Rachael Herron (RH Herron)'s Blog, page 8

Nancy Stohlman is the author of four books of flash fiction including Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (a finalist for a 2019 Colorado Book Award), The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), and The Monster Opera (2013). She is the creator of The Fbomb Flash Fiction Reading Series and FlashNano in November. Her craft book, Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction, is forthcoming from Ad Hoc Fiction in 2020. She teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado Boulder. When she is not writing flash fiction she straps on stilettos and becomes the lead singer of the lounge metal jazz trio Kinky Mink.  She dreams of one day becoming a pirate.

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

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Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 235 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron, and I am thrilled that you’re here with me today as I speak to Nancy Stohlman on why writing short, and I mean, short, short, short is so exciting. I found this conversation completely fascinating, and I hope that you do too. So she was a delight, please stick around for that. What’s going on around here? Well, the move continues a pace, we did a pretty- not pretty, a very difficult thing. This last weekend, when we gave our kitty Waylon to someone who’s adopting him and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And I know that sounds over-reactive if you are not an animal person, but if you are, you understand. Waylon is too old to make the trip safely. Cats just die. His age, either during the flight or during the quarantine, and we can’t do that to him. Waylon is also the one that lost his dog this, you know, a couple of months ago, also lost his twin brother about a month ago. So, rehoming him was so much harder than it normally would have been because we felt like we were stripping everything from him, which we were, and it was awful, but, we took him to a home with three incredible, adorable, smart kids who just want to love him. And Waylon is just made of love and apparently he’s just been loving everybody in the house and fitting in and we’re crossing our fingers. But it works out really well and that he stays there and, that’s why we did it early. [00:01:59] So they have some time to take him for a test run although I don’t think they have any interest in taking him for a test run. I think they have adopted him wholeheartedly and that makes me feel good and it makes me sad, but we are one- I think that was honestly the hardest thing we’re going to have to do in this move. I could just say goodbye to my sisters and my people, because I can talk to them. I can continue talking to them on zoom. I can come back and see them. You can’t explain this kind of thing to a little old man cat. So, yeah, I’m glad that’s done because it was excruciating. What else is going on around here? Well, I just finished doing our taxes and this was the best year ever since I talked about that in my money show at the beginning of the year, but it’s always a little bit different in April when my tax person says, oh, and don’t forget, you made this here, and you made that. And here’s your, what you made- net and she just pointed out to me couple hours ago, the year that I went full time, 2016, I netted $20,000 from my writing business. And in 2020, 4 years later, I netted $160,000. That’s after expenses. So that’s amazing! That’s so awesome. And I am proud of myself and I am happy and grateful. And I wanted to take this moment to talk to you a little bit about money. And I’ve said this before on the show, and I will say it again, but this is for you, if you want to be a full-time writer. And by that, I mean, if you want to be a person who sustains financially half or more, of a household. [00:03:46] I needed to continue to bring in my half of the mortgage and our half of the bills. And we live in the bay area and it’s expensive. And honestly that first year of 2016, that net did not cover what I needed, we had to go a little bit in the savings then I believe if I’m remembering correctly, I know that I needed to bring in $36,000 a year, when I left the job in order to cover those things. And here is what that looks like: If you want to be full-time, if this is something that you must bring in money to support your family or yourself, there’s one thing that you have to do. There’s a few things, but the most important thing you have to do is get out of debt. And I know that we don’t talk about that enough in America or, you know, anywhere really, but debt is one of those things that so many people carry around. And they don’t talk about it because it’s shameful. And by carrying it around and being ashamed of it and not talking about it, it gets worse and worse and worse. And I have a set on the show and I’ll say it again. I think our deepest in debt moment was not including our house. We were $125,000 worth of dollars in debt. That included an IRS bill, my student loan, 40 or $45,000 worth of credit card debt and something else. Now, maybe it was just those three things. We have never carried any money on the cars because we drive hoopies, and that’s okay. That’s what we like. But that was a lot of debt and that is why I worked a full-time job. And I wrote for the first, for six or seven years after I was first published. Yeah. Six years. My first book came out in 2010. So I’d been getting paid for writing since about 2008 when I sold my first book and I continued to work double full-time jobs until 2016 in order to get out of that debt. And I just wanted to put a plug in for a tool that is how we got out of debt. I’m not affiliated, I’m not getting any kickbacks for this, but YouNeedaBudget.com YNAB, Y-N-A-B. YouNeedaBudget.com is life-changing, I didn’t start using it until I was late thirties and I only started using it because best friend Sophie Littlefield was also really struggling with money after being divorced and winding up broke with nothing to show and no way of understanding how money works and how to take care of ourselves.[00:06:34] And somehow I got into our late thirties and I’ve always been the one who does the bills, but I just didn’t understand how money worked. And I didn’t understand how much I needed to save and put away and not spend every month because of the bills that were going to be coming. Like I’m a smart, intelligent person. I thought I always knew what was coming and yet, we were always clap caught flat-footed we were always needing to use the credit cards because we just weren’t gonna make it through that at the end of that month and this is nothing to be ashamed of. This is normal. I’m going to look up a stat. I found it. It is from a study by the federal reserve. This came out last year. Almost half of American adults would not be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash from savings. That’s almost half of Americans don’t have enough to cover $400 worth of emergency anything. So if you’re in that camp, don’t feel embarrassed. I mean, I know it’s normal to feel shame, but the more we talk about it, the more we look at it, the more we gaze upon it, the more we understand that we’ve all been in that boat, the easier it gets. So why YNAB, YouNeedaBudget, is kind of like mint or, you know, other budgeting software, but in another way, it isn’t at all. It is nothing like those things. I can’t explain it to you. They will have to explain it to you. They have a million awesome, cute cartoon, lank little videos that teach you how to use the software, but basically, you give every dollar that you own at this moment, a job, and that’s the magic of it. So even if you have $10,000 in your checking account right now, in your head, when you look at YNAB, it might show you that you have maybe, you know, $700 left for the rest of the month, because every other dollar in there is being held for something.[00:08:33] And that, I was thinking about it today, because that is why we stopped getting pets. This is true when Lala and I moved in together 15 years ago, we just adopted animals and they are all dying out. Because animals, dogs and cats typically live around 15 years. And that is why we have lost three of five this year to old age. And then a fourth too. Adopting away. And then we’ll loan my dog Dozy to my friend, Sophie, while we’re looking for housing in New Zealand, and then we’ll bring Dozy over. But we’ve lost three out of five because we all, we adopted them. We filled up the house with animals and then using YNAB, I came to learn over the course of months of using it, that amortized over the year, every single animal cost us about a hundred dollars a month, in pet supplies and in veterinary care. So if we had five animals, we were spending on average $500 a month on something pet related and we were broke, broke, broke, broke, and we were drowning in debt. And I realized, oh my God, if I keep the kitten that I just found, cause I’m always finding animals. That’s another a hundred dollars a month. We can’t afford it. And that’s when I started being really, getting really good at finding alternate homes for pets. And that’s kind of what I did for a while because I find animals. And, so it taught as things like that. And you save up for things so that when things arise, or fall in your lap, you have the money just to write the check, just to spend the money because it’s in his own little bucket and I cannot explain how it works so well, but it does. [00:10:09] And I’ve told so many friends and family about this app and they get out of debt and they tell me that it has changed their lives and retell YNAB. YNAB has testimonials on their site about how people’s lives have been changed by this. I owed money to the IRS, today, after I met with my tax person, but I knew what I owe, and it was in a savings account and I just get to write a check and it’s covered. I have the money right there waiting to be paid. And it is a monthly fee nowadays. It used to be that you could just buy the program once, but of course they’ve moved over to a monthly thing. I can’t actually remember how much it is. Maybe $10? I’m guessing. It is worth it. If you are struggling with your finances in any way at all, and if you want to be a full-time writer someday, get you the YNAB. I’m really, I couldn’t push this more, this is right up there with, in order to be a writer, you have to sit down and do some crappy, terrible wordsmithing. Sometimes, if you want to support yourself by writing, you need to be out of debt. Debt is an emergency. I don’t include mortgage debt. Personally, I do include student loan debt because that is your sorriest. I can never say that word. You should. You know the word I’m talking about. I read it. I can’t say it. You serious. They are so predatory. I took out a loan for $40,000 for my master’s degree after paying it for I’ve written all these stats down, now I forgot them, after paying it for 12 or 13 years, I owed them $50,000 and I’d paid them $26,000 over those years. So I owed them more than I had taken out after paying them $26,000. And believe me, once I finally did that math and they do not make it easy, then we started funneling all our money at that last debt that we had because everyone says student loan, that is okay. I don’t think it’s okay. So treat your debt like an emergency, if you want to be a full-time writer and if you have to bring in money for your household, and that’s probably the best thing you can do for your writing self apart from doing the writing.[00:12:18] So, that’s my little pep talk today and I want you all to be able to be that full-time writer, if you want to. Do that, it is absolutely possible. Yeah it’s and it’s awesome. And now we’re moving to New Zealand and that’s, we can afford to do that because we don’t have debt behind me, if you’re watching on the YouTube video, I’ve got the Hush Little Baby poster just went up over my shoulder that comes out in about three weeks. I really should be doing more for that. And I’m not. So I need to get on that. I’ve got a couple of articles to write. But I’m getting excited about that. I will let you guys know about the launch party, which will be online at a Murder by The Book in Houston with my friend John, who runs the bookstore. So that’s going to be fun. I believe let’s look that up right now. If you want to mark your calendar, it’s free to come. I would love to have you. It is on May 14th. I think it’s free to come. They may want you to buy a book. I haven’t actually looked into the details, but it is Murder by The Book on May 14th, please come. I would love to see you. I’m also going to be sending out signed book plates for anybody who buys a book from Murder by The Book. So if you want a signed book plate to put in your Hush Little Baby, I would love to do that for you and there. My plug is done for that, and we can go into the interview with Nancy Stohlman. Please enjoy it. Please enjoy your own writing. And I’m really, really glad that you’re here. [00:13:43] Do you wonder why you’re not getting your creative work done? Do you make a plan to write and then fail to follow through? Again? Well, my sweet friend, maybe you’d get a lot out of my Patreon. Each month, I write an essay on living your creative life as a creative person, which is way different than living as a person who’ve been just Netflix 20 hours a week and I have lived both of those ways, so I know. You can get each essay and access to the whole back catalog of them for just a dollar a month. Which is an amount that really truly helps support me at this here writing desk. If you pledge the $3 level, you’ll get motivating texts from me that you can respond to. And if you pledge at the $5 a month level, you get to ask me questions about your creative life, that I’ll answer in the mini episodes. So basically I’m your mini coach. Go to patreon.com/Rachael (R A C H A E L) to get these perks and more and thank you so much.

Rachael Herron: [00:14:43] All right. Well, I could not be more happy, and pleased to welcome to the show, Nancy Stohlman. Hello, Nancy! 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:14:49] Hi! How are you? 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:50] I’m so glad to talk to you. You’ve got, if anybody’s watching on the video, you’ve got the campus, it’s the university of Colorado Boulder behind you, right? 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:15:00] Yes. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:01] Where you would be if you were actually teaching today on campus

Nancy Stohlman: [00:15:04] Exactly. And where the trees in my, in my fantasy are already blooming and we’re already in spring, so 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:12] Yes, we’re getting so close here, all the daffodils have just sprung up. So. Getting closer. Well, let me give a little bit of a bio for you. Nancy Stohlman is the author of four books of flash fiction, including Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities, which was a finalist for the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories, 2014 and The Mons- I love that title and The Monster Opera, 2013. She is creator of the F-bomb Flash Fiction reading series and FlashNano in November. Her craft book going short, an invitation to Flash Fiction is forthcoming from Ad Hoc Fiction in 2020. Is it already out? 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:15:53] It’s out. Yes. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:54] Okay. We will correct that, to say it is out, now. Fantastic. She teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado Boulder. When she is not writing flash fiction, she straps on stilettos and becomes the lead singer of the lounge metal jazz trio Kinky Mix. She dreams of one day becoming a pirate. As a lead singer in a yacht rock band called Sausalito, the lead singer in me, honors the lead singer in you. 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:16:19] The lead singer in me honors the lead singer in you. That is, I want that on a t-shirt 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:25] There are two leads in my band, but how are you doing with the whole pandemic and not being able to perform? 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:16:34] Say that one more time?

Rachael Herron: [00:16:35] Oh, sorry. It froze a little bit. How are you doing with the pandemic and not being able to perform, not being able to play? It’s been really driving me crazy.

Nancy Stohlman: [00:16:44] Oh, I know I’ve got this fan to see, once I saw all the people over in Europe doing like the balcony cello concerts and things like that. And I have a pretty big balcony here and I’m up on the third floor. So I get a pretty good crowd if we did a balcony concert, and I have yet to convince my bandmates that this is a good idea, but I have not given up hope that we’re going to have a balcony concert here soon.

Rachael Herron: [00:17:10] I think it is a fantastic idea. And if you do, you should record it and broadcast it. I think that is amazing. Okay. So let’s talk about your writing though. You are a master of the flash of the short, and I kind of wanted to talk to you about your process around this. Maybe how did you come to a flash fiction and how do you write it, really?

Nancy Stohlman: [00:17:34] That’s such a big question. 

Rachael Herron: [00:17:36] I know

Nancy Stohlman: [00:17:37] So, let me clarify. So how do, how did I get started writing it? or how would another person get started?  

Rachael Herron: [00:17:48] Oh no, how did you, how did you get started writing it? 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:17:50] Yeah sorry, there was a little lag there. I- it’s interesting because I wrote novels for a long time. I thought I was going to be a novelist and I love novels. I read novels all the time. I think novels are amazing. And so I just assumed, if one was going to be a writer, then one would be a novelist and that I should begin writing novels or poetry, but, I was always kind of on the prose then. So I wrote novels for many years and those were not published novels, but I was getting my feet kind of in the novel genre and there was just this part of me that was like, you know, sometimes I just want to say it faster and I don’t want to have to create all this like exposition and I don’t want to have to do so much explaining. Like, I think that there’s something mysterious about not doing so much explaining. And so I was sort of just battling myself in my own head. And then I discovered flash fiction, which is for those of you listening, who don’t know what it is already, the technical term would be a story, a full, complete standalone story in less than a thousand, its actually quite long once you’ve been in the flash fiction world. So, even much shorter, most of my stories are around 500 words I would say. And so here I am writing novels and all of a sudden, I discovered this flash fiction form in which the idea is to condense it down, to distill it down to the essence of the story without any of the fluff. And it just blew my mind and suddenly I didn’t want to write. I can just play with the reader and I can create stories that are using ambiguity and implication and white space and come up with something much more mysterious for me. So I just never looked back and I continued to write books and I continue to write books that have, you know, a novel scope to them, but I’ve never, ever wanted to return to traditional chapters and exposition and all of that.

Rachael Herron: [00:20:09] So you have the novel scope, but it’s told through these pieces of flashes, that right? 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:20:15] That’s where I’m headed these days. So, for years and years, I just wrote kind of single standalone flash fiction pieces, and I’m just like crazy about them. And then I started collecting them into books and I have several collections. You mentioned some of them, but I noticed even with my collections and beginning with the Vixens screen, which was in 2014, that I was, that the novelist in me was still wanting to tell this epic story, but now I was doing it through like, almost like a mosaic of taking all these flash pieces and kind of creating a mosaic that is interesting. The pieces are interesting, but then when you step back, oh, whoa! Suddenly, all these pieces made a portrait of you know- whatever. And so that’s where I find myself leaning now, is kind of this juxtaposition of the novel and flash fiction, which is really exciting for me.

Rachael Herron: [00:21:12] I find that so exciting. I find that so incredibly interesting to think about where do you, in terms of process, where do you fit your writing in around your life, and around your teaching? And how has that changed during the pandemic, if it has? 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:21:27] Oh yeah, for sure. I think it’s always a challenge. So I’m a mom, and my children are getting older now. I have a 22-year old and a 15-year old. So, I just have one at home still, but you know, I’ve been writing and I started writing novels when my first child was born. So 22 years ago, I sat down and said, well, I guess I better get to work if I’m going to be a novelist. And so all through my life of being a writer and a parent simultaneously, it has been a real creative exploration of you know, when do I have consistent time. And for many years, consistent time was nap time. I wrote entire books from 1 to 3 in the afternoon, consistent time would be bedtime. I wrote other books from 8 to 10 in the evening. And so I think that’s something that I’ve gotten really good at is, realizing that the ideal situations may not always be there or be, you know, easy, but you can always create a writing routine. You just kind of have to get creative about it. And just because one routine worked for you for a few years doesn’t mean that you won’t have to come up with a new routine again. And that’s sort of what happened to me with quarantine. I had gotten into a routine. It’s very funny because my life, you know, I was commuting to Boulder on the trains, and so my writing time would often be my train commute. So I would have, you know, 45-minute ride to Boulder, 45-minute ride back. That was an hour and a half of consistent writing that would happen every day. And so as non-ideal as it seems, non-idyllic, for sure. I was getting a lot of good work done and, you know, I’d get on, the doors would close then we take off on the commute and I would be in the zone. And so when the when the quarantine hit, surprisingly, I was missing my commute to work, even though I really don’t want to be commuting to work, but it was like, whoa! Now I have to re-imagine my entire routine again, just when it was going so well. So, with some trial and error, I’m now back into like an early morning, set the alarm for 7, make the coffee. I actually do a lot of writing in bed. I find that when I’m in bed, I kind of am half connected to the dreamy, unconscious deep zoo of my brain. And if I wait too long to start writing, then I just, then I’m practical then I’m making a to-do list of things I have to do that day and stuff like that. So, now I’m feeling like I’m kind of grooving in this like 7 to 9 time in the morning. Before I check my email or check my phone, or look at any of anybody else’s words or voices or anything, and that’s been working really well. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:19] A couple of things, just to point out for listeners who are all writers listening to the show is that you are speaking very clearly about writing for, you know, an hour or two a day. And I always think that there’s this myth that goes with writers that we we’re probably sitting in one spot, 8 hours a day, turning out beautiful prose, page after page after page. And we can’t, we don’t, we can get in our hour and a half or two hours, maybe three hours on a really good day. But otherwise I don’t know about you, but I tap out in terms of the sheer deep focus creation part of it. 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:24:54] Absolutely. I try to think about my writing time is about three hours a day, but I know that an hour of that is just journaling and maybe a half hour of that is taking a walk. So the actual time, like typing words is yeah, hour an hour and a half. And I try to say the same thing to writers that it is better to do less every day than to try to do these marathon writing sessions on the weekend. Because when you’re it, it’s like having a long distance relationship. You know, if you talk for 15 minutes every day, you haven’t really lost touch. You feel like you’re still kind of actively in the relationship. But if you wait until the weekend, you got to do a whole lot of catching up. There’s a little bit of a strange event that happens. And I think the same thing can happen with our work. If we wait too many days in between, then we have to kind of reread the whole thing from the beginning and trying to figure out where we were, what were we thinking? And so even 30 minutes a day, every day, or say 5 days a week is like cumulative. It’s like compounded interest. You’re going to get way more than just the 30 minutes because your unconscious is helping you in those other 23 hours and 30 minutes in between, because it knows you’re coming back. There’s like a trust.

