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What if the best way to write a successful series is to stop thinking about the series and focus on writing one excellent book?
In this episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show, I’m joined by Canadian author and writing coach Kevin T. Johns for an honest, funny, and deeply practical conversation about finishing ambitious writing projects, writing a trilogy, and giving your current book everything you have.
Kevin recently completed The Page Turners trilogy, a genre-bending series about three teenagers who discover a magical book of spells and accidentally release the fictional villains from the stories they love.
Across the three books, Kevin moves through horror, science fiction, and fantasy while exploring much bigger themes, including family, anger, identity, loneliness, and what it means to grow up.
But this conversation is not only for writers working on a trilogy.
It’s for anyone whose book has become too big, too complicated, or too precious to finish.
Kevin shares why every book in a series still needs to stand on its own, with a complete emotional arc, a clear theme, and a satisfying story. His advice is simple and powerful: do not save the good material for book three. Put your strongest ideas, scenes, emotions, and creative energy into the book directly in front of you.
We also talk about the “punk rock” mindset that transformed Kevin’s writing process. Instead of trying to create his version of The Lord of the Rings, he began asking how he could make the story shorter, more focused, more passionate, and more entertaining. That shift helped him finish the first book and allowed the rest of the trilogy to grow naturally.
Kevin also offers thoughtful advice for writers who love complex stories. A multigenerational epic with several timelines, continents, and points of view may sound exciting, but complexity does not automatically create depth. Sometimes the more focused your story becomes, the more deeply you can explore what truly matters.
We dig into revision too, including the challenge of returning to a manuscript written ten years earlier. Kevin explains how adding fresh material helped him reconnect with the story while honouring the younger writer who first imagined it.
And because this is a conversation about the real writing life, we talk about self-doubt, dark art, creative resilience, and why writers are rarely the best judges of their work in the moment.
Your readers are not waiting for you to fail. They want to love your book.
So stop saving your best ideas for later. Write the strongest version of the book you can write today.
Listen now to hear Kevin’s practical advice on writing a trilogy, simplifying an ambitious story, revising an old manuscript, finding your audience, and finishing the book in front of you.
