living, or at least part of one, and I don’t even follow the advice I give people. I know it makes my life harder, but I never liked being boxed into one thing.
I only went to journalism school because I wanted to be a movie director and I only went to the University of Maryland because I got in-state tuition. I actually got into NYU, and I would have gone, too, if it didn’t cost $35,000 a year. Instead, my practicality won out and thus started a long, long history of taking the teachings of one form and translating them to another.
(Also, everyone told me journalism and sociology were phony majors, and yet I use both every single day of my life).
After graduation in 2004, I worked on Capitol Hill for a while, but the news game was never for me. Even though DC is a great documentary town, with Discovery Channel and a billion non-profits lining every street corner, I didn’t want to make documentaries, either.
I wanted to make narrative films, which was why I quit my job in the middle of 2005, went into massive debt to buy a bunch of gear on credit, and spent the next several years trying, and mostly failing, to make movies.
I did end up making one web series and a bunch of other things that failed to see the light of day. Usually, I ended up working for other people and I didn’t love that. As a serial creative entrepreneur, even now I bristle at anyone telling me what to do.
Between 2004 and 2008, that web series was my one career highlight, and it didn’t even come out until 2013. By then, I had moved to Los Angeles, gotten a manager, written a bunch of award-winning screenplays (or they would be eventually. I was just sure of it.), and was ready to conquer the universe.
Maybe I could have scratched out a living as an executive producer/director in DC, but I wanted the brass ring. Spoiler alert…it didn’t work. However, after years of trying and failing to get anyone to recognize my tortured genius, my manager sat me down and asked me a question that would change my life.
Have you ever thought of doing comics?
I hadn’t read comics since the 90s and didn’t follow the indie boom started by Vertigo and Image that grew and blossomed in the previous decade-plus since I stopped reading them. I wanted to make movies, and anything less would be a miserable failure. (God, I was such a pretentious prick back then.)
Still, I took a stack of comics home, cracked them open…and fell in love.
It’s hard to describe the moment when your whole life falls into place, but I opened those comics and everything in my life suddenly made sense. It was like that moment in A Beautiful Mind where Russell Crowe sees how game theory should work in a moment of clarity. I read those comics and swear to the gods it was like seeing behind the code of the matrix.
Before you shoot a movie, you use storyboards, drawn by artists, to visualize what you’re going to shoot. Comics was exactly like that, but better, because those visuals were the end game instead of an intermediary.
My brain has always worked in pictures. Back in DC one of the ways I made money was as a fashion and portrait photographer, often doing headshots for the same actors I cast in my (failed) projects. Between my history with photography and my history making movies, writing comics made intuitive sense to me in a way nothing ever had before in my whole writing life.
Don’t get me wrong, it still took a lot of work to learn how to write comics, but being a screenwriter taught me how to break down a script for a team and how to choose keyframes to emphasize and capture something that resonates with an audience.
(By the way, if you want to see some of those scripts, I have a script archive available to paid members.)
This was the first time I learned the lesson I hope you take from this article…every creative industry has a bit of the truth locked behind it, and the more different mediums and formats you work with the more of that truth you unlock in your own writing.
I jumped into comics with both feet, launching three different books in 2010 and another in 2011. The thing with comics, though, is that just like film there’s a lot of waiting. Unless you’re the artist, too, most of the time you’re waiting for the artist to get to work.
By the time 2011 rolled around, I had several projects in production, but I was mostly twiddling my thumbs. I don’t like twiddling my thumbs. I get antsy quickly, so I tried to find other projects I could work on while I waited.
In the previous two years, I had some success getting some scripts optioned. However, the thing with Hollywood is that an option is the first step in a long process. Sadly, for me, it was the end of the process, too. Nothing ever ended up happening with any of them…at least in Hollywood.
I’m not a fan of rejection, though, especially when I think somebody is wrong, and I thought they were dead wrong about just about everything. I knew there was value in the work I was doing, even if it only found a smaller audience.
I do not like for anything to go to waste, so I started looking for ways to translate some of those projects into comics. The problem was, well, I was broke and already overleveraged producing comics. I had time, but not money, so I decided to do something I always swore I would never do and write a novel.
I now read a book a day, but back then I wasn’t much of a reader. I had certainly never written anything as complicated as a book, but what I did have were vetted projects I knew were saleable.