Rachael Herron: [00:26:11] Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I feel like if we do touch, touch it just like Chris Beatty of NaNoWriMo says to like open your computer and throw the chunk of meat at it and then shut it. Just feed the animal every, you know, every day if you can, keeps us going. That’s and I love your analogy about the long distance relationship. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing? 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:26:32] Well, besides scheduling and time and logistics and things like that, I think it’s, it’s remembering that creativity goes in cycles. So sometimes we’re in that discovery phase where we’re not really sure what our next idea is going to be, and we’re just kind of playing around. And then sometimes we’re like gripped by the muse and we can hardly wait to get to our work. And then sometimes we’re in like a finishing phase and we’re kind of bringing things to completion and maybe putting it out in the world if we’re lucky. And then sometimes that phase is followed by a little fallow, you know, phase where we’re recuperating. Because I just put out going short in October, I’m kind of coming out of my fallow phase. And to me, that’s probably the biggest challenge, even though I know it’s coming, even though I know that you have to rest and recuperate and fill the well up again, I get nervous and I find that sometimes I even stall on the finishing. Just because I know what follows next is the fallow and I don’t and I get so, you know, can I do it again? Can I find another idea? What am I going to do during my writing time? So I’ve been trying to get really creative this time. Going into it, eyes open, I knew, you know, that I’m finishing the project and it’s complete and it’s beautiful and it’s gorgeous and I’m celebrating it. And I’m getting to talk to people like you and behind the scenes, I’m just going to be really gentle with myself. And I’m going to just do things for fun and play. And, you know, I don’t have a new project I’m working on yet because I’m waiting for it to show up. So I’ve been doing a lot of like, writing poetry, playing with techniques, reading a lot of craft books and just sort of waiting for that next idea to hit me. And I can enter that discovery phase again. So, some of it I’m saying out loud because I’m still coaching myself through it, but just remembering that the ebb and flow of the creative process always turns like it’s always going to turn and six months from now, I’m going to be in another phase. 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:36] And that is completely normal to feel that way. Have you read Wintering by Katherine May? 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:28:41] No, I’m going to write it down though. 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:42] I think you might like it. It’s about how the seasons are, you know, our lives are cyclical, these seasons are cyclical and we don’t get as a tree, we don’t get to go in a deciduous tree and in winter, doesn’t get to say no, I’m going to work real hard. I’m just going to work real hard and put out new leaves. Like they just don’t get that option and neither do we. So yeah, I think you might like it. What is your biggest joy when it comes to writing?

Nancy Stohlman: [00:29:07] I love it. Biggest joy, I mean, I think anybody listening knows that like amazing feeling of when, you know, you’re just feeling connected to like God and the universe and everything magical. And you’re like, I am a conduit for ideas. You know, they are coming through me. I’m a midwife and so, you know, trying to create the conditions for that to happen as often as possible. I do take what I call like little sabbaticals whenever I can. And it’s something that brings me a ton of joy because it lets me go really deep. And, sometimes these sabbaticals last just for the weekend and sometimes they happen in like, motel six, you know, and some, yeah, I mean, you know, there’s nothing interesting happening in motel six, so there’s no reason to leave your room and get distracted from your work. So it’s actually, I’ve had many, many, many productive sabbaticals in motel 6 but then sometimes I get to treat myself and spend like a week. I’ll get what I’ve been doing during quarantine is getting an Airbnb that I can drive to. And then I just stay there. You know, I just bring groceries with me and I don’t leave. And so it allows me to really kind of be always in that like half writing, half dreamy state. I’m very lucky that my children are old enough now that I can leave them for a week. Obviously people can’t do that as easily, but I even think if you can give yourself a weekend somehow in somebody’s house, house sitting. In the motel 6 or whatever it might be it is one of my very favorite things and I feel like I get so many breakthroughs when I give myself 36 straight hours to just be with my manuscript. Especially if you’ve been having a long distance relationship, and you got to reconnect with it over the weekend. So like manuscripting counter weekend. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:06] That’s a very sexy way to think about the writing, which sometimes can feel very, very, very unsexy. Can you share a craft tip of any sort with us?

Nancy Stohlman: [00:31:18] Well, I think it’s really important to know what part of the writing phase you’re in. So are you in the creation phase or are you in the editing phase? And I think that we should keep those things very separate. So, and you know, I teach in college and so I’ll talk to people who are doing a lot of academic writing and I give them the same, you know, the same advice they think, well, it’s just a waste of time to write it, then go back and edit it. So I just edit it as I’m writing. I think edit as you’re writing is the worst idea, especially for creative people, because when you’re creating, you are literally like playing, you know, you’re just like taking risks and you’re like a little child and it’s so important to protect that. The editor is the like tough love parent, not the protective parent. So if you bring in the editor while the child is playing, it they just don’t co-exist. And I think that both processes are extremely important, but I think they have to happen in different spaces. So I never do those things at the same time. And I try not to do them on the same day even, or I do one in the morning and one in the afternoon with hours in between. But I think it’s really important to know where you’re at. And it also goes with like sharing your work. I think that sometimes people can get really excited to share their work because like, ‘Hey guys, guess what? I wrote something’ you know, and you really just want people to go, ‘Yes! You wrote something, you know, like, cheers!’ But the problem is you show it to somebody and instead of them realizing you just want them to give you a high five and say, I see you, you wrote something. They’re like, oh, well, it’s pretty good. But maybe you can do this, you know? And you’re like, I wasn’t ready for that. I think it’s hard for us to articulate that to people. So I think it’s really important to get kind of self-aware about where we are in that process. Am I in the place where I need to protect my work? Am I in the place where I need to get tough love? Am I ready for feedback, or not? And so yeah, I think that being very clear about your own process is going to help you give yourself what you need at the right time.

Rachael Herron: [00:33:31] I absolutely love that and I could not agree more. And it’s something that I’ve learned over and over again, is that whenever I get a draft of a book into shape where I think it’s finally time to like, let my wife read it. Now, that the back of my brain says, no, you really want her to read this after it’s done because if she reads it now and I’m going to make it better with my editor later, then I’m going to be bummed. She can’t read it again for the first time. 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:33:55] Yes, yeah. You’re right. 

Rachael Herron: [00:33:57] So anybody who is tempted to share stuff too early, don’t forget that no matter what, you will make it better. And then you will regret that your friend or your partner cannot see it in its better way for the first time. Yeah. I love that. What- yeah go on.

Nancy Stohlman: [00:34:11] Well, I think if you can like, I was going to say, if you can even establish I’ve got some friends who, you know, will share things, but it’s like, don’t need comments, just need a high five, you know?

Rachael Herron: [00:34:22] Yes

Nancy Stohlman: [00:34:23] And if you can do that for each other and be really clear about that can be great for just accountability. You know, I had a friend when I was on one of my sabbaticals and he was like, okay, I’m gonna email you something every day, just acknowledge that it was written and he did the same back and I was like, you’re writing and I see it, you know, and that was all that was really needed. And we were both extremely productive so,

Rachael Herron: [00:34:43] I believe in accountability groups. And I have a hard time believing in crit groups. Like I’ve seen crit groups can help sometimes they do, but for the vast majority of students who are new to this game, I’ve seen crit groups just take them down. So countability group all the way.

Nancy Stohlman: [00:34:58] Yep. Yep. For sure.

Rachael Herron: [00:35:01] What thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way?

Nancy Stohlman: [00:35:08] Yeah, I was thinking about this question actually, I think I’m very effective, you know, as we were both talking about being musicians, I think all creatives are usually creative in more than one field. So maybe we don’t specialize in more than one field, but we are affected by more than one field and we are, you know, actively appreciating. I feel like if I had 10 other lives, I would be 10 other kinds of artists, you know, artists’ fields. So I think I purposely allow myself to be affected by other art as often as possible. So, you know, I go to the museums alone and I just like spend an artist and date there. I listen to music. I actually go, well used to, go to classical concerts alone again, you know, and just this alone, it’s like me and my creativity we’re going to go get inspired, you know, get cross pollinated by other people’s art. And so all of it, photography, music, dance I feel like that’s one of the things that we can do is just allow other people’s creative expression to wash over us and through us, and then out in words, because that’s our specialty. And so that’s something that I’m, that I really try to do a lot is just put myself in situations where I can absorb the fruits of other people’s creative process, even if it’s not words. And especially, actually, if it’s not words, 

Rachael Herron: [00:36:40] I have had a hard time with this since the lockdown and I’m wondering if you have found any other ways to do this because I am the same way. I love the artist states. I love going by myself to things, but because we are so locked in, I’ve taken to doing something I don’t do it often, maybe once a month, but I will lie on the couch or in bed or something and put in my headphones and listen to an album from top to bottom, the way we used to do it in the nineties girl, you know, and just like listen to the transitions. And especially if it’s a new, a new album to me, has been really firing some stuff up. Have you found any ways to treat your artist in this way? Take them on a date while we’re still under lockdown. 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:37:22] Yeah, I love that idea by the way. Here’s my very favorite of all, and because we’ve got daylight savings changing soon, I would, I’m planning to do it this weekend as a matter of fact is to get up early before the sun rises, like when it’s still dark, dark, dark, make some coffee, get in the car and drive east. Drive toward the sunrise and put on music. I love like Tom Waits, you know, and just drive and watch the sunrise to whatever music is like calling you and then drive home. And I mean,

Rachael Herron: [00:37:58] It is beautiful

Nancy Stohlman: [00:37:59] It changes everything. It changes everything and it’s, and it’s been my favorite thing to do during quarantine because I don’t have to interact with anybody and I come home and people are just waking up by the time you come home and you’re already like, ah, life is good, you know?

Rachael Herron: [00:38:14] I am going to do that. That is beautiful. I will tell you very quickly, just an aside, I met Tom Waits once at a, at like he was at in Yosemite, my girlfriend was lighting this fire and he helped her and she didn’t know who he was, but I followed him out to the back of the, I went to the woodpile with him, which is a great thing to say that you went to the woodpile with Tom Wait, and I will tell you how articulate I was. I said to him, are you? And then he said, ‘Yep’. 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:38:45] Wow. 

Rachael Herron: [00:38:46] Can’t get his name out of my mouth. I know it was awesome, but I’m going to, I’m going to take that driving east thing and I probably will play some Tom Waits. What is the- 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:38:55] I have the small change album or one of those old ones, that’s

Rachael Herron: [00:39:00] Yeah. I love all the old stuff. I love Holly Cole’s, take on that stuff. Perfect. What is the best book that you’ve read recently? And why did you love it?

Nancy Stohlman: [00:39:08] Oh, recently. So recently actually I’ve been doing a lot of rereading because

Rachael Herron: [00:39:00] What are you rereading?

Nancy Stohlman: [00:39:08] Yes. Well I’m in that fallow phase and whenever I’m in that fallow phase, I always go back to rereading. Cause I’m like, let’s remember all the things that have juiced me up in the past. So, two things I’ve reread recently, one is The War of Art, which is an amazing book by Steven Pressfield. If nobody, if you haven’t read it, it’s a little craft book, it’s tiny. It’s adorable. It’s fierce you can probably read it in a couple of days or a couple of hours depending. It very much inspired me for going short in the formatting of the book and yeah, it’s amazing. And then the other book that I’ve been rereading is actually one of my favorite books of all time, which is: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway. And I’m a Hemingway fan

Rachael Herron: [00:39:58] I don’t think I’ve ever read that one. Actually, now that I think of it,

Nancy Stohlman: [00:40:01] I know most people haven’t read that one. And some of the ones that he’s the most famous for, I don’t enjoy it as much, but For Whom The Bell Tolls is set in the Spanish civil war, you know, they’re waiting in the hills to bomb the bridge and all of this. So it’s a 1930s, you know, Spanish civil war book, but there’s just something so interesting to me about the way he strings tension through that book, because so much of the book they’re waiting for the signal to like for the action and hundreds of pages, they’re waiting for the signal. And then of course, once they get the signal it’s goes fast. But what he does in those hundreds of pages, while they’re waiting for the signal is just so like to string you the tension that long, you know, where we’re like, oh my gosh, are we ever going to get the signal? But I’m not bored. I just, 

Rachael Herron: [00:40:47] Wow

Nancy Stohlman: [00:40:48] Found it fascinating. So, I’ve read it three or four times, and every time I read it, I just get something else from him, language, tension, I think he’s a real treasure to literature, so 

Rachael Herron: [00:41:02] I’m going to put them on my list. Also, I do love him. I’ve loved what I’ve read. And I also like that I’m always shelved between Hemingway and Hessa. And then there’s Heron and I’m like, you know, It’s- it doesn’t, it’s not weird. It’s a weird feeling to be between the two giants.

Nancy Stohlman: [00:41:17] Yeah. I’m always shelled next to Bram Stoker. 

Rachael Herron: [00:41:22] That’s cool!

Nancy Stohlman: [00:41:23] That’s very cool. 

Rachael Herron: [00:41:24] That’s very cool. Speaking of shelving, will you talk about your new book Going Short, 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:41:31] Of course, I will.

Rachael Herron: [00:41:32] Full title, Going Short an Invitation to Flash Fiction,

Nancy Stohlman: [00:41:34] Invitation to Flash Fiction let’s see if it’s going to come up. 

Rachael Herron: [00:41:36] Perfect. 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:41:37] Yes! And so, yeah, so Going Short is really like 10-years worth of my, like living and loving in the flash fiction world. I feel like, I came into flash fiction in around 2007, which, obviously there were people writing flash fiction at that time, but it’s really become something that’s taken. It’s gotten a lot of momentum since then. So I really feel like that I’ve been on that vanguard watching it go from something, just kind of odd to something with a lot of momentum. And I’ve been teaching it for a long time, I’ve been, you know, publishing for a long time. I actually ran a small press, for a time in 2000 in the early, 2008 to 12 or so, and so basically Going Short is like everything that I possibly know about writing, flash fiction, editing flash fiction, how to put flash fiction in books, why it’s important, what it is, like, why you should write it, its philosophy, its tips, the chapters are very, very tiny because I wrote them as flash fiction pieces. So again, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to see this, you’re going to have to just buy it and look at it, but the chapters are written as flash fiction pieces themselves. 

Rachael Herron: [00:43:02] What a great idea. Yeah. 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:43:04] So the whole chapter is one page or half a page. 

Rachael Herron: [00:43:05] The form actually-

Nancy Stohlman: [00:43:06] It depends because it’s- exactly, I’m talking about the form through the form. And so for me, it’s, I don’t call it a textbook because I’m not like, okay, now do this, you know, it’s not like, here’s your exercise. It’s much more like, let’s have- let’s pour a glass of wine and let’s have a long conversation about flash fiction. And I’m gonna tell you everything I know about it. And so that was really the way that I approached it. Inspired by so many great craft books like War of Art, like Bird by Bird, like Writing Down the Bones, all of these books that have been so important to me in my growth, I really wanted to give something like that to the flash fiction world, because there really aren’t books that were specifically meant for that world. Although you can read this book as a non-flash fiction writer and get just as much out of it. 

Rachael Herron: [00:43:57] I love that it can be read both ways. Do you know Grant Faulkner?

Nancy Stohlman: [00:44:02] I do. Yes, we’re good friends. We have a little rivalry, actually. I’m sure he won’t mind that I say it. So I, every time we see each other, we always have a little rivalry of where, which city has the, is the flash fiction capital. So he says San Francisco’s flash fiction capital. I say, Denver’s the flash fiction capital. And we actually, at one point, we’re going to have like a flash fiction off, like family feud style at an AWP or something in which we would then, you know, bring it on, but of course 

Rachael Herron: [00:44:34] I knew you would-

Nancy Stohlman: [00:44:35] He’s wonderful. 

Rachael Herron: [00:44:36] He is wonderful. He’s a good friend of mine too. And I, and he’s very much on the vanguard of the flash fiction too. So I knew that you match each other. It has been wonderful talking to you. Absolutely wonderful. Can you tell us where we can find you out there on the interwebs? 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:44:51] Yes! So, Nancy Stohlman, S-T-O-H-L-M-A-N is how you spell my name, my website is NancyStohlman.com. So you can go there. I’ve got the books. I’ve got workshops. I’ve got well, all sorts of things over there. It’s really fun over there. And I’m on all the social platforms, Nancy.Stohlman on Facebook, Instagram (Nancy_Stohlman), Twitter (@nancystohlman), all the usual spots. 

Rachael Herron: [00:45:15] It has been a joy talking to you, and I might,

Nancy Stohlman: [00:45:20] It is my pleasure

Rachael Herron: [00:45:21] Might even be brave enough to do a flash at some point between you and Grant. You’ll both get me into it. At some point

Nancy Stohlman: [00:45:26] I would love it. I’m cheering you on not editing you, just hearing it. 

Rachael Herron: [00:45:32] Yes! Yes! Thank you, Nancy so, so very much and happy writing to you. 

Nancy Stohlman: [00:45:35] Thanks for having me, Rachael. Bye! 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

The post Ep. 235: Nancy Stohlman on Why Writing Short is So Exciting appeared first on R. H. HERRON.

Bonus mini-episode, brought to you by my mini-coached Patrons! Question include: Should I write a book proposal? What’s fictionalized memoir, anyway? And how can I learn to revise my book? 

Books mentioned: 

Moonglow, Michael Chabon – https://amzn.to/3dmmg3Z

How Should a Person Be, Sheila Heti – https://amzn.to/3dm81fH

Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill – https://amzn.to/3abGUlh

For revision: 

Story Engineering, Larry Brooks – https://amzn.to/3gi8Rfc

Anatomy of Story, John Truby – https://amzn.to/3tq38HX

Intuitive Editing, Tiffani Yates Martin – https://amzn.to/3tntJoV

Novel Editing Workbook – https://amzn.to/3tA9DZ3

*Amazon affiliate links – please order local if you can! 

Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #234 of “How do you Write?” This as a bonus mini episode brought to you by my patrons at the $5 and up level, you get to ask me any question that you want and I’ll answer it here on the podcast. I usually collect them until I have a couple or three or four. And then I do a mini podcast. So here is the collection of what I’ve gotten so far. And these are some good questions. The first one comes from Thomas Langer. Hi, Rachael, here’s a mini coaching question. Is there such a thing as memoir fiction, analogous to what we call historical fiction? And what is your opinion of this approach? As I write a memoir, I have created some hybrid scenes and characters and some of them are so hybrid that I think it is straying into fiction. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks. So I’m so glad that you asked there is a category it’s not easily shelvable. People do have problems shelving it, but it is called fictionalized memoir or less frequently I see the term auto fiction kind of like autobiography fiction. The important thing is, if you’re straying into something that feels like fiction and our guts always know, our guts know the difference between conflating time periods and pushing characters into one amalgam of a character and recreating dialogue, as best as we think the dialogue went on that day when the car crashed, that’s all acceptable in memoir, you get to do that. It’s just common practice. We know that memoirists are writing. They’re basically writing.[00:01:59] A novel, like thing, bringing us into their world in a way that really no human can- most humans cannot remember things that well. So there’s a contract with the reader that says the memoirist gets to stretch what they believe the truth to be into things like dialogue action really concrete scenes. Writers do struggle with, is this fiction if I’m making it up, it is not fiction. If you follow Rachael’s 80% rule, which is if you’re 80% sure that it really happened this way, because you know these people involved and they probably said something like this, then you get to use it. If you just heard something in the background, that was my wife yelling at people on TikToK. So she’s not going to do that anymore. Real life. So you get to as a memoirist, do that. But when you start making up scenes that, you know didn’t happen, making up people that are not a composite amalgam of characters of people that you knew, but actually somebody new and fresh on the page. Then you do have to say that it’s fiction of some sort and you can call it fictionalized memoir. You can call it auto fiction. You can call it what you want, but naming it, I think is important. And it is kind of having a moment for maybe the last four or five years, people know what it is. They understand it. Michael Chabon’s book Moonglow did some historical stuff within what he imagined in his family that I thought was really well done. You may want to take a look at that also, Sheila Heti wrote, How Should A Person Be, which is obviously about her. And it is obviously also a novel at the same time. [00:03:46] The Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill, I thought was a remarkable, remarkable book and it reads like a memoir and in some ways it is about the dissolution of her marriage, and in other ways, it isn’t. So check out some auto fiction, see what you think about it, see how you feel about it. And then you do, at some point, you don’t have to do this on a first draft. You have to make a decision on what it’s going to be. And now that I’ve said that it might be a good thing to decide while you’re doing a first draft, which is really a rare thing for me to say, but before you do make up a lot of stuff, if you’re later going to decide, you want to write a memoir, then you’re going to have to take all of that out. So I would say, decide. Do you want to write a novel? Do you run and write a memoir or do you want to write something that you will say to people this is fictionalized memoir and it’s really kind of a nice place to be because your readers cannot decide what is real and what is true is another business anyway, it also allows you to add things that you wish happened. Add things that you wish you had done or said, or that you imagine the people around you did and said in rooms where you weren’t. So if you choose that way, excuse me, I think it can be really, really fun and really interesting. So great question. Yes. Follow your gut on this one. All right. [00:05:06] And this one is from Michelle. I’m just going to read the end of her question, but she was basically, she was asked to write a book proposal for a memoir for a competition that she did not enter. My question is, would it be helpful for me to do a book proposal for the competition and then use it in the future? I’ve never heard you talk about this before so I feel like it’s not necessary and would be a waste of money, but proposal seemed to be more geared towards non-fiction. Plus, I don’t want to do it. I have zero platform. I have zero plans as to how I will make money, et cetera, et cetera. I can make stuff up, but it feels fake. Thoughts? Oh, Michelle, I love this question. So yes, you’re right. Book proposals are more geared toward non-fiction and we kind of had these, we have these three buckets that we talk a lot about on the show. We have novels fictional, we have memoir and we have nonfiction. And this dovetails beautifully with Thomas’ question. Memoir is true, but memoir really fits in the novel category in terms of story, there is a story and it’s structured like a novel. So most people, most agents are not going to ask you for a book proposal for a memoir. It does happen. We do see it, especially nowadays when it’s competitive out there and agents want to know, can you pull together book proposal if I asked for one, but I’ve had people success, I’ve had students successfully get agents by only targeting the agents who didn’t want a book proposal for memoir. That is, it’s not a normal thing to request, although it is getting a little bit more seen. And your agent should be able to sell your memoir to a publisher without a book proposal, too. Memoirs are like novels they sell because of the story underneath it. [00:06:58] Nonfiction, when we’re talking about like, you know, how to build your platform or how to create excellent house design. I don’t know. I’m spit balling here, but non-fiction is nonfiction. Memoir is a story and novels are a story. So therefore you shouldn’t need a book proposal. If you do need to write a book proposal, any of you, Google, you know how I feel about Reedsy, Google Reedsy, nonfiction book proposal, and they have an excellent guide to doing it step by step. But Michelle, you don’t need one unless the agent of your dreams requires one, and then in which case you may want to write one. But don’t bother with it now. Great question. Okay and then let’s see. Okay, May asks, so I’m going to start querying my book soonish. Yay! I remember somewhere that you mentioned that agents will spy around and look at your website. I don’t have one. I don’t have social media under my pen name either. I have been thinking of starting a Bookstagram for it, but I haven’t yet. How important is it to have those things when querying for an agent? I feel like as a millennial, I have kind of failed by not having them, but I always thought it was important to finish the book first. Yes. Finishing the book, finishing a great book, revising it, editing it, which I know that you’ve been doing is the most important thing of all. And here’s what I think about this. You could start a Bookstagram, attached to your pen name or, and this is something I don’t know what your answer is going to be.[00:08:36] Are you going to query under your pen name or under your real name? A lot of people query under their real name so that they can be real with the agent. The agent knows who you are, and then with your agent, after you have accepted them, or, you know, you’re working together, then you could talk about your pen name, what they think about it whether you should do it under this pen name and you may already really, really be clear on the fact that you are going to write under this pen name and that’s fine, but your agent will need to know your real name. So do you have a social media presence under your real name? Which they will know. They will have to know, and then they will spy on you there. So think about that. Do you have social media? I know you’re on Twitter, but I think you’re under your pen name on Twitter, that’s true. So my answer is, look good on the internet to whatever availability, to whatever place you’re already occupying. Like under your real name, I know you’re not a dick, but you wouldn’t want to be a dick. Like you wouldn’t want them when they find out your real name to go look you up and find out that you’ve been trolling terribly, doing things or writing caustic messages on your blog about the terrible publishers who’ve done this to you. You’re in no danger of that May, I know you, but for everybody else, that’s something to keep in mind. [00:09:57] Number two, thinking about your pen name and building up a following, I know that you’re querying soon. So if you try to build up a following anywhere, you know, say you do Bookstagram. So in a couple of months, when you’re carrying maybe you have 25 followers, 50 followers, that’s not going to be enough to impress them. So my Rachael answer, and this is not one you’ll hear popularly said anywhere else, but why bother. Honestly, why bother. This is your pen name. They don’t expect you to find you doing anything on your pen name, out there in the world. And then you get to speak with them as your real self, under your real name. You get to speak with the agent that you decide to work with and say, so for this pen name, May, what should I do? What do you want me to do? Do you want me to be a Bookstagram or do you want me to have Twitter? Do you want me to have Facebook? What looks best to you? And then let the agent help you with that, just when they do search for you under your real name, just be not a dick. So I think that that answers the question and I think you’re really safe May. So don’t worry about that. [00:10:59] And then the last question comes from Ashani, Hi, Rachael, sending in a question for the next mini episode, would you be able to recommend any good self-editing books? David Cochran recommend self-editing for fiction writers by Renee Brown and Dave King. I was wondering if you had any other resources that you’d recommend. Thanks. Okay, Ashani. So this is such a hard question and this is literally why I teach 90-day revision. I couldn’t find any good resources. I didn’t learn any good resources when I was getting my masters, everything I read about revision seem to confuse me and I read everything. I literally read everything as I learned my best ways to revise. And now that I have a method, it’s the method that I teach. And it has things that are, pick-up-able, put in your pocketable and keep-able that you will use in revision for the rest of your life. And yes, I am going to write 90-day revision and I’m going to write 90 days to done. I don’t know when, but so that book will be out there as resource at some point. And it will be my version of revision for now, though, I think that the best book that helped me most with learning revision is Story Engineering by Larry Brooks, which is not a book about revision. It is a book about story structure because when we are doing our first major revision, that second draft, which is the hardest, the heaviest lifting you’re gonna be doing for your whole book. The things that we’re trying to get in place are character arc and story structure. We don’t care about what the scenes look like, what they sound like, how well they’re written. That’s really the last thing that we’re concerned about. That was literally the last thing we’re concerned about. If we’re concerned about how a scene reads and how well it’s written, then we may accidentally get too attached to that scene and not recognize that it doesn’t fit in good, strong, compelling, emotional story structure.[00:12:56] So really learn story structure first, have it in your bones, then take your book apart. And put it back together into good story structure while showing your incredible, impeccable character arc. I’m saying that like it’s easy. It is not easy at all. It takes time. But then later on your third draft, fourth draft, maybe in some of your passes later, because we cannot do a second draft and have your book be perfect. There’s a lot more to go after that. Then I really like the book Intuitive Editing by Tiffany Yates Martin. She does talk a little bit about story structure and a book that a lot of people like I have a little bit of a problem with it, because it is really more for late revision, not for the second draft revision, which is the big, hard one. But I do like it it’s called the Novel Editing Workbook by Kris Spisak. So it is better for later in the journey. And I will put these in the show notes at HowDoYouWrite.net. So you know, don’t have to pull your car over and write these names down. That is what I recommend. But most of all, I recommend a really good book on story structure, and I love Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering, and I recommend researching and learning about character and character arc, which he also talks about in there.[00:14:08] Another one I really love is John Truby’s, Seminole work, which now I can’t remember what it is, but it’s his really big book. And there’s a lot about character arc in drawn, John Truby’s Anatomy of A Story. That’s what it’s called. Those two books are the Larry Brooks and the John Truby are probably the books that I learned the most from and pulled all my bulldozer revision tools. We have little tiny, we have pitchforks, we had little tiny sporks that you do your revision with, but in the beginning of that second draft, we’re using bulldozers. And that’s what I would recommend to you. Great questions. Thank you all for submitting them. And now I don’t have any more questions. So if you are a patron at that level, use me, send me some questions. I meet them in Patreon, send me them in emails. Send me them in Twitter. I don’t care where they come from, but I want to hear from you. And thank you, thank you so much. You can always visit me patreon.com/Rachael and I wish you very, very happy writing my friends and keep me posted on how you’re doing. I love to hear bye. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

The post Ep: 234: Should I Write a Book Proposal? appeared first on R. H. HERRON.

YES, you should have writing goals. But here’s why they don’t (actually) matter that much. And it’s going to blow your mind. Enjoy. 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing. 

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #233 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I am so happy you’re with me today. This is kind of going to be a bonus episode. No, it is a bonus episode. I am going to read to you an email that I wrote to my writer’s list. This is for two reasons, one big, one small. The small reason is if you’re not on my writer’s list, this is an example of the email that I send to you. You might like to be on my email list for writers. It really is a place that I put time and energy into and my job is to encourage you for free, just sign up and let me encourage you to do your writing. You can always get to that by going to RachaelHerron.com/Write. But the second reason I want to read this particular email to you is that I think it’s maybe one of the most important things I’ve ever said about writing, and our goals of writing. So we’re going to get into that in a moment, but, what’s going on around here? I want to thank new Patreon supporters. [00:01:21] Thank you. Thank you so much. Donna Ryan, Jenny Clark, Vivian Tee, and Helen Conway. Thank you so much for being here with me, supporting me. It means the world. Thank you to all of my current Patreon subscribers as well. It really does make a huge difference in my life. So, how is the move going, Rachael? Well, the room is a little bit emptier, boxes around us. I’m glad we started when we did, we still have a bunch of really big things to get rid of, like my beautiful desk. I still have not managed to clean out this desk. It is not because I haven’t had time. It is because I love this desk so much. I don’t want it to go. I even got out of box and filled the box with all of the things that I will need on a daily basis to have on my desk for the next six months or so things like my planner and my favorite pens. And oh, what else is in there? My headphones, my favorite coaster. And put them all in the box so that I could empty the desk and then take a picture of it with all of the empty drawers as a roll top. It’s big, it’s old. It’s wonderful. If you’re in the bay area and you want it, let me know. You’d have to pick it up. And in the last five days, all of those things have just crept back onto my desk because I just don’t want to let it go.[00:02:38] I want to hug it, hugging it here, virtually on the podcast. So someday, perhaps I’ll listen back to this and think, oh, remember that beautiful desk. Isn’t it amazing that I have a new, beautiful desk that I love? That will happen. So we have been alternating fits of panic and joy, but the panic is subsiding and the joy is setting in. We had an amazing conversation with our friends, Mona and Damian, who you may, you’ve heard me talk about Mona MacDermid before she is a poet and writer. I just adore her and she and her husband have moved to so mentee in so many places all around the world internationally. And they gave us a little pep talk about how to move and how to do it in a sane manner and a sensible, responsible, joyful manner. And here’s some of the talking points that I took away from our conversation. Have and do your good goodbyes. So we are making a list of things that we love, not just people, but the things like the restaurants and the places and the particular lawn where I like to eat an ice cream in San Francisco. It is Dolores park, by the way, buy right ice cream across the street. That’s on the list. I would not have thought about doing that. [00:03:56] Of course, we’re going to be able to come back to the states every year or so and see things, but an intentional good goodbye makes so much sense to me. Number two, throw the party, throw yourself a party. I’m going to throw a party and invite all the locals that I love to come say goodbye. Hopefully they’ll be back as unaided. I don’t know where we’re going to throw it, because at some point we won’t have this house to throw a party in, and I want to throw it as late as possible but that’s going to happen. Number three, this is huge. Get excited about the destination. I have this strange brain tendency to try to put off joy. If I’m often, if I’m reading a book and it is incredible, I will put it down and walk away for a few hours a few days, sometimes a few weeks, never even finished lonesome dove for this reason. Because I want to prolong the joy. So, or like put it off because that feels delicious to me. It is something that pleases me, however, it’s okay just to like watch the movies, watch Wellington paranormal, read the travel guides, watch the vloggers on New Zealand and on this place, we’re going to go and get really excited about it.[00:05:04] So that is something we’ve been doing, amazing. When we get there, they said these are two things I would not have thought of doing, present gifts to your new neighbors. Love that. I want them to love me. I want friends, I want my neighbors to know us and to wave at us and to chit chat on the street. Like we do here. We have an amazing little neighborhood community on our cul-de-sac in east Oakland and it is so great. So I’m going to bring like little gifts from home, Ghirardelli chocolate bars or something like that. And then this one, I love make yourself a regular somewhere. This is something I do when I travel. Normally, if I’m in a place for more than a couple or three days, I tend to try to do that, but being intentional about it, walking into this coffee shop, where we want to become regulars and saying, as someone I knew did, and as I did once in a coffee shop that I loved and it worked saying, Hey, I’m here. I’m Rachael, I’d like to know all of your names. We’re going to be here every day. And then it becomes friendship and it becomes awesome. So we’re going to do that. Thank you, Mona and Damien for taking that time. It was amazing. Also, thank you to Emma from Australia who made a move like this from the UK with her wife and Emma sent me this email that made me cry.[00:06:14] She also had to leave an old cat behind and I hope you don’t mind I’m saying this, and had a cat die right before they left also because animals do that. Exactly what we’re going through right now. And she said, everything you need is inside you. And you only need to get that in mind. And to remember you’re loved. Everyone you know and love holds you in their heart. What an adventure we just get to go. It’s so exciting. Thank you. Thank you, Emma. Thank you, Mona. Thank you everyone who’s been responding to me about these kinds of things. It really does help me feel less scared and more excited. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. There will be another bonus mini episode coming soon because I’ve collected a good number of questions. I don’t know if that’s going to drop this week or next week, but I’ll get it out to you soon. And that’s at the $5 Patreon level I become your mini coach, not very many, but you know, I do many questions. Anyway, whatever that looks like. If you’re interested, that’s over patreon.com/Rachael. And now let’s jump into this email. Even if you get my email might be a good idea to listen. This- I write emails of encouragement to writers because they’re what I need to hear at the time. Honestly, they’re selfish. They’re what am I struggling with? What am I grappling with? Let’s talk about it with the writers. [00:07:34] So, here you go. I think this letter was called, what was the subject line? Oh, your writing goals don’t actually matter. All right. Your writing goals don’t actually matter. Dearest writers, I’ve been thinking a lot about goals. We’re moving to New Zealand and it is so exciting and it’s rather banana pants. I’m a citizen and my wife’s visa means that we have to enter the country rather more rapidly than we thought we would. So we’re leaving on July 24th. That’s a little less than three months from now and between now and then we have to pack the house. I’m a neat-nic but a bit of a pack rat and my wife is a collector. We have to fix the house. We’re lazy and have done little in upkeep, except the essential as I’m typing this, there’s a man on a ladder scraping the old paint off my office window to prep for painting. The look of horror every time I show him another thing we put off fixing would be amusing. If it weren’t such an expensive expression. We have to sell the house. This is a very grownup thing to do and it’s freaking us out. Neither of us ever having done anything like it before. Yes, we’re selling a house in the San Francisco bay area, but don’t get too jealous. We bought in 2006 right before the crash. So we’ll walk away with a little money. Yay. But not a lot. Hopefully, it’ll be enough for a smallish down payment on a house in new Zealand’s rather nonsensical housing market. And then, then what? And what’s our actual goal here? In the back of my mind, I have this goal one day we’ll look, look up in surprise and find ourselves happy and safe in a cozy home on the other side of the world, we’ll be relaxed and happy, but to get to that goal of being happy and relaxed, we’re going to be the opposite of relaxed or happy. It’s hard getting rid of most of our belongings and packing the few things we’re taking. We’re both cranky and really we’re just getting started. Once we’re in New Zealand, it’ll take months and months to figure out where we want to be, what we want to do. We’re going to be living out of suitcases and in total turmoil for a long time. Waking up to find we’re suddenly relaxed and happy and cozy and have everything we need. That’s not a real goal. We already have that kind of comfort here for the most part. If that’s what we really wanted, we’d quit packing boxes and tell our friends we’ve changed our mind so they can stop arguing about who gets our AirFryer. [00:10:05] Let’s look at writing now, a lot of writers have the goal of finishing a book or another one. If they’ve already climbed that peak, they think if they finish it or get it published, that they’ll finally feel confident. They think they’ll finally feel like a real writer at the base of that hope is the persistent desire to be happy and satisfied, but there is a big problem here. To write a book, that means you have to write, and what that means is that for many months or years, you’re going to be uncomfortable as hell. You’ll be unhappy with the way the words land on the page. The words won’t do what you want them to, and you have no idea how to make them better. Every once in a while a scene or a chapter feels great. But then the next one goes off the rails and the whole book crashes down around you. The sound of the falling word rebel ringing in your ears. So in trying to gain happiness from being a writer, you signed up for a boatload of difficulty and occasional abject misery. Guess what? This is why writers quit writing. They say, I just wanted to chase my dream and feel happy, but doing that, trying to write a book or a collection of essays or poems, often feels like utter crap. So, of course, we start second guessing that goal. They say, I must be doing this all wrong. I’m not a writer at all. How stupid was I to think I could even learn how to do this? I’m just a failure at this, writing is not for me. So we pushed the journal or the manuscript into the closet and stop trying, if the goal was to feel like a more confident writer and actually doing the writing made you feel very opposite of confident, of course you feel terrible. Of course you want to quit. [00:12:01] Here’s the thing, my darling writers, and you are already a writer by the way, reaching the goal of completing a book or of getting a published, or even seeing it on a shelf, changes nothing. Nothing. Yes, it is fun to walk into Barnes and Noble and to see our names right there. And if that’s a dream you have, please continue to fan that flame. But honestly, it’s a high that lasts like five minutes. And then you feel like an idiot for shouting at the stranger in the same aisle, I wrote this book! Before she hurries away into the next aisle. Ask me how I know. The next morning, when we sit at our desks to continue writing, we feel the same way we always do, unprepared, not good enough, not disciplined enough, you know that feeling and it sucks and it doesn’t go away, by the way, ever dozens of books in I still feel that way every day. And I honestly don’t want it to go away. A writer who just knows he’s great at writing, isn’t a writer, who want to read, that way lies cocky complacency, and no, thank you. So here’s the hard truth, a goal isn’t enough to keep you going for months and years at a time.[00:13:12] A goal is something else entirely. A goal exists to make you uncomfortable. A goal exists to make you uncomfortable. The whole point is to feel discomfort. A goal is meant to bring up negative emotions so you can learn how to work through them. This is how we learn what we need to work on. The goal isn’t something we aim for in order to get a huge gold star, the end point hardly matters in fact, and I know that is a scary idea so stick with me here. Instead, moving toward the goal, teaches us about ourselves. Most importantly, moving toward the goal, teaches us how to move through difficulty while holding grace and love and tenderness for ourselves. Every single day, I sit at the computer and I feel discomfort because I’m not writing as well as I want to. Honestly, I’m feeling that way right now, as I revise this letter, worrying that I won’t write it clearly enough to blow your damn mind. But every day, I get a little better at welcoming that discomfort. Oh, Hey, it’s you again? Okay then, why don’t you just grab a seat? I’m going to keep working. It’s fine that you’re here, but keep the complaining to a bare minimum. All right? Like Elizabeth Gilbert says in big magic about being on a road trip with fear. Quote fear. You’re allowed to have a seat and you’re allowed to have a voice, but you are not allowed to have a vote. You’re not allowed to touch the roadmaps. You’re not allowed to suggest detours. You’re not allowed to fiddle with the temperature, dude, you’re not even allowed to touch the radio, but above all else my dear old familiar friend, you are absolutely forbidden to drive end quote. Pretty damn reliably. Our brain when handed a big goal will hand us back. Lots of negative emotions. We’ll stand there. Our hands dripping with gunk fear, imposter syndrome, lack of confidence, worry, anxiety, and all of these emotions want to steer the car. We can’t let them, our goals teach us how to be comfortable being uncomfortable. [00:15:29] In our move to New Zealand, my “goal” of being cozy and happy in a new house, in a new town. It doesn’t really matter. I’ll never get to that exact spot. Not in any way that I can imagine right now. But the goal remains useful as we move toward it. I’m reminded that yes, this is going to be hard. I get used to greeting those negative emotions, cheerfully. Sure, my wife and I are so grumpy, we’re about to chew the crumbling, lead paint off the walls, but that doesn’t mean moving is a bad idea or that we should quit. It just means that we get to actively learn from the hard things. The point of a goal is to grow into someone stronger than you are now. A goal to write a book is not about the end point of holding a book in your hands, although yes, that’s magical and wonderful. It’s really about learning who you are now and who you can become. And yes, it’s total cliche, but it’s actually about the journey, not the destination. And yes, you can get a gold star if you want one, when you hit the goal, but the real gold stars come along the way. You award them to yourself every time you sit and move your fingers on the keyboard. Every time you show up for something like Rachael Says, Write. Every time you read a book in your genre and try to figure out how the author just made you gasped aloud, you deserve all the gold stars. All of them. I say this as a person who just spent $34 on Amazon on gold stars, I would not have even guessed that was possible. So get comfy, being uncomfortable, stay at the computer while you’re angry, little inner editor fumes in the invisible seat behind you, frustrated that you won’t let her touch the radio dial or steer. By God, that little inner editor can also get used to being uncomfortable. Then at the end of the session, give yourself a gold star, either virtual or real. Don’t wait to hit the goal to celebrate. Instead, celebrate every single damn day. I know that you can do this. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