So, I started with a middle grade novel based on my teleplay Gumshoes: The Case of Madison’s Father. Why did I choose that screenplay to start? A couple of reasons:
Middle grade books are relatively short (35-40k words)
Middle grade books have a simpler story structure
Middle grade books have less complicated prose
I knew story, structure, and character, but I didn’t know how to translate that into a written format where the prose was the final format. Even with comics, the prose it taken and interpreted by an artist. Since this was my first time, I wanted to lower the bar a bit. Not that middle grade isn’t complicated in its own right. It’s just that for what I was trying to learn, I found it a more surmountable challenge.
And guess what?
Working on a novel allowed me to take everything I learned in comics, and bring it to this new format. Comics have a very strict structure, as do teleplays, and together they helped me formulate how to construct a chapter so it always ends with the reader wanting more.
Meanwhile, one of the things that novels taught me was how to play with time by elongating or shortening bits to emphasize, or deemphasize a point. You can spend thousands of words describing a ham sandwich if you wanted or span a decade in the course of a sentence.
Once I finished that manuscript I actually got a publisher interested (though it didn’t work out with them), which gave me the confidence to try again.
I still wasn’t confident enough to write a novel from scratch, but I had a screenplay called My Father Didn’t Kill Himself, which was optioned a couple of times. While I hadn’t written a YA book before, I had been writing a blog since 2008 and decided to try to merge my history with blogs into an epistolary novel.
The whole novel is constructed as blog posts by a girl and her best friend as she deals with the tragic loss of her father, constructed around this twist on a murder mystery novel. It’s still one of my favorite books, and it allowed me to take everything I learned from blogs and combine it with everything I knew about crafting stories.
After that I was off to the races. I’ve written 40 novels and produced over 1,000 pages of comics, along with editing hundreds of articles, comics, and other pieces across nearly every type of writing imaginable.
I can crank out 10,000 good words a day if I’m in a crunch, and can move between mediums with (relative) ease.
Right now, I’m adapting a screenplay from a novel that got optioned several times in the early days of my career. Every time I do this work, it unlocks a little bit more of the truth and makes me a more well-rounded writer.
We’ve also worked with coffee brands, game companies, merch, and more to help translate our stories into new mediums, and every time it unlocks a little bit more of the writing puzzle, showing us how to connect with fans on a deeper and deeper level. I feel like nothing I write is ever lost because I can always bring it into another medium in the future.
In business terms, we call this “creating leverage”. To me, that means performing one action and getting exponential value from it over time.
The hardest thing to do is construct a story that works and connects with people. Once you have a story that works, you’ve done the hardest part. After that, the work is in translating that work so it resonates with as many people as possible.
This is hard, complicated work because every medium works differently in how it connects with readers. The biggest mistake I see writers make is making a 1:1 translation of their work. When we made Black Market Heroine, I decided to show the monsters that the main character can see plainly on the page, but that’s not how I wrote it in the Magic novel that tells the same story.
When I translated Katrina Hates the Dead into the novel Death, I added a lot of context that wasn’t in the comic because novels allow for more emphasis on character interactions and less emphasis on visuals. When I translated the first part of that same story into a web series, I knew money was a constraint so I kept it very small and intimate compared to the bombastic comic or universe-spanning comic book.
This work is very rewarding, but it means swallowing your pride and putting aside your ego to learn what works best in every medium so your work can connect with the right audience.
I spend hundreds of hours with different mediums before I even consider working in them. Even when I started The Author Stack, I read thousands of articles and studied tons of successful Substack publications before I even thought about launching my own. It is that kind of diligence that is rewarded. I started looking into Substack in February of 2023 and didn’t launch until May. It’s been a huge success but only because I did that research and had such a rich writing history.
People are eager to get their work in front of more readers, but they rarely do the work to study the medium before launching something. Even when they do, they don’t do it critically and with intention. If you want your book to be a movie, or a comic, or live in any other format, then you need to study the medium to learn how it works.
This kind of work is supposed to be fun, but it is still work.
Most people think the only transmedia success comes when your work is made into a Netflix show, but I’ve worked in almost every medium and had a very successful career translating my work into other formats without ever having that kind of success…though I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice.
Russell Nohelty (www.russellnohelty.com) is a USA Today bestselling fantasy author who has written dozens of novels and graphic novels including The Godsverse Chronicles, The Obsidian Spindle Saga, and Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter. He is the publisher of Wannabe Press, co-host of the Kickstart Your Book Sales podcast, cofounder of the Writer MBA training academy, and cofounder of The Future of Publishing Mastermind. He also co-created the Author Ecosystem archetype system to help authors thrive. You can take the quiz to find your perfect ecosystem at www.authorecosystem.com or find most of his writing on his Substack at theauthorstack.com. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and dogs.
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