The post Ep: 233: Why Your Writing Goals Don’t Matter That Much! appeared first on R. H. HERRON.

Sonya Lalli is a Canadian writer of Indian heritage. She studied law in her hometown of Saskatoon and at Columbia University in New York, and later completed an MA in creative writing and publishing at City, University of London. Sonya has a black belt in tae kwon do and loves travel, yoga, and cocktail bartending. She lives in Toronto with her husband.

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 232 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron and I am so glad that you’re here with me today, as I am talking to Sonya Lalli. And it was just such a joy to talk to her about her amazingly fun and wonderful book. So, I know that you’re going to enjoy that interview.  What has been going on around here? It has been very busy, very real. We are just getting painting done of the outside of the house. Painting of the inside of the house will be coming, because we, my wife and I, live like college students. We moved into this house, that was a bright post-it yellow when we moved in. It was really the yellow of a post-it, which is just, oh, isn’t it the most gorgeous color you ever saw? And it is now kind of white and we really didn’t even notice. So that has been fun. We’re painting it, and by we, I mean, the person that we hired to do so, is painting it a light gray with white trim, which I think is the most boring thing I have ever seen in my whole entire goddamn life. But my realtor says, it’s the hot color right now. How is light gray with white, a hot color? But I have to admit it, does look sharp. No, you know what? That’s giving it too much credit. It looks clean. [00:01:50] So, we’ve got that going on. What else? I feel like everything is really rolling forward. Yesterday, I printed out, and if you’re watching on YouTube, you can see it. I printed out a four-month calendar, that delineates, where we need to be at what time, what we need to do, in order to get on that plane in July to go move our whole lives to New Zealand. And here is the exciting part is that as I record this, it is April 8th, 2021. And I think we need to have basically ourselves out of this house in terms of all of our stuff by the end of April. So, in the next three weeks and one in two days, we need to have everything packed and sorted and put into a pod storage unit, which will then be put into a container ship we’re taking about, I think we’re going to take about, 60 cubic feet of stuff, which is about 40 or 50 boxes of things like books and some clothes and some pots and pans and that’s really all we’re taking. But meanwhile, our house is full. You will notice that I’m still sitting at the same eye level here because I’m still sitting at my beautiful roll top desk. Seriously, if anybody lives in the Bay area, San Francisco Bay area and wants a beautiful roll top desk that I love so much, I’m going to be getting rid of this. There are still these big things that we have to gear it up, our bed, our couch, our chairs, our dining table, the island in the kitchen that we jury rigged by buying old cabinets and putting a Formica table on top and I can tell you, it is very sturdy. It is a sturdy island. We made the Formica table hang over the edge of these cabinets so that we can sit at it with stools, we have been sitting at that thing in our kitchen for years and years and years and years. And it’s sturdy because we didn’t know how to attach it. So, we use duct tape and, what are those rubber band things called? I cannot think of the name for, bungee cords, bungee cords! We can’t give that to anybody. We can’t sell that to anybody. We can’t even give that to anybody, that just needs to go to the dump because those were dumped items in the beginning. So those kinds of things, getting them out of the house in order that we can have the guy put in some new carpet in order so that we could have people paint the inside of the house.[00:04:27] I painted this when I moved in and I haven’t painted it since 15 years ago. So those kinds of things are rolling, but what I want to say about that is that something I’m looking forward to, is when the house hits the market. It’ll be staged, I think we’ll probably be living in it with the staging, which is going to be really strange. It’ll be nicer furniture than we’ve ever had, but we won’t have anything else to do. We won’t have anything, we don’t, we won’t have stuff. We will have the things that we keep with ourselves. I’m going to keep a couple of knitting projects, deck of cards, so I can play poker with Lala whenever I can talk her into it, and my Kindle and my computer. I will have a lot of time to do work, and that’s going to be great. I’m kind of looking forward to that. I’m not kind of looking forward. I’m really looking forward to that mental clarity where there’s nothing else I can do except wait for the house to sell and then get on the plane. All of our stuff is packed. We’re living out of suitcases. I have been struggling to write, I am writing. I am working on writing, but it is a struggle. Yesterday was supposed to be a writing day in the morning and it turned into hours of dealing with getting our stuff shipped. So that is something I’m really, really looking forward to is having that time and space. [00:05:46] Speaking of time and space, I do want to take a moment and thank some new Patreon followers because y’all give me the time and space to write the essays that I love writing. And thank you Patreon followers who really liked that first essay, which is going to be the first part of my memoir on moving to New Zealand. I got so many good suggestions of titles for the New Zealand moving memoir, right now I really love, I think it was the newest Kiwi or the new New Zealanders. I love that. Thanks Mona for that. And so, thank you to the patreons who support me there and who get to read these essays well in advance of the book coming up, which you know, will happen someday. So first of all, thank you to Rebecca Wendt. Thank you, Ken Guidros, I hope I said that right. Miley Topliff, thanks, Miley. Rose Ketchering, thank you, thank you so much. Bill Aprens, Bill is just such a darling dear heart and he’s a student of mine and he’s supporting me in a generous level and thank you, Bill, that just made me happy and grateful. Cassandra Leach and Heather James, who is Bill’s pal. And, thank you all of you. Thank you all of you who do support on the Patreon patreon.com/Rachael or who have supported in the past. Thank you to the people who cancel their Patreon support because they can’t afford to. That’s totally welcome. You can do that at any, any time. I understand, finances come and go. And if a dollar a month is too dear, is too hard, I, and I, that sounds facetious when I say it. I mean it. There have been times in my life where I could not afford that extra buck or two a month. And, when you stop that I never have hard feelings, never, ever, ever my darlings.[00:07:39] So, thank you, thank you, thank you with all of my heart. Also, something I’m just going to say one more thing that I am excited about is that earlier today, I got an email from somebody who wants to adopt Waylon, who is, you can’t see him. If you’re watching on YouTube, he’s a black cat, sleeping on a black sweatshirt on the chair behind me, the darling of our heart, the brother of Willy who died last week. And, it has been the one thing that has been breaking my heart about this move. Like I’m sad about everything, about leaving my sisters and family and bothering our family and friends and my people and my place in the world. But Waylon has been breaking my heart the way he is so sad not to be around dogs and cats and people. And the people who say that they want to adopt him, have three kids and a cat. And I just can’t imagine a better place for Waylon than being around kids that he can go yell at and then get petted by. So we have an informational interview with that family tonight. So, wish us good things, because if I knew Waylon was well taken care of, oh, my heart would be so happy. So, I’ll keep you posted on that. [00:08:50] None of these things are writing related. So, we will jump into the interview with Sonia, which is writing related, completely relevant to you as the writer that you are. I want to take just a second to remind you that you are in exactly the right place. You are doing exactly the right thing. If you’re not writing, you’re getting ready to write. If you are writing, congratulations, keep it up. We just move onward. We take one foot, put it in front of the other and we do it again tomorrow. We just need to write a little bit at a time to move our books and our stories and our memoirs and our plays forward. And I know that you can do it. I know it’s hard. We talk a lot about that on the show. It’s hard. And you have the power to do it. You don’t have to do a lot, just do a little and you’re moving in the right direction. Thank you, my friends for being here and we’ll talk soon. [00:09:43] Hey, is resistance keeping you from writing? Are you looking for an actual writing community in which you can make a calls and be held accountable for them? Join RachaelSaysWrite, like twice weekly, two hour writing session on zoom. You can bop in and out of the writing room as your schedule needs, but for just $39 a month, you can write up to 4 hours a week. With our wonderful little community, in which you’ll actually get to know your writing peers. We write from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM on Tuesdays and 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM on Thursdays and that’s US Pacific Standard Time. Go to RachaelHerron.com/Write to find out more.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:24] All right. Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show, Sonya Lalli. Hello, Sonya!

Sonya Lalli: [00:10:29] Hi. Thank you so much for having me. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:31] I’m so pleased to have you. I am enjoying your book so, so, so, so much. Let me give you a little introduction. Sonya Lalli is a Canadian writer of Indian heritage. She studied law in her hometown of Saskatoon and at Columbia University in New York, and later completed an MA in creative writing and publishing at City, University of London. Sonya has a black belt in taekwondo and loves travel, yoga, and cocktail bartending. She lives in Toronto with her husband. But right now, you said you’re with your family in central Canada. Is that right? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:11:01] Yep.

Rachael Herron: [00:11:02] Is that like a holiday or? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:11:03] No. I, for family reasons, yeah. But we’re, I’m from Saskatoon, so that’s where I am right now.

Rachael Herron: [00:11:08] Okay. Oh, nice. Is it freezing? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:11:11] It was very, very cold. I’m thinking Celsius here, but it was like minus 40?

Rachael Herron: [00:11:17] Oh, no thank you.

Sonya Lalli: [00:11:18] 30 minus 40 for a few days. It was crazy. Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:11:23] I don’t even know how people do that 

Sonya Lalli: [00:11:24] It’s gone, it’s gone now. The cold snap is gone now. 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:26] Okay, thank goodness. Well, let’s talk about your lovely book, Serena Singh Flips the Script. I had not read you before. And then I noticed you just have a big catalog behind this, but it is so much fun. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:11:38] Oh, thank you.

Rachael Herron: [00:11:39] Your writing is so much fun to read and it reads as real and this particular book is about women’s friendships as well as romance, but you really get the women’s friendships front and center there. Is that what your books always have to do with or? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:11:56] No. So when I first started writing, I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think about what genre I was writing. And it turned out that, and sort of was molded better into, a romance women’s fiction book. So, my first book, Matchmaker’s List, that was more on the romance side, Grown-up Pose, my second book, and Serena Singh Flips the Script is more on the women’s fiction side. But for the third book for me, I started out thinking about it as a romantic comedy about finding your new best friend. So, I thought about in that typical, the tropes and milestones of a romance, I just applied that to the friendship and the book.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:38] I am a romance writer. Also, I write in a bunch of genres, but I’ve written a lot of romance and I’m enjoying seeing all the beats being hit. I don’t think a, you know, a normal reader wouldn’t pick up on that, but I’m like, oh, this is so romance, but it’s about friendship. It’s just, it’s beautiful. So, I would love to talk to you about your process of writing. Are you a full-time writer? Is this a?

Sonya Lalli: [00:12:59] No. So I work in publishing. And so, I write on the weekends and evenings. 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:06] Okay. So, 

Sonya Lalli: [00:13:07] Yes.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:08] I love talking to people about this. How do you fit that in, especially how do you wrap your brain around making that switch from the finished product side of publishing to the beginning side? How do you manage that? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:13:21] Sorry, you mean like between my day job and my? 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:23] Yeah, yeah. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:13:24] Yeah, so

Rachael Herron: [00:13:25] Where does, where does writing fit and how do you make that brain switch at the, when you’re writing?

Sonya Lalli: [00:13:30] Well, before the pandemic, it was easy because I would go to the office. I sort of, when I was, when I was there, I was sort of in this world where I’m part of a business, I’m one of a move, I’m one of the pieces in a bunch of moving parts, trying to create a book and help bring it into the world. And then I would go home and go on my other computer room, go back into my pajamas and write on my kitchen table. So, the pandemic has made that challenging. I still have two different computers, so at least there’s that like physical, I have to move one computer to the side to get the other one to like, to write. But yeah, I have found it more challenging while working from home to sort of, just switch back and forth. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:11] And are you a morning writer, before work writer, or are you an after-work evening writer or all of the above?

Sonya Lalli: [00:14:18] I can barely wake up in time to go to get to my regular job. So, and often I’m late. So, no, I write in the evenings, and mostly on the weekends. So, it’s just my husband and I in our apartment. And we, I have a lot of time to myself. And so my weekends are my own. I typically wake up, around eight o’clock on Saturdays and Sundays and write as long as I can go usually until about one or 2:00 PM. And I get most of my work done there. And then in the afternoons and evenings on the weekends, I sort of see my friends and hang out and do other things. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:57] You’re a normal person. Yeah. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:14:58] Yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:59] Are you, are you more of a pantser or a plotter?

Sonya Lalli: [00:15:01] I’m a plotter 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:02] Hardcore. Like you could, I can see it in your face, this is, you plot.

Sonya Lalli: [00:15:06] I need to know where I’m going. I always have a, like seeds of ideas or characters or hooks and that kind of thing. And then once I have that, then I sort of get my pen and paper out and I really go to town. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:23] Serena Singh is such a strong character. Did she come to you fully fleshed out or did you have to work with her to bring her out?

Sonya Lalli: [00:15:33] So, I sort of elaborated on the parts of myself that are sort of anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment and sort of anti-convention, I guess you could say. I, in my personal life, I actually have made, have made quite a conventional person. But, I don’t like the idea that women have to, have to make these choices that they need to get married, that they need to follow a certain timeline to be happy because there are so many women, and I know a lot of them that are so happy with their lives and they’re single, or they have a partner and they don’t want children and that’s a choice that they make. So, I really sort of thought a lot about that and I thought a lot about, yeah, I thought a lot about the women who are sort of having to justify their decisions. And so, and put that in the character.

Rachael Herron: [00:16:28] Something I really am enjoying about her is that a conventional character arc, and this would have been pleased me in a book, right, is to watch somebody going from not knowing what their voice is to finding their voice and being able to stand up for themselves. But Serena comes onto the page, knowing that her choices, she’s made these for a reason and she’s already really strong and I just am really enjoying rooting for her. So what is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing?

Sonya Lalli: [00:16:54] What are my challenges? I sometimes I find I get too complacent if I’m starting a new draft and I find myself returning to things maybe that I’ve already written about, or even using phrases that I remember, I know I’ve used that expression before

Rachael Herron: [00:17:14] Yes

Sonya Lalli: [00:17:15] or that kind of thing or that sort of character, and then I get annoyed. And then the next draft that like, do my best to freshen it up. But that’s a challenge and I think I’m sure that’s a challenge for a lot of writers, especially when you’re writing multiple books that, so I guess what I try and do is just read a lot across genres and try, and not like actively study them, but just try and keep my brain more challenged, I guess. 

Rachael Herron: [00:17:42] Kind of absorbing new information. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:17:44] Yeah. Exactly. But I do, I, and especially, and that’s something I think about a lot is when I, you know, I hope to keep writing and maybe you have some advice for this, but like, how do you like, try and proactively stay fresh and think about things in a new way as you write more and more books.

Rachael Herron: [00:18:01] I wish I knew. I wish I knew the answer. I even have, I even have a shorthand to myself that if it’s all, all in caps, I don’t use a pair, a question mark or anything I just put used. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:18:10] Okay.

Rachael Herron: [00:18:11] And that is my that’s my tag to when I’m in revision, go back and like find, search and find other documents to see where I’ve used this phrase or, have I done this convention. But I think that, you know, our readers want to read us because they love our voice and they love the worlds that we create. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:18:25] Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:18:26] Right?

Sonya Lalli: [00:18:27] For sure.

Rachael Herron: [00:18:28] So, they want to come back to this, but yeah, I worry about that too. A lot. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:18:31] Yeah. I think some things it’s good to, like, so many parts of romance in particular, they’re so universal, right? And it’s just about doing it your own way. So. 

Rachael Herron: [00:18:40] Exactly. The way that only you can. What is your biggest joy when it comes to writing? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:18:45] My joy is when I have absolutely no distractions and nobody’s around and I can just sit there and not feel guilty about not answering my phone or not being, you know, I don’t need to do this or I should really be working or, you know, something like that? And just have like a heat, like an afternoon just to myself to write. That’s the best feeling.

Rachael Herron: [00:19:07] That is the best feeling. It’s, I had one of those days this week and it was the best. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:19:11] Oh, that’s nice. 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:12] Can you share a craft tip of any sort with us? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:19:17] Yeah. So I’m trying to think of a good one to share it. I mean, sorry. 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:27] Take your time.

Sonya Lalli: [00:19:28] I find that, especially for people who have, like me, who has very, very, limited time. So, let’s say we do have an afternoon off. We know we have to use that afternoon well, and it can be a lot of pressure to just kind of, okay, oh my God. I need to get 2,500 words out or 1500 words out. And if I don’t, then I feel like a failure and sometimes the words just aren’t there. So I just try. Like I don’t, like I do push myself, but if the words are not coming, I don’t force myself to write the chapter I was planning. I try and be like, okay, this isn’t happening. I’m going to skip forward and write the ending. So I know exactly what the ending is going to look like. And at least I’ll feel better for, and I will probably have to edit it a lot because I missed half a book in between. But that’ll feel good to get that out or edit the first chapter or, you know, do some research on some thinking like on a theme that you are incorporating to the book. Just, I also find that reading even for like a chapter of a really good book and then sometimes like, oh yeah, I love reading. I love writing. And then I can get back into it. Yeah, I just find, what’s the word? Doing what feels right at that time and there’s lots of different ways to be productive.

Rachael Herron: [00:20:39] Rather than continuing to beat your head into the brick wall, which is one of my favorite ways to write, honestly. I forget to do that too, to kind of follow what the next joy is, if you’re really, really stuck. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:20:53] Yeah. I mean sometimes like, okay. The only thing left to do now is to edit this chapter. Then I get, then the beating happens because I’ve done everything else I can possibly do and now I really have to do this, but yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:06] Yeah, I love that. What thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:21:12] The weather. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:13] Oh, tell me more.

Sonya Lalli: [00:21:15] When it’s summer, and the windows are open and there’s a breeze and I’m wearing shorts, I feel like I should be on school holiday. And I don’t want to be inside. If it’s, if I’m hot, you know, like I, actually, winter, when it’s dark and it’s cold and I don’t want to go outside, those, that’s my most productive season. But actually that, those July, August, really hot days, it’s very, very difficult for me to write.

Rachael Herron: [00:21:42] It’s play time. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:21:43] Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:21:44] It’s time to be outside. Yes. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:21:45] Exactly. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:46] Yes. Can I ask you about the mug that you’re holding? Why does that look like an awesome mug? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:21:51] Because I’m at my mom’s house and she has nice stuff. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:54] Okay. That’s beautiful. I thought maybe like it heated itself or no, it’s just beautiful.

Sonya Lalli: [00:21:58] No, no, no. I’ve heard a trend online that there’s smart mugs.

Rachael Herron: [00:22:01] This is what I was going to ask if that’s what that was.

Sonya Lalli: [00:22:02] Oh no. This is just a regular mug. Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:22:06] I did get it, I did get a mug warmer for my desk, which I really have been liking, but, 

Sonya Lalli: [00:22:11] Oh, that’s a good idea.

Rachael Herron: [00:22:12] Okay. So what is the best book that you’ve read recently? And why did you love it? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:22:17] I read, this was, like I said, I read all sorts of fiction across genres, and this was one of the more literary books that I read. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. And he, it’s like, he won the Pulitzer, I think. Like it’s like a very literary

Rachael Herron: [00:22:32] It did. Yeah. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:22:33] very good book. And the sequel actually came out. It’s coming out next week or something, and it’s called The Committed. And The Sympathizer is about a spy during the Vietnam war and eventually comes over to America and makes a life for himself as a spy and it is the best voice that I have ever read. Like I’m, I usually,

Rachael Herron: [00:22:56] Leaping to the top of my list. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:22:57] Yeah, it is, he is such a fascinating voice and I do love learning about like, you know, I didn’t learn anything about the Vietnam war in school or very little, right?

Rachael Herron: [00:23:07] Yeah, yeah.

Sonya Lalli: [00:23:08] And so, it was just learning of so much interesting stuff. And then he’s really, really very fleshed out characters and his voice again is just phenomenal.

Rachael Herron: [00:23:16] What does his voice do? What does it sound like to you? Because I can see you like brighten when you even think about his voice. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:23:24] I’m trying to think of how to describe it. He is, he’s very dry and very funny and very, just original, the way he speaks. And I mean, it’s the author and the character, but like, the way he speaks about the world is just so original and voice is something that I, that could be another challenge that I could mention to you is that, I have a very particular voice as a human woman, and I know that I parts of myself, go into my characters and I try and do my best to not have all my main characters’ sound exactly the same and sound exactly like me. But, when you’re writing a character whose life is similar to you and she would respond in similar ways, I kind of have that. That’s something I try and think about is, making the voices of my main characters, different. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:20] Well, the voice of this main character that I’m reading is wonderful. And I’m loving spending time with this particular voice. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:24:26] Oh, thank you.

Rachael Herron: [00:24:27] So, speaking of Serena, can you tell us about this book? Tell us a little bit about what it is about. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:24:33] Sure. Yeah. So, Serena Singh is 36 and she has just gotten a promotion as a creative director, circa madman at an advertising agency. And her little sister has just announced that she is pregnant and Serena feels happy for her, but she also feels a little bit deflated because a lot of serene, her little sister, she considers her best friend, and a lot of Serena’s other friends, in their late thirties, have gotten married and had children and they don’t have time for Serena or at least that’s how she perceives it. And Serena’s actually quite judgy at the beginning of books about mothers and just assuming mothers are going to go be mothers and not have time for their friends, because Serena has a lot of baggage. She grew up in a very complicated household where there was not a quality between her mother and father. So, she grew up not having a good, healthy relationship with men and that’s informed a lot of her decisions. And so, Serena decides that, or with the help of her, with the guy she’s seeing, she realizes that, if she wants to make more friends and fill her life in this way, she needs to put in the effort. And it, kind of is like dating because, it’s hard making friends as an adult.

Rachael Herron: [00:25:52] I think I’ve really, I think I’m really attached deeply to this book because we are, my wife and I are planning a move to New Zealand this year in the next six months or so. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:26:00] Oh, that’s great.

Rachael Herron: [00:26:01] And I am just, I’m really worried about making friends. Like I have been in the Bay area for 25 plus years. All my friends are here. How do I go about making best friends? So, I was already like, oh, Bumble BFF. All right. I’m in. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:26:14] Yeah, it’s hard. Like when I moved at, to Toronto, I hadn’t gotten my current job yet. I was working remotely for my old company. I was with my husband. I wasn’t starting like a new college program or an office job where there’s this like a ready-made group of people you can hang out with. And it was really challenging. And I did to go on Bumble BFF, and I did go to super awkward book clubs and stuff like that. And it was really, really hard, but you’ll be great. You’ll be great. 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:40] Did you end up making friends from any of those attempts?

Sonya Lalli: [00:26:42] I did. I would say, I will say that the strongest friendships I’ve, new friendships I’ve made were probably at the office, just, 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:50] Which is just natural. That’s how,

Sonya Lalli: [00:26:51] Yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:52] I’m going to, I’m going to look for like a coworking space just to at least be in around other people. You know

Sonya Lalli: [00:26:59] For sure. Yeah. I think that’s a, that’s probably the way to go.

Rachael Herron: [00:27:01] Okay. So yeah, this is, I’m just enjoying it, so, so, so very much. Where can we find you online? 

Sonya Lalli: [00:27:08] I am on Twitter (@Sonya_Lalli) and Instagram, (Sonya_Lalli) and also, I have a website, SonyaLalli.com  

Rachael Herron: [00:27:17] Sonya, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. And thank you for writing this wonderful book that has just, it’s exactly what I needed right now. I have been, I’ve been doing a lot of dark and this is the kind of light and the kind of reality that I really needed to see, so thank you. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:27:32] Okay. Thank you so much for having me and have a great time in New Zealand.

Rachael Herron: [00:27:34] Thank you. Happy writing. 

Sonya Lalli: [00:27:35] Thanks, bye. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

At Rachel heron.com/right now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to write in my friends.

The post Ep. 232: Sonya Lalli on Using Romance Beats in Mainstream Fiction appeared first on R. H. HERRON.

Erika Robuck is the national bestselling author of Hemingway’s Girl, Call Me Zelda, Fallen Beauty, The House of Hawthorne, and Receive Me Falling. She is a contributor to the anthology Grand Central: Postwar Stories of Love and Reunion, and to the Writer’s Digest Essay Collection, Author in Progress. She writes satire (#Hockeystrong) as E. Robuck.

Her latest novel, The Invisible Woman, is about real-life superwoman of WWII, OSS/SOE agent Virginia Hall. 

In 2014, Robuck was named Annapolis’ Author of the Year, and she resides there with her husband, three sons, and a spunky miniature schnauzer.

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #230 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So pleased that you are with me today, as I talked to Erika Robuck on the magic of doing research, including some of the more virtual research, like research on YouTube, for example. We had a great chat and I know that you are going to enjoy listening to her, impart some wisdom on us. So before we get to that, what’s going on around here? Moving, moving is going on around here. We are deep in the middle of it. I’m pretty much done with my office. And my office holds everything that I own except for my desk. I’m still sitting at my desk. I have this gorgeous antique roll top desk. Seriously, if any of you in the Bay area, want to roll top desk, hit me up. I’m going to put it on Craigslist soon, but it’s got, it’s must have 25 or 30 little drawers and there’s things in all the drawers. So I need to go through and make myself a desk kit. It’s going to be one box of stuff that I’ll put in the shipping container, the shipping box that we’re shipping to ourselves. So I’ll get that in four or five months after we move and that’ll hold mostly post-its. You know that. I’m not throwing out my post-its. I know I can get them in New Zealand, but I already have them, so I’m shipping them. But then when I’m really excited about is to make a little container of desk now, the things that I use on a daily basis, the things that I reach for which include post-its and pencils and my tarot cards, and you know, my glasses wipes, those kinds of things. I’m going to have to bring, of course my podcasting mic, but then after I get rid of all of the other stuff that I can sell the desk, and that’s really the last big piece of furniture in this room, apart from a very small sofa, which, honestly, just going to get tossed at the end because I’ve been using it for so long and we have pets and it’s scratched up. [00:02:22] So other than that, I’m pretty much packed. That is not to say the house is in any way packed. We have both been focusing on our own offices since in our offices, we keep our clothes, we keep all of our things are, our bedroom is just for sleeping. There’s really not much in there, but the rest of the house has things like, you know, the kayaks in the, in that one closet. And, so that’s- oh, the kitchen! Oh my God, the kitchen. That’s going to be fun. But right now, outside, I hope you don’t hear it, but we have somebody fixing stuff up and power washing. We’re going to get house painted outside and in it’s just all really sinking in we’re spending real money now to get things done. So now, it’s just been terrifying. I know I keep talking about how terrifying and scary this is. But it is, it really is. It’s also exhilarating and exciting, and I can’t wait to make this move to New Zealand, but one of my students shared this with us last week and the phrase is just “Do It Scared.” And I have that on a post-it on my desk right now. Where am I going to put my post-its? I don’t know, but Do It Scared is my motto right now. We do it. We do it scared. We do this with our books, with our writing. We don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know how to do it. We don’t know if we will ever succeed. We don’t know if we’re good enough. In fact, we think we’re not, and we do it anyway. We do it with this pit of fear in the bottom place of our soul. And we show up and we take the steps to get these things done. [00:04:04] Yeah, writers are brave. Writers are courageous. We have to be, we have to be hopeful and courageous to, in order to do this really wild thing that nobody else wants to do. So if you’re feeling scared about what you’re doing with your writing, good. That means you’re exactly in the right place. There’s this beautiful David Bowie quote that I slaughter every time I try it, I should just memorize it. But he basically says, “Write when you feel like your feet can’t touch the bottom of the swimming pool, that’s when you’re in the right place.” I feel that so often in my own writing, and I know you probably do too, and I definitely feel like that in my life right now. So that’s going on. I had some health stuff crop up over the week that kind of knocked me out for a few days that sucked, but I’m up in better now and I’m still doing fine on the health stuff, no diagnosis. And I believe I’m not going to have a diagnosis. I believe whatever sickness I had for those almost three months, I don’t think they’re ever going to figure it out. And I’m becoming okay with that. The more exploratory tests they do unable to find things really the happier I am. It’s frustrating, but it’s really also very, very awesome. But last week, I did get the shot. I got the vaccine, I got the one dose Johnson & Johnson. My hyperactive immune system really kicked up a storm and I got real sick. And also that was, you know, thank you, immune system, making those antibodies. Yeah, because of one of my medical conditions, I was on the list to get it and I got it. Lala does not have it yet. My wife does not have it. She’ll hopefully get it within the next month or two. And, but it does feel nice to have, it’s anticlimactic. I just want everybody to have it, but that’s all. I just want everybody to have the vaccine and that will be really, really great but that’s, that’s coming.[00:06:00] What else is going on? I’m gearing up for the launch of Hush Little Baby. I got some artistic assets as they call them today. And they’re just really cute images that you can put on Instagram or Pinterest or whatever of your book. And the nice thing is when you’re with a traditional publisher, if you decide to go that route, that’s one of those things they do for you. They give you the artistic assets and thank God for that, because I like to use Canva for the stuff that I do, myself, my self-published books. But it’s nice to have somebody else send that to you. So they’re doing things like giveaways and so that is starting. I’m trying to be present for that, trying to show up at the desk, even though life is literally in disarray, in several different arenas. I still got to show up at the desk and write. I still have to show up to the desk and think about marketing. I still have to show up. I get to show up at the desk and teach that’s, I love doing that. Life just doesn’t stop spinning because we get busy, we just get busier and that is fine. Do it scared. Do it scared. I’m trying to go a little bit easy on myself. I hope that you are exploring some of that too. I’m thinking a lot about the seasons of writing, and I have more than a few students right now in my classes who are really hitting a wall.[00:07:25] And I think it has to do, I’m guessing this is my guess. I think it has something to do with his year of the pandemic, it’s really slapping us all in the face that we’ve lost an entire year to this in so many ways. And the smallest thing we could lose from this is a year. So many of us have lost so much more than just a year. And this particular stress as is just accumulated to the point where, for a lot of people, it is hard to write right now. And I want to remind you that there are seasons, there are seasons of writing. I love to teach these 90 day classes because 90 days is a great season. You can go hard, you can work hard. You can bond with this community and work your ass off and have something to show for it at the end, you can’t do 90 days to blast through everything. Every 90 days you have to recuperate. Winter Will Come, my last Patreon essay that I wrote was about the book wintering, which I highly recommend and about my type of wintering and how we have to remember that tree’s like really- a really good hardworking tree outside. I may have said this on the podcast, I apologize if I have, but are very hardworking tree. Your favorite tree out on the sidewalk. If it is a tree that normally loses its leaves in the fall, it doesn’t get to decide just to try really hard and work harder and produce the leaves all through the winter. It doesn’t get that choice. It has to winter. We all have to winter at some points. And right now, even though we’re going into spring in this hemisphere, I feel people are wintering, are needing to winter. If you have been working your ass off, it might be time for a goddamn break. It is what I’m telling you my friends, it’s different than not wanting to write, not wanting to write, hating, writing, hating what you’re writing. That’s just- that’s any day of any season, but hitting a wall and needing to take care of yourself more than needing to get to the page, that’s normal. That’s part of the writer’s life. So if you’re there, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re living this part of the writer’s life and wintering is included in that you must winter sometimes. So, take heart. Take care of yourself. Write when you can and when you do, come find me on the internet and tell me about it. I really love hearing about your writing. Okay. My friends enjoy this interview. I know you will, and we will talk soon. [00:10:12] Do you wonder why you’re not getting your creative work done? Do you make a plan to write and then fail to follow through? Again? Well, my sweet friend, maybe you’d get a lot out of my Patreon. Each month, I write an essay on living your creative life as a creative person, which is way different than living as a person who’ve been just Netflix 20 hours a week and I have lived both of those ways, so I know. You can get each essay and access to the whole back catalog of them for just a dollar a month. Which is an amount that really truly helps support me at this here writing desk. If you pledge the $3 level, you’ll get motivating texts for me that you can respond to. And if you pledge at the $5 a month level, you get to ask me questions about your creative life, that I’ll answer in the mini episodes. So basically I’m your mini coach. Go to patreon.com/Rachael (R A C H A E L) to get these perks and more and thank you so much.

Rachael Herron: [00:11:12] Okay. Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show, Erica Robuck. Hello, Erica!

Erika Robuck: [00:11:17] Hello. I’m so happy to be here. 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:19] I’m so happy to have you. I am not done with your book yet, but I have not been able to put it down since I picked it up yesterday. So it is just so fantastic! And I can’t wait to talk to you about it. Let me give you a little intro, Erica Robuck is the national best-selling author of Hemingway’s Girl, Call Me Zelda, Fallen Beauty, The House of Hawthorne, and Receive Me Falling. She is a contributor to the anthology Grand Central: Postwar Stories of Love and Reunion, and to the Writer’s Digest Essay Collection, Author in Progress. She writes satire, hashtag #Hockeystrong as E. Robuck. Her latest novel, The Invisible Woman, the one I’m reading is about real-life superwoman of WWII, OSS/SOE agent Virginia Hall. In 2014, Robuck was named Annapolis’ Author of the Year and she resides there with her husband, three sons and a spunky miniature schnauzer. So I’m just so glad to have you on the show. One of my favorite genres to read are these historical novels that are based in truth. And just before we get into writing, which is what this podcast is all about. How did you find out about her? How did you fall in love with her?

Erika Robuck: [00:12:30] Well, I was going through trying to find people that were from Maryland, who were important to me. And I’ve written books about women in the shadows of men. So I’ve written Mrs. Fitzgerald, and an editor had said to me, find a woman who’s special in her own right. Who’s not in a man’s shadow, but remarkable. And around that time, I found Virginia Hall from Baltimore. I live in Maryland, who grew up where I did. And I don’t, I didn’t know how I’d never heard of her before, because her story is so extraordinary. If I’d made it up, you just wouldn’t believe it. 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:04] Yes. 

Erika Robuck: [00:13:06] So the day that I found her, I just, I’m so thankful that I did. 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:08] And she just like took over your life and your imagination and 

Erika Robuck: [00:13:11] Absolutely

Rachael Herron: [00:13:13] You write her with such beauty that she is just so three-dimensional and I could just feel everything that she’s feeling. And I appreciate that from you. Can you tell us a little bit, so you’re wildly prolific, obviously, what is your writing process like? What, how do you get it done? 

Erika Robuck: [00:13:28] Yeah, my now and my son is a little older, I try to work while they’re either in virtual school or online or at school. They’re in a hybrid situation right now. So I pretty much work 9 to 1 every day is my writing time. And then I come out of the office blinking and see to food and exercise and domestic activities and interacting with children. But that’s the time I try to carve out every morning and it’s really important that I keep that. So that’s Monday through Friday. And then, you know, I have like a whole setup. I have classical music. I have a candle; this whole desk is kind of like an altar. So you know, I have my, I hypnotize myself and then I set my alarm so I do remember to go pick people up from school because I definitely missed that before, when you’re in the past, it’s hard to come out, back to the present. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:17] Yes. I use my echo device for that. You know, people feel different ways about having those in their house. And I don’t like to have it in my house, but my wife insisted on it, but now I use it for everything for, and especially for writing, I set it to set the alarm because you don’t have to think very hard. You just say it and then she’ll yell at you when you need to go run the errand that you have to do. 

Erika Robuck: [00:14:36] Yeah. I do have, on my little, on my watch here, it buzzes and won’t let you stop. So 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:40] Otherwise I don’t know how we would get anything done. Yeah, exactly. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing? 

Erika Robuck: [00:14:47] Well, when I’m in the drafting process, I really have to crawl into the skin of the characters. And, you know, as a writer, when that process is very different from revising or editing. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:57] Yes

Erika Robuck: [00:14:58] And it’s hard for me to go into that world, to go into world war II, occupied France, Virginia Hall, and then to come out and to go to the carpool line and interact with human beings in the grocery store. So that’s the biggest challenge for me is in the drafting phase when it’s almost I wouldn’t don’t say method acting, but you know, you’re just not in your own head as much as in someone else’s. So that’s a real challenge to balance that.  

Rachael Herron: [00:15:24] I like that you called it method acting. We really do kind of do that when we get very deep into it. And I’ve, you know, when you’re moving through your office like trying to act things out and how does your body move and would her arm actually reach that far? And your character has a prosthetic leg and, oh! that’s fantastic. What is your biggest joy when it comes to writing?

Erika Robuck: [00:15:45] My biggest joy is definitely- I call it the fifth day. So four days are a total slog and I’m agonizing or every word and I’m interrupted a thousand times by myself and everything. But on the fifth day, you know, I go into the zone. So yeah, five hours pass, I do- I like to pick people up. I don’t know what happened. It barely needs to be edited. So I’m always the writer high on the fifth day is what I’m always chasing, but you have to do the really bad four days before that to get to the fifth day.

Rachael Herron: [00:16:15] I absolutely love that. And I think that my personal schedule is something very similar to yours and it reminds me, my mom always said, and I have no idea if this has any basis, in fact at all. But she always has said that there’s a big wave and then six smaller ones. And the seventh wave is always a big one. And when we were like avoiding things on the beach, we would run around the rock right after the big waves. Cause we’d have six waves to do it. And it kind of sounds the same as yours.

Erika Robuck: [00:16:37] Absolutely. That’s exactly what it’s like. 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:39] Yeah. And I wish I could get, I wish we could program in to have that fifth day more regularly, but what I like talking about this is because there are so many people who will be listening, who are like, it’s supposed to be easy every day. How would you, what would you tell them about that?

Erika Robuck: [00:16:55] I would say, you know, just they’ll button chair advice that you have to, you can’t wait for the muse. You have to be in the place where it can find you, you can’t just wait for it to find, you know, chase you down. It’s not going to do that and it’s a little bit, I don’t know, it’s almost like finding a radio frequency. And, you know, I think about Virginia Hall and trying to find the frequency and contact London. It takes a lot of misses and a lot of static, but then you find it so you can have that day of transmission and, you know, my best writing days, I don’t feel like I’m writing at all. I’m just, I just feel like I’m channeling. So, but to do that, you have to really practice finding the channel. 

Rachael Herron: [00:17:35] I really love that analogy too. And it’s so beautifully with Virginia. Can you share a craft tip of any sort with us? 

Erika Robuck: [00:17:43] I was thinking a lot about that today and for those who don’t have resources to travel, my, and also now we’re so, so many of us can’t travel. My greatest resource is video and using a YouTube. This is strange. I have a NordicTrack treadmill that lets me go to the Pyrenees so I can walk the trails close to where she walked. 

Rachael Herron: [00:18:05] Wow. 

Erika Robuck: [00:18:06] I can walk through Lyon. I can go to Le Chambon Lyon and because I have access to this technology. So for me, for writers, if you can access YouTube videos about settings, character, if there’s, if you’re lucky enough to have a character who’s on tape, access all of that, because it really animates everything for me, it helps me a lot. And if I don’t have it, so I don’t have any video of Virginia Hall, but I imagine who I would want to play her in the movie. So for me, it would be Catrona Ball from Outlander who plays players. And if I just watch her do a couple of scenes, maybe during the WWII time period, it helps put me in the zone a little bit easier.

Rachael Herron: [00:18:46] I absolutely love the idea of being able to walk through that scenery with the NordicTrack. How very, very, very, very cool is that to put yourself there that way. Oh my goodness. I wanted to, I wanted to go somewhere down a track, but I’m having a hard time focusing today because I’m excited about everything, including your book. What thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way?

Erika Robuck: [00:19:12] I’m so surprised by how well, my family, first of all, and sometimes I’m intentional about it and sometimes I’m not, but for example, my sons, I got all three of their names into Hemingway’s girl for characters as a little wink to them. And then my youngest son, when he was little, he used to always say, remember, remember? And he said it so often. That I put that in one of the characters’ child’s mouth. So I would never forget how he would always wanted me to remember things. So that was in Fallen Beauty. So usually 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:40] It’s so beautiful. 

Erika Robuck: [00:19:41] I kind of just trying to put little winks in there and get them into the fiction. 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:46] I love that

Erika Robuck: [00:19:47] The other ones I don’t plan, I have kind of a devotion to different saints and sometimes they show up in the writing and I don’t plan on them. So I have a great interest in Padre Pio, he had the stigmata, he had by location, all these strange mystical things. And he showed up and call me Zelda without my plan. And I ended up talking to my editor and she’s like, no, it works. You have to leave it there. But it’s strange how these little things assert themselves. And that’s the fun of writing historical fiction because it’s not biography. I don’t have to be perfectly faithful to the letter. I do have a little bit of space, not a lot, but a little bit, so 

Rachael Herron: [00:20:26] And it sounds like you get to follow your passion and follow your interest when that pops up. Yeah. I do remember what I was going to ask you about. In terms of research since these are based in the French countryside and very, very clearly based there, what kind of research did you have to do or have you done, or can you just do it from the Nordic track? Or have you been there?

Erika Robuck: [00:20:45] No, it’s a little bit of everything. And because she was a spy, she didn’t want to be found. She said it very clearly in interviews later in her life, people would try to hunt her down. She would say no. And she was operative in the CIA until her mandatory retirement at the age of 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:00] Holy cow. 

Erika Robuck: [00:20:45] Yeah. So she really wanting to remain in the shadows, but now here we are. So they declassified her files, the national archives. So I was able to go to college park and go through all of those was amazing. I applied to be a researcher at the CIA and they let me come in there. I got to see her distinguished service cross, her passport, a wireless transplant. You know, 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:23] That gives me goosebumps, to see and touch those things even though, even if you were wearing gloves, you got to, you got to be there with them,

Erika Robuck: [00:21:28] I could be there and then there’s a lot of a spy craft fiction. There’s a lot of books about women at that time and the SOE and the OSS. I found a French language book about one of the McKee who worked directly with her, who actually had a contentious relationship with her. So it was really interesting to see that and helpful, but the best thing was meeting with her niece. She has, her niece lives in Baltimore. And so Lorna and I met for lunch three or four times, and she let me see all of these family photos and family documents and she was so generous with her time. 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:02] How does she feel about seeing her aunt portrayed in these ways? Did she love it? 

Erika Robuck: [00:22:08] She loved it. And I’m sure, you know too with the phenomenon, the collective unconscious, when something comes up, it comes up. And so Virginia Hall, Lorna has said to me, nobody knew about my aunt and all of a sudden I was getting calls from writers, biographers, filmmakers. And sure enough, the film We’ll Call This By just came out. There’s a woman who know importance the biography. There’s a movie based on that coming out. There’s my book there, there’s just all of a sudden it’s like our stars rising, so

Rachael Herron: [00:22:39] Which is so cool that people will really, really know her and be able to follow her with your words. That is so exciting. Do you miss her? Now that you’re not writing her?

Erika Robuck: [00:22:49] Absolutely. And I, and she hasn’t left me yet. So my follow-up book, I’ve got two books right now with Berkeley and the first one was The Invisible Woman. And then early next year we’ll have the follow-up, which, which is as yet untitled, but it’s another SOE female. And then another American woman who helped smuggle pilots out of France. Virginia Hall showed up in the draft. Of course she did. She muscled her way into the SOE offices, and you don’t plan on it. And one of the men said, Oh, she’s not very approachable. And it just made me laugh because it- I didn’t plan on her being there, but she’s like, Oh, I will be there.

Rachael Herron: [00:23:26] I’m thinking that sometimes when, you know, Virginia walks on for you or when the saints walk on, that might be one of your fifth days when you’re just receiving. 

Erika Robuck: [00:23:34] Absolutely right. Absolutely. And I said, I’d said to my editor and my agent, I was like, look, who showed up in the new book. And they all thought it was funny, you know? So all these beautiful

Rachael Herron: [00:23:43] Beautiful. Oh, that’s the magic of being a writer. Okay, speaking of awesome books, what is the best book you’ve read recently and why did you love it? 

Erika Robuck: [00:23:53] I’ve been an evangelist Ford Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Have you heard it?

Rachael Herron: [00:23:57] Never heard of it. No, Hamnett, H A M N E T? All one word? 

Erika Robuck: [00:24:01] Hamnett. Yes. Who is Shakespeare’s son who died of the plague. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:05] Oh I didn’t know that.

Erika Robuck: [00:24:06] Whom he based Hamlet off of, and the name Hamnet and Hamlet are kind of interchangeable in the documents of the boys’ life. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:13] Wow 

Erika Robuck: [00:24:15] It is phenomenal. I don’t, I can’t even describe it. I was so greedy for it. I couldn’t put it down. I devoured it. And then as a writer, I’m so jealous. How did I not, how can I not write like this? How did I not think of this? So it’s just, it’s so good. And I think it won every award last year, so

Rachael Herron: [00:24:33] I haven’t even heard of it. It must be off in my own cloud somewhere, but yeah, 

Erika Robuck: [00:24:36] it’s, you don’t have to care about Shakespeare or historical fiction. It’s just a phenomenal book. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:41] I love both deeply, so I am very excited. That’s going to go to the top of my list after I finish yours. So thank you. Okay. Now, so let’s talk about you and this book. Can you give us kind of the pitch, the logline for this book for people who haven’t heard of it? 

Erika Robuck: [00:24:57] Well, I just do it as simply as possible. She’s the real life, superwoman of WWII, who helped to you know, best the Nazis liberate mountain villages and arm and train thousands of guerrilla fighters. With a prosthetic leg, she called Cuthbert by the way. So are you really, you just it’s silly every time my editor would say, did she really do that? And then I would say yes, 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:18] I kept thinking that as I, as I’ve been reading through, like, is that something that she made up because the writer’s brain asks that, but apparently a lot of it is real. So her, will you tell us a little bit about her personality though? I think that’s why I’m enjoying her so much is she is not a, by any means cardboard cutout of a strong woman.

Erika Robuck: [00:25:38] Yeah. And I’m so glad to hear you say that because wrestling with her has been one of the big challenges of this book in particular

Rachael Herron: [00:25:45] I can imagine. 

Erika Robuck: [00:25:46] Yeah. And I kept getting feedback from beta readers and she was like, Oh, she’s just not likable. 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:51] I loved her instantly. So I don’t know how you pulled that up because I can see the unlikeability, but I loved her instantly.

Erika Robuck: [00:25:59] Well, that’s how I felt about her, but it was really a problem for a lot of people because she is, she’s prickly needs. 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:05] Yes

Erika Robuck: [00:26:06] Her niece described her as intimidating and scary, smart. There’s nobody who ever called Virginia Hall likable, but because she’s the protagonist of a novel, we have to root for her. We have to sympathize with her. And my editor brilliantly said, let’s see Virginia before the war losses, before she shot off her foot. Before the survivor guilt, post-traumatic stress. Let’s see, young Virginia. And so we brought in the prologue where she goes to study in Paris and she falls in love with Paris. It’s her first time out in the world. And she thought she’s going to take the world by storm. She’s going to travel and she speaks all these languages. And so we see her very young and starry-eyed. And then in chapter one, I just write into the fire. It’s second mission. First mission. All of that network has been decimated. People are dead and she is a cold shell of her former self. So I want the reader to say what happened and you will find out

Rachael Herron: [00:26:58] That is exactly what you did. And I had actually forgotten about that prologue because it had just. I just filed it away in my head. And I’m always talking to students about that whole save the cat idea that we have to give the reader, just that subconscious nod, that this is a good human being that you will not regret spending your time with. And you did that the way her father lifts her up on the shoulder and shows was it wasn’t it like Paris at Dawn? He shows her parents at Dawn. 

Erika Robuck: [00:27:25] Yeah. And then she helps her friend at the party talks with Brendan, make sure she’s safely home. So you said for people, she takes care of people. So 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:34] You saved the cat with that moment. And that is, I know that that’s why I saw her as unlikable as this woman, the shell of woman. And also love her. 

Erika Robuck: [00:27:41] Good. I’m glad it worked because that wasn’t an error until very late in the writing. It just, we had to get it in there and what it ended up doing, it also was bookends the epilogue very nicely with a major plot point

Rachael Herron: [00:27:55] Don’t tell me I’m not there yet. 

Erika Robuck: [00:27:56] Yeah I won’t and I think they helped bring completion and round out her character. So it actually worked out really well, but that my editor had that idea and it was brilliant because I just. I didn’t want to make her something she wasn’t. But I needed the reader to root for her. So,

Rachael Herron: [00:28:12] And it is literally a psychological trick that we play on the reader to get them to come along with us. And it works beautifully. And I didn’t see, I, it worked on me and I’m always looking for those kinds of things

 Erika Robuck: [00:28:22] Oh good. Good.

Rachael Herron: [00:28:23] Fantastic. Where can we find the book and where can we find you?

Erika Robuck: [00:28:26] We can find wherever books are sold. I signed about a jillion copies for Bethany Beach Books, which is an independent bookseller in Delaware, they ship anywhere and I also have signed copies for a likely story in Sykesville, Foxtail Bookshop, Warwick’s in California, if you read on a Kindle, it’s available for e-book and also it’s at Costco

Rachael Herron: [00:28:49] Oh, congratulations! I have never gotten Costco placement. I’ve gotten Target, but never Costco. That’s it. Okay. 

Erika Robuck: [00:28:55] It was my first Costco. I was thrilled, thrilled 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:58] That is a bucket list. 

Erika Robuck: [00:28:59] Yes. 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:01] Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, I will go and check that out at my local Costco too, but I have the Kindle version and you are @erikarobuck.com, is that correct?

Erika Robuck: [00:29:08] Yes, and I’m usually at my favorite social media. I love Instagram. I like the pretty pictures and the book tableau of coffee with books, you know, that’s where I feel happiest, so

Rachael Herron: [00:29:19] That, I agree with you. I have gotten rid of almost all of their social media except for Instagram, where I still am. 

Erika Robuck: [00:29:23] There you go

Rachael Herron: [00:29:24] Thank you so much for chatting with me. It has been a delight. 

Erika Robuck: [00:29:27] Thank you. It was great talking to you. 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:30] All right. Well, good luck and may it fly from the shelves. 

Erika Robuck: [00:29:32] Oh, thank you. And good luck to you too.

Rachael Herron: [00:29:34] Thanks. Bye Erika!

Erika Robuck: [00:29:35] Take care. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

The post Ep. 230: Erika Robuck on the Magic of YouTube Research appeared first on R. H. HERRON.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. My Year Abroad is his new novel. 

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #229 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So thrilled that you’re here with me today, as I record on March 19th, 2021. And today I’m talking to Chang-rae Lee. Right? How exciting is that I, this interview was awesome, so enjoyable, and it was an honor to speak to him. So, we talked a little bit about slowing down while writing. I know that you’re going to enjoy the interview. Please stay on the edge of your seat for that. Before we get into that, though, what is going on around here? Well, I guess in the biggest news I got my vaccine, which is incredible. I am so happy that I was able to get it. I got the Johnson & Johnson one shot and oh my God, did I get sick. Oh wow! I have one of my body issues is a, an over-reactive immune system and it overreacted. But honestly, it only lasted like 30 hours and it was like having a very, very terrible flu, which is nothing compared to COVID. So it was such an interesting feeling to be that sick and that miserable and that happy and grateful at the same time. I’ve never been thrilled to feel like I have the flu, you know, 102, 103 fever, chills, body aches. And I was like, yes, ride this, this is amazing! Thank you shot. So I’m really, really happy about that. Lala does not have hers yet. Hopefully she will be able to get hers pretty soon. [00:02:02] It’d be wonderful if the both of us were and could see some friends who have their vaccines in a few weeks when the inoculation actually takes effect because they don’t, they didn’t tell me this onsite when I got my shot. But you’re not fully protected for a few weeks or so. So do your own research on that. I’m not going to tell you how long it takes per shot, cause I don’t know, and I would not want to get that wrong, but I am very, very happy and grateful about that. It’s, I just want everybody to get it though. Like, it’s awesome that I have it, but I don’t care. Cause I want everybody to get it. That’s the important thing. [00:02:37] What else? I am not writing this week. I have not been just well, and that’s not true. I’ve been working on the synopsis of Quincy, which I keep working on and it’s just not right yet. And to take my own advice, I’m just going to have to get it off my plate and send it to my agent, which is where it belongs. And I’m going to try to do that later today. There I set it here. Now I’m going to have to do it. But what is really going on is moving, you can hear the room is more empty now than it was even last week. And that is going a pace. I still don’t know how we’re going to get it all done. We have a moving date now. I don’t think I had this the last time I podcasted, but yeah, we got our managed isolation which is very, very hard to get. And we got it about a month before we actually had to enter on Lala’s visa into New Zealand. So the timeline has moved up yet again and now we’re leaving in approximately four months and our house is still 100% full of everything we have to sell it. We have to get rid of everything all in four months. And so we’re doing that, moving toward that. I actually really enjoy this kind of challenge. I love lists. I love doing things I love working until late at night and falling into bed, happily exhausted from having to do a lot of things. [00:04:04] Whereas, my wife is finding it more emotional. She is more of a collector of things and she got rid of, I’m going to say, more than 95% of her books and graphic novels that she has collected for the last 25, 30 years. And that was really hard for her. That was really, really a challenge. So, she’s doing great. And I wish I could make it easier for her and I will because I’m going to pack the kitchen. She won’t have to. So one of the things that I did want to mention on this show, and I haven’t mentioned it over anywhere in social media yet, but if you go to RachaelHerron.com and go to the blog, the most recent post is about our two cats, Waylon and Willie and I am not going to cry on this show. I’m not going to do any of that crap, but they’re too old to go with us. They are 14 years old. Willy has a kidney not infection, kidney problems. He has chronic kidney problems and they, it’s just not safe to travel with them. We just keep reading these terrible stories about how these cats didn’t make it. You can’t drug them on the plane. They don’t let you. So they generally just die of fright on the 17-hour flight at the shortest and then they have to do quarantine. So we cannot safely bring them and it’s breaking our hearts. They are the sweetest boys, sweetest cats that I’ve ever known.[00:05:36] The sweetest cats I’ve ever known. They were both black. Willy is long haired. Waylon is short haired, and they wrap themselves around each other all day. Every day, they have each other, they love us so much, but they have each other. So they’re just always content and happy and purring. And they’re wonderful. And I talk about them on the blog and what we are hoping is that we find somebody close to us physically. Hopefully in Northern California. So it would just be a car ride away who wants to adopt them. We are going to take care of all their medical bills till the end of their lives. So that would not be a worry. They come with a litter robot three, which is Bluetooth activated and tells you when about once a week or so you have to change the bag. No scooping of the litter. Yeah, we need to find a really good home for them because they are amazing. And Dozy, our young dog she’s five years old, so she can safely do it. She’s in getting all the shots and everything. And we have a place for her to stay while we are getting settled. And then we can send for her to come over, but we can’t take the cats. So if you’d like to, or if you know anybody in Northern California, who would like a pair of brother cats that are beyond wonderful, let me know. If no one steps forward, I do have an offer from a friend who lives in West Virginia. Wait, where does she live? I can’t remember. Maybe Virginia, Virginia. But so we could put them on a plane and get them there, but we’re hoping to avoid the plane. So if you or anyone, you know, in Northern California wants these two boys go read the blog post, it’s all about them, entails every single thing about them. And I thought I would mention it here in case, you know, anybody cause you guys know everyone. [00:07:23] And one other update, you know that I love writing my Patreon essays. I love writing them. It’s my favorite thing. I am going to pivot them and I’m going to be talking about moving to another country as an adult permanently. That’s what those essays are going to be about. I think they’re going to be really fun to write. They are going to be how I collect the chapters of a book about this move. A memoir about this move. So if you would like to be in on the ground floor and reading those essays, the first one will go out this month. I’m not sure what it’s going to be about yet, but it’s going to be about freaking out about moving, probably something along those lines. You can always go to patreon.com/Rachael (R A C H A E L). And while I’m mentioning that I wanted to thank new patron Alice Law. Alice, thank you. Thank you so much. Welcome on the ride. There are at least four dozen essays in there that y’all can get for a dollar. You can read them all and then unsubscribe that would be a lot of reading, how many thousands of words is that? I’m going to go 48. You can hear me clicking. They’re usually about 4,000 words each that’s 192,000 words that are not available anywhere else yet, because I’m still collecting them into collections of books. Someday, I will do all of the things, but until then, they’re all over there in Patreon, if you are interested.[00:08:50] And, just wanted to say a very, very big thank you for all of you who are subscribers and all of you who aren’t subscribers, who can’t be subscribers for whatever reason. I’m so grateful that you’re here and that you enjoy the show and that you leave reviews over it. iTunes that’s super, super helpful or I-podcast or whatever they call it now. I feel like one of, I feel like one of the olds talking about the Facebook, but those are great. You know, what else is great? This interview with Chang-rae Lee, please enjoy. And I wish you all very, very happy writing this week my friends. Bye. [00:10:15] Hey, is resistance keeping you from writing? Are you looking for an actual writing community in which you can make a calls and be held accountable for them? Join RachaelSaysWrite, like twice weekly, two hour writing session on zoom. You can bop in and out of the writing room as your schedule needs, but for just $39 a month, you can write up to 4 hours a week. With our wonderful little community, in which you’ll actually get to know your writing peers. We write from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM on Tuesdays and 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM on Thursdays and that’s US Pacific Standard Time. Go to RachaelHerron.com/Write to find out more.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:07] Okay. Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show. Chang-rae Lee. Hello there, welcome!

Chang-rae Lee: [00:10:13] Thank you very much for having me. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:15] It’s an honor to have you, let me give you a little bit of a bio. Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. My Year Abroad is his new novel. So congratulations on that amazing bio and on this new book, which I just loved. 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:10:46] Thank you, Rachael. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:47] I’m so glad to get a chance to talk to you about it. Before we jump into those questions that I had your publicist send you that are my normal questions I wanted to ask really quickly. And this is purely selfish because I’m working on a novel right now that deals a lot with longing and desire and a certain kind of hunger. And I’m, you know, I’m going into revision. So I’m actually starting to think about what the book wants to be now. And I just had a curious, you know, fellow writer question, hunger is such a theme of this novel. When do you know that? That’s something that you like, you just sat down one day said I’m going to write a novel with the theme of hunger or does that come later for you?

Chang-rae Lee: [00:11:28] No, you don’t. I didn’t think that, and 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:32] Oh good, that makes me feel better. 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:11:35] And you know, it’s something that it’s funny because you know what it’s about, even if you don’t say it to yourself and think it to yourself. Somehow, there’s some part of you, I think that knows what it’s about. And this is what I tell my students all the time is that you have to, you obviously have a sense of the story and sense of the characters, but sometimes, and most of the time, you don’t fully appreciate why you’re interested in those characters. And it’s only in the writing of it that you begin, that it begins to become clearer. Like it’s always there. It’s always there, but it becomes clearer and clearer, clearer why you needed to write this particular story about this particular character in this particular circumstance. So for example, in this book, I thought that my interest was about the Chinese businessman named Pong, who is obviously a main, main part of this story and the person who takes the narrator on this trip and who introduces him to the world. That was my original you know, character and my original inspiration and my original excitement about, oh gosh, I want to write a story about this striver immigrant, who had so much energy, so much charisma who like, you know, it was just, you know, had delightful way of thinking about opportunity. And I thought, okay, maybe it’s a certain kind of immigrant novel that way, but the more I asked myself, well, why am I interested in this character? The more I realized that wasn’t the full story, that was part of the story, but not the full story. The full story was I’m interested in this character because I feel this kind of, I don’t know this emptiness, this void, this depletion that of spirit, that a character I’m thinking a character has and who needs inspiration, who needs to be sparked into something. And that I think in the end led me to this ultimate feeling or ultimate knowledge as I was writing him that yes, he’s, he feels empty. He feels hungry, he feels desirous, but he doesn’t really know why and so that’s that I think is an example of a good example to me in the writing process of not just jumping immediately into your inspiration. Sometimes you have to interrogate that inspiration and maybe that leads you to, so I didn’t lose Pong as a character. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:19] Not at all, yeah.  

Chang-rae Lee: [00:14:20] Right, but I think I got to the core of my interest and curiosity. Which is not wholly, it, which is really about a certain kind of psyche and consciousness that is desperate for some saver of the world, some saver of his life. And then, and that led me ultimately to this young kid Tiller that narrates ‘em all.

Rachael Herron: [00:14:47] Tiller is so great. Tiller is just so, he’s a treat to be around. 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:14:55] Yeah. Well he’s well, you asked the question again. There’s a lot to say about him. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:03] Well, how do you feel about the idea of this as kind of a building’s roman for 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:15:09] Absolutely. It’s- you know, this is, I mean, I didn’t, again, I didn’t conceive of it this way, but it ends up this novel ends up being a lots of different kinds of novel. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:20] It really does! Yes 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:15:23] You know, it’s a buildings are on for him, a coming of age, laundering novel, but it’s also, you know, where you have a young person going out in the world and figuring things out, but it’s also in some ways a midlife crisis. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:42] Yes

Chang-rae Lee: [00:15:43] It’s also an immigrant novel, as I mentioned, it’s also kind of a absurdist novel. It’s also a novel about, a novel about sensuality and the body 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:00] Yeah. And a love story in that way

Chang-rae Lee: [00:16:02] And a love story in that way. Yeah. So, and this is all because of I’ve found Tiller. Tiller is somebody who needs it all, you know, he wants, if he could, he could eat, he would eat the entire world. Right. And try to taste all its flavors. And again, it’s ultimately not about the flavor. It’s not about, it’s not about the palette. It’s about, you know, the capacity of the psyche to take it all in and get some meaning from it.

Rachael Herron: [00:16:33] And he’s really the stand in for the reader, right? 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:16:36] Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So I put you on this journey with him and Pong and hope that you know, to give you more of a taste than you thought you were going to have everything that’s wild and wacky about the world and scary too. Yeah, and this is what I, you know, this is sort of where I wanted to go with him, which is, yeah, you can taste the world, but you know what? Sometimes the world will taste you back. 

Rachael Herron: [00:17:06] Exactly. There’s a lot of surprise in your writing. How much of that is planned or is it all just a surprise as you’re going? 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:17:15] In this book, some of it was planned, but I didn’t know the extent of what I would encounter. For example, I knew that he would meet this crazy, you know, a private chef named Chilis, of this businessman that they made, and I knew that they would have some kind of fun, you know, or a strange encounter together. But I had no idea where it was going to go. I knew that he was going to meet the daughter of this businessman and then they’d have a love story and sexual relations. But I had no idea where’s it gonna go. So just generally, and I knew like he meet all these different people, but I had no idea the kinds of things that he would be having to witness and do. So, yeah, and maybe that goes with the spirit of the book, which is just this kind of, part of the book, which is this wild adventure. And I think if you plan out a wild adventure too much, it doesn’t feel very wild.

Rachael Herron: [00:18:16] I absolutely agree. So this podcast is for and about writers. Can you tell us about your wri- I know this is the quintessential question, but your writing process?

Chang-rae Lee: [00:18:28] Well, for me, it’s pretty simple. I, you know, we were talking about, you know, how story comes to be, but once you’re kind of settled on it and also of course, very curious about it too. And that’s what I would add is that you know, you don’t want to know everything about a story. If you feel like, you know the whole story, you probably shouldn’t write it. You should probably look for a ancillary story or corollary story that is probably the one that you’re most curious about and want to discover. Because then it, you know, then it’s fresh. Then the language is alive. Then you know, the incidents and happenings maybe feel more natural. But then once you kind of are committed to it and I write novels, so I have to commit, I try to just sit at my desk basically, you know, just work as much as I can, as long as I can. I’m a slow writer. I care very much about the sentences and not just the storytelling. And so it has to sound feel right to me, the cadence has to be right. And so that takes a long time. I’m a slow writer. And,

Rachael Herron: [00:19:51] How do you fit that in, around the teaching? And especially when I asked that about the kind of mental weight that goes along with teaching?

Chang-rae Lee: [00:20:00] Yeah. It’s tough. I mean, people always ask me, what do you get from teaching for your writing? And I said, well, you know, I love the students and I say to everyone, sometimes I don’t want to go and teach because I’m working on something. I’m thinking about something. But after teaching, I’m always happy, you know, the class is great and the students are always great. And I learned things and we have, we connect and it feels good, you know, but boy, if you asked me maybe half the time, we’d be like, I’d rather not teach today. Just to be honest. 

Rachael Herron: [00:20:47] It’s hard. I also teach, I teach in the extension program, the creative writing program at Stanford. So yeah. So I’m on the same campus where you are. It is, but I live in Oakland. And where do you live?

Chang-rae Lee: [00:21:00] I live in San Francisco. So it’s worse. It’s even worse. Good for you.

Rachael Herron: [00:21:05] It’s not a good drive, but going home is always the best feeling because it’s just so jazzed. So fun.

Chang-rae Lee: [00:21:13] Yes! I agree. And I love, you know, I teach a night class and, cause it’s just good for my writing schedule, and the kids are actually awake at night. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:25] That’s a good point. 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:21:26] They’re not awake at 10. They’re just getting up at about 4 in the afternoon. So like, you know, when I teach a class starting at 6-6:30, it’s perfect.

Rachael Herron: [00:21:35] So you can suck some of their energy to go home. Exactly. Speaking of teaching, can you share any kind of a craft tip with our audience? 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:21:45] Well, I think the thing that I talked to most, especially to my undergraduate writers who were, you know, obviously more less experienced than say the Stegner fellas, no workshop or a real writers, you know, I mean, they know how to write it, tell them anything is that most writers are just are not patient enough, they just rush through scenes. They rushed through investigations of consciousness, thoughts. They feel like they’re, they have to get it all out. They have to embrace it, the whole thing at once and I keep saying everything you talk about, everything you look at a character, a dialogue, a situation, it’s actually huge. And your job is to find the you know, you find the three things about it that are most relevant for and most interesting and exposing of this moment, rather than trying to capture it all. Now you can write it all, but you’ll have to probably edit it down to those things, but in your, but sometimes students will just try to just capture the whole thing and then they don’t write it all. They just kind of summarize or they go too fast or they, and so that’s what I would say. I would say most, most of my students are not patient. 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:17] I had a student the other day asked me how it’s a simple question, but it’s, you know, if you had never considered it, it’s a huge question. How much time can you cover in a novel? And I said, well, you know, you can cover 1700 years in a novel if you like to or I really believe you could cover an hour

Chang-rae Lee: [00:23:34] Yeah. Virginia Wolf does it

Rachael Herron: [00:23:37] Abso-freaking-lutely!  You know, there’s so much to look at and slow down on the inside.

Chang-rae Lee: [00:23:44] Right. And exactly. And that’s why I always urge my students to read as much as they can so they can see all the examples of writing about an hour, writing about an era. Right. So it’s all the same thing, which is pay attention, slow down. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:05] I love that.

Chang-rae Lee: [00:24:06] Yeah, be effective.

Rachael Herron: [00:24:07] That’s perfect. What thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way?

Chang-rae Lee: [00:24:17] I think family affects my life in a way that I didn’t quite expect. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:07] How so?

Chang-rae Lee: [00:24:17] Well, you know, when I was starting out as a writer, I didn’t think I was going to have family originally. I didn’t think I was going to maybe get married, but not have kids just because I thought, you know, I’m a writer. I’m never going to be able to support a family. I never gonna sometimes I still think that, but so you just, I was thinking of it as just, you know, part of my writing life, right. This thing I had to kind of take care of maybe, and we ended up having a family and the kids earlier, and more and more, I think it’s affected my and informed, you know, how I think about what people value and what people hold, not just family, you know, obviously we love our family or what we want to love our family. We love our family. 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:20] It’s been a tricky year.  

Chang-rae Lee: [00:25:20] Yeah. Been a tricky year. But you know, it’s as I think we’re all figuring out, we get to see, especially in this past year, you get to see so much of the world and of existence and of humanity just in dealing with family members. Sometimes we don’t want to pay attention because it’s a pain or it’s painful or we just get sore in your, to it because it seems like it’s so obvious, but I think this past year, especially has thrown into relief, how complex people are and people that are closest to you, which you can use sometimes can’t see, you know, and I think that, you know, maybe as a writer, I’ve paid more attention to my family in that way, as an observer than most other people do.

Rachael Herron: [00:26:16] Well, and it’s right. As writers, we don’t have very many other people to observe right now. 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:26:20] Exactly. 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:21] Yesterday, I was missing people and I don’t miss people much, but I was feeling the longing for other people and we’re actually getting ready to move to New Zealand. So like,

Chang-rae Lee: [00:26:31] No way, really? 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:32] Yes, yes I have dual citizenship so we’re getting out. 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:26:36] Yeah well, it’s a great place.

Rachael Herron: [00:26:37] Yeah, it is. That’s wonderful. So I was looking at all these pictures because we’ve got to get, you know, apply for my wife’s visa, and missing people and I just realized, you know who I don’t miss is my wife. Like, I love her to pieces, but I wish I could miss her.

Chang-rae Lee: [00:26:56] You’re right. Exactly

Rachael Herron: [00:26:57] I am done studying her. And she’s probably done with me studying her too. 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:27:01] Yes. Yes. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:03] Can you tell me what is the best book that you’ve read recently? And why did you love it? 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:27:08] Oh, gosh, I’ve heard a lot of good books recently. You know, say, take one of them. I really enjoyed Katie Kitamura’s, A Separation. I don’t know if you’ve read that. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:18] I don’t know that one, no.

Chang-rae Lee: [00:27:20] Yeah, it’s a wonderful book. It’s about a woman who is wanting to separate from her husband and she goes to basically make that happen where he is in Europe. And when she gets there he’s gone. Somehow he’s disappeared from the hotel where he is and so it becomes this kind of search, but we kind of know what’s what probably happened. And then it’s really just you know, the writing is very precise, kind of searing in a quiet way 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:59] Sounds wonderful

Chang-rae Lee: [00:28:01] And it really minds, you know, what it is to be in a relationship and to be part of a relationship and it’s not normally the kind of story that I relish, but I found myself, you know, deeply drawn in

Rachael Herron: [00:28:15] I love the premise of it. Speaking of premises, which I cannot, wrap up in a tidy logline. Can you tell us please about your new book My Year Abroad? Tell the listeners what it’s about and where they can find it, and all that good stuff.

Chang-rae Lee: [00:28:31] Well, it’s pretty much about, I think plunging into the world and 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:41] Yeah, eating the world, 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:28:42] Eating the world as it were and but in every way and full body, full body consumption of the world and the joys and pleasures and pains of that. And well, they can find it anywhere. You know, I normally I would be visiting all these independent bookstores all across the country. And so I hope if people order it though, they’ll order it through an independent bookstore. 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:12] Absolutely. Are you doing any of the virtual tours? 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:29:17] Yes, I am. I am for you know, independent bookstores and I’m hearing San Francisco. I signed a whole bunch of copies for an order for an order of Green Apple.

Rachael Herron: [00:29:29] I love Green Apple. That is a great store. 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:29:31] Yeah great store. Great people. 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:33] Fabulous. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. I am honored to have you and it’s been a treat to talk to you. 

Chang-rae Lee: [00:29:39] You’re very welcome and great luck to you in the New Zealand. What a beautiful place. 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:44] Thank you so much. All right. Take care. Bye-bye

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

The post Ep. 229: Chang-rae Lee on Slowing Down While Writing appeared first on R. H. HERRON.

Jasmine Mans is a Black American poet and artist from Newark, New Jersey. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin Madison, with a B.A. in African American Studies. Her debut collection of poetry, Chalk Outlines of Snow Angels, was published in 2012, and BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME, just out, is a love letter to the wandering Black girl, and a vital companion to anyone on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing. Mans is the resident poet at the Newark Public Library. 

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

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Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #228 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So glad that you’re here with me today, rather emotional. Okay, so here’s how me, filming my podcasts usually goes, I get a guest, we chat and then it goes in the bank. I’m probably a month and ahead, maybe even two months ahead right now in terms of interviews, which is awesome. I love the publicist, send me amazing authors and they get to read their books and then I get to talk to them. But it doesn’t mean that by the time I release the episode, I haven’t talked to them in four or six weeks or more. And I don’t want to do that today. You guys, I just hung up with Jasmine Mans and I cannot remember a guest ever making me cry before on the show. You’re going to love the episode. It’s brilliant. It’s beautiful. Because she is those things and her book is those things and I want you to get it and read it. And I’m so moved that I can’t, I just can’t wait to share it with you. I can’t wait six weeks. So, as jumping the queue, it’s going in front of everybody else and it’s going to go out this week because it’s important to me and the things we talk about in the show about play and love and fear and life and the way we as writers put that on the page. It was an incredible conversation to me. So I hope that you enjoy it too. And I know you will. [00:01:52] Well, what’s been going on around here. Well, you may hear it’s a little bit more echo-y on the podcast and for those of you who are audio files and who noticed those kinds of things, I apologize for it, but we are finally starting to pack for the move to New Zealand. It’s really getting real. We, I can’t remember if I mentioned this on the show, but we have to enter a New Zealand by August 19th to honor my wife’s visa. I can go in anytime, but she’s got to be so that we have to enter by August 19th. So that means we have to sell the house. We have to pack everything we own that we want to take, which is almost nothing compared to what we own. We’ve been in this house for 15 years. We don’t have a garage. Thank God we don’t have. And we have very small closets, but we still have managed to pack a bunch of stuff into this 1100 square foot home. And we’re trying to leave most of it behind. So we are jumping into that. I, and my room is just emptier now and it’s feeling nice and it’s also feeling terrifying. What else is going on, while we’re doing that, I’m just trying to figure out some kind of a balance. And I don’t know if I’m going to be able to nail it because my priorities outside people who are always my highest priorities, but my priorities are writing, teaching and then moving, where do podcasts fit? I don’t know. I mean, how do you write we’ll keep going because I’ve got episodes in the bank and it’s an easy show for me to do and produce, but my newer podcast Youre-Already-Ready, I think I’m going to move that to a bi-weekly format because I just can’t keep up with the writing of that podcast and the recording and the release. I love that podcast, but it takes a lot of time finding, I need to squeeze time out of places where I’ve never squeezed time from before. And that’s kind of stressing me out. It’s a good stress, but it is a true stress. [00:03:52] Physically, I think I’ve seen one of the last doctors on the list that I needed to see, to try to figure out why I was so sick for those couple of months. And yesterday I was, I saw the specialist of all the specialists and she had no answers. So I remain a medical mystery. Still don’t know what was wrong with me. And I probably will never know. Which is frustrating, but I am just trying to accept it. That is, it’s kind of like these things, we always, I always talk about with writing. We don’t want to write. Writing is hard. Writing is difficult. And we get to accept those thoughts, those feelings, those truths, and still sit down at the desk and do our work. Having those thoughts does not prevent us from doing the work and knowing that I don’t know what my body is doing or has been doing doesn’t prevent me from living my life to its fullest. And hey, you know what? I’m really grateful after all these tests, they didn’t find something really wrong with me. How awesome is that? Like I was literally disappointed that they couldn’t find a diagnosis until, well, I still am a little bit disappointed about that, but then I really did have to snap myself out of it and say they didn’t find a bad diagnosis. Hell yeah. Fantastic. [00:05:16] I’m really grateful for that. Also grateful for the fact that I’m going to have to start remembering what Hush Little Baby, the book that comes out in May from Penguin, it’s a thriller, is about because it’s been off my desk long enough that I’ve kind of forgotten. And I have a, the first publicity call with my team this afternoon. I’m going to have to try to be professional. I’m still not putting on a bra. But I’m going to have to try to be professional and remember what I was trying to do with that book and what I would like to share with the world about that book. So that’s super exciting and I love my editor and I love my team genuinely. I’ve worked with this publicity team for the last book and they just are really awesome people, Dutton as an imprint is phenomenal and I’m so happy to be with them. So that’s coming up this afternoon. Other things that I’m grateful for are so many, and I’m just trying to remember them every day. But right now, I just want to say, thank you. I’m grateful for you. For you listening to this show, we have this weird, special connection that you allow my voice into your head. And that means a lot to me. And I appreciate you for doing that. And I hope that I bring you value and God knows this show today is going to bring value to your life. So I’m pretty confident in that. [00:06:39] Also, I would like to just quickly say thank you to new patrons. I can’t read her name here. Oh, here it is, Daphne Garrison. Thank you, Daphne. Welcome! And also to Mona McDermid, who is just one of my favorite people. Thank you, Mona, for supporting me. I really appreciate that. And okay. That’s all I got to say. I’m feeling gratitude. I’m feeling emotional. Get ready to hear me panic, because I realized that I’m crying. I must say that, you know, ever since Clementine died, I feel like I really let down some walls and I’m, you know, and I’m sober now and I have feelings and I feel like I allowed so much sadness with Clementine with coming and stuff to fill me that now the sadness is just like, Oh, we got a channel. We know how to get there. We know how to make the tears happen. And, yeah. So, you’ll, you might be able to witness my horror at realizing I’m going to cry on a podcast. But it’s because of what Jasmine reads and, so open your heart, maybe figure out if you have any tears that need to be shed and enjoy this incredible interview with a phenomenal writer. And that’s all I got to say. So I wish you very happy writing and we’ll talk soon my friends. [00:08:00] This episode is brought to you by my book Fast Draft Your Memoir. Write your life story in 45 hours, which is, by the way, totally doable. And I’ll tell you how. It’s the same class I teach in the continuing studies program at Stanford each year, and I’ll let you in on a secret. Even if you have no interest in writing a memoir, yet the book has everything I’ve ever learned about the process of writing, and of revision, and of story structure, and of just doing this thing that’s so hard and yet all we want to do. Pick it up today.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:35] Okay. Well, I could not be more pleased today to welcome to the show Jasmine Mans. Hello, Jasmine! 

Jasmine Mans: [00:08:41] Hi, pleasure to meet you.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:42] It’s such a pleasure to meet you. It’s an honor. I love your poetry collection that just came out. Let me give a little bit of an introduction and then we’ll chat all things writing. Jasmine Mans is a Black American poet and artist from Newark, New Jersey. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin Madison with a B.A. in African-American Studies. Her debut collection of poetry, Chalk Outlines of Snow Angels, was published in 2012 and Black Girl, Call Home, just out, is a love letter to the wandering Black girl, and a vital companion to anyone on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing. Mans is the resident poet at the Newark Public Library, which is so freaking cool, by the way, love a library, but also your, your bio, your like you were blowing up, like you’re on all the lists that Oprah and time and all of these things. How is, how has that, how has that feeling? You, you open for Janelle Monae.

Jasmine Mans: [00:09:41] I once in my life, since I was maybe 11, 12. 

Rachael Herron: [00:09:48] Oh my goodness. 

Jasmine Mans: [00:09:49] That was beautiful poetry and yeah, it’s crazy right, because I didn’t imagine this I would’ve been grateful with a happy book that came out, and then there was the opportunity to be great, right. And to go all the way and to be magical. And then why not? And so I am less to have a team that believes in magic period, 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:16] Magic and fearlessness. I got a lot of fearlessness from your book and of course the fear is in there. Because you’re human, but you also seem to possess the ability to look everything in the face and put it on the page. And I really appreciate you for that. Would you mind before we get into the questions, would you mind sharing a poem with us of your choice?

Jasmine Mans: [00:10:42] Yeah. I want to give you a love poem because love make me feel warm

Rachael Herron: [00:10:49] Yay

Jasmine Mans: [00:10:50] This is The Light on page 155. Stared at a picture of Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte wondered if we still fight the same or buy it the same, if they ever made more love than sense, if they ever stared at our generation and just wondered where all the fireflies went. Do they all die or did they just not find us worth the light. Did they not find us worthy of them dressing to the nines in their shot? Waiting to become falling stars between the hands of a blushing girl in front of a boy waiting to give a pro audacity and her world. I promise, that if I died tonight in these sheets, I would still want you next to me. Like this love survived all of those riots. I know when you are scared, I hold your hand when the hurricane came. Pass me my lighter, I’m sorry, I made you cry. I don’t care if you cry I will always wipe your tears when you cry. And I know you did not give me permission to, but already started asking God about you. Told him if he doesn’t mind, I’d like to make it to heaven before you do to run your bath water and to make you a plate to turn your TV to your favorite channel and turn it off. And make you believe that you left it that way. And I vowed to never to open the door for a scent other than yours, and I promise. Promise to always remember your sin and that we will laugh at everything that hurt, when we were humans. Like when we were poor, when we slept on our bedroom floor on Leslie street when we only had water and we grilled cheese. The moment you said, baby, I may not have any money, but I’ve got a soft spot and a melody in it and a pair of arms that could rock you just so what? Are you thinking about taking a chance on me? 

Rachael Herron: [00:12:37] Well that, I don’t usually cry on my own show, but that, that poem brought me to tears when I read it too. I have an amazing wife. I’m gonna have an amazing life with her and we’ve been together for, I don’t know, 15 years something like that. And that is how I feel about her. I want to get to heaven first. So thank you for that. Thank you for breaking me down on the show. I appreciate that. 

Jasmine Mans: [00:13:03] And it’s those moments like where you can like read a poem to someone you love in bed. It’s, and these poems I wrote about women that I love and were no longer in my life anymore. And women that, that really have implanted on my heart. And so it’s weird, right? So I haven’t been removed from so many relationships and I’ve learned so many things and to put all of that on a show and to say, I lost so much, so much love, so many people are written about who are no longer here. And it’s on a shelf now and that’s, it’s a mourning ceremony, it’s a joy and it is overwhelming undertaking. 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:56] And it’s an honoring of all of that that you had and that you went through and that you had with them. And you also, speaking of the women that you’ve loved, you also really unpack beautifully the mother daughter relationship, which is my favorite relationship to explore in my own writing. And, yeah, I just want to thank you for doing that. I want people to buy Black Girl, Call Home, just buy it people. Put this on your shelf. If it can make Rachael cry on the podcast for the first time in five years. Perhaps you’ll like it. Let’s take down my cortisol level. Can we talk about your writing process, when and where and how much do you, and I’m because I’ve only come to, I’ve come back to poetry this year. I was scarred in grad school and then didn’t write for 15 years, 20 years and have just come back and I’m, I know how to write fiction and I know how to write non-fiction. I know where that fits in my life, but. How does poetry fit into your life as a process? 

Jasmine Mans: [00:14:59] I’m trying, it’s so interesting because, it’s like an unlearning, right? We get scarred in school. We’re taught to be masters of things and to be brilliant, and that there is a hierarchy on what language is best and which either mama or mommy. Is it tomato or tomato? Like so much stuff about what is great versus what is lower, what is on here? And for me, it has become and what I’m learning as I, as I experienced life more, and as I engage as a student with so many elders and the work of so many elders before me, it’s about playing it’s about, 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:44] I literally just wrote the word, play on my notebook to make sure that one of us said it, you play in this book, 

Jasmine Mans: [00:15:52] it’s about playing and joy and discovery and like my coffee mug holds, can hold poetic depth, just like the bark of a tree, just like a mother, if sometimes if we’re listening properly. And so what I’m trying to teach myself as a scholar who is removed from school, is to place value in depth and things and relativity and things because people wants to feel related to and remembered even when it comes to how we approach our objects. And so my process, sometimes it’s read a bunch of books and do some research and take notes and instructionally build a poem, and I can very well be emotionally removed and sometimes, it’s so emotional that the poem doesn’t happen and I’m just in this emotional space until maybe a few weeks later the poem does happen. But sometimes like, even like when you’re thinking of a good meal, like for your wife, it takes preparation before way before you get to the actual turning of the stove on, and you might have to even go to the grocery store or go to the fish market, a couple towns over, but the preparation that it takes can always be different depend on, depending on what we’re writing and what the stakes are right? If we’re writing to get somebody back, or for writing to say thank you but sometimes the stakes are different.

Rachael Herron: [00:17:30] How do you? For this particular collection there, you do so many different things inside the collection. And there are a lot of poems and they’re different styles. There are different placements. There’s different fonts that you’ve got narrative prose, poems, you’ve even got the sketch in there of- how do you decide what to put into a book of poetry? This is, I know this is like a newbie basic question but 

Jasmine Mans: [00:18:01] No, you sit with it. I wanted to create a flow or routine I was saying to someone it’s just like, I keep using these food references. But you know, you taste something until you know it has enough salt, and then they might have to dial- you might have to dial it back a little bit because it might be too much salt in there. And so it was just a matter of tasting. And so it was the perfect taste, until it was the perfect organization and that took tenderness and love and rereading and gentleness and a lot of rereading, I remember being like, I don’t think we’re ready, I don’t think I’m ready, and but it does take constant tasting and we looked at each poem individually, but then we had to look at poems next to each other. How did just like musicians think like, well, but how does this sound, song sounds coming after this song. And so that’s the same similar concept of like, is there a flow? Where’s the art? Where’s the emotion? Is there two, is it too emotional here? And how do we bring them out of their emotions? At the end of the book, are they home? Did you start home and did you bring them back home? That was the, that was the number one point to go back home and so that’s what I hope I did. It was a lot of processes throughout the writing of this, because the stakes were all different. There were poems where I was like, you’re honoring your mother. There were poems where I was just like, you have to deliver this message that historically happened properly. 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:46] Yeah. You, you dive so deeply and bravely into the women whose bodies were used for medical research and assumed that they had no pain. And you look at that, but then you fit it into a book which also includes, you know, lightness. And the fact that you’re able to do that in a, in a rhythmic way that leads the reader through perfectly is just outstanding. 

Jasmine Mans: [00:20:12] Those themes, I was a huge theme of the women’s bodies and my mind was stuck in that space and research while writing, because I was thinking about those women bodies and then I was thinking about Whitney Houston too with multiple poems in the book. If you find that, I repeat, they don’t give our bodies back to them. And so often when we talk about poetry and literature, we don’t repeat things like you just, you’re not supposed to repeat things. Don’t recycle lines, but there was a moment where I decided that I want people to remember this line and it was fluid throughout the book. And I was nervous about creatively, is that a decision that’s okay to make? Does it seem a bit amateur? And I was just like, no, this is what I want. This is a refrain. This is a note that I want people to hold on to when we talk about the black woman body. And I’m so happy that it caught on to those. You’re actually the first person to ask me about those pieces and those were the pieces that were the hardest and those are the pieces that I wrote the latest in the collection. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:27] It’s so much about the body. It’s so much about the corporeal form and from the mother to these women lost and unnamed and to you and your lovers. And then there’s that incredible one where your grandmother loses Grandfather next to her and his corporeal form stays in bed, but he leaves without her. Like it’s all about the body and naming it and claiming it and it’s incredible.

Jasmine Mans: [00:22:02] Thank you. 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:05] I’ve chills. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to doing this work? 

Jasmine Mans: [00:22:10] I think I have a couple of challenges, receiving myself. 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:15] What do you mean by that? 

Jasmine Mans: [00:22:16] You have imposter syndrome of like is this the point, can I run away now? Let’s just pretend like this is not happening and when you think you’re brave, you poke out your chest and you’re like, we’re doing this. My dreams came true. Amen. And then you think you better be careful what you wish for. Now everybody’s going with it now. Now what if you got a book deal? What if everybody read your poetry? No don’t. And people are taking photos of the book open and I’m like, don’t you dare. It’s as if your diary was left open at someone’s party, like how I’m offended, I’m appalled. How dare you take and you just snatch it up and you run away. If I am naked out here and afraid, but we’re going to do this. It’s beautiful. It’s we’ve come this far for things that I think are good and positive, and I believe in those things. And so I’m still dealing with the rawness of it. Like y’all got all my, all my stuff here, all the laundry but it was, I was intentional about it though, about how I wanted to shape people and narrative and love. And so even to like one of my ex-girlfriends is in the book and I haven’t spoken to her in a few years and 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:48] I was wondering about that, you know, I was wondering about that

Jasmine Mans: [00:23:49] And I wonder what she thinks about it. Like, well, will she be angry that I mentioned her name, will she honor, or she know that I’ve learned about and I didn’t want to write the book without mentioning her. Because I was just like so much about what I learned about myself in love is connected to that woman and so many women. And some, you just have to say like, thank you and I’m sorry. And I hope that this honors so many people in so many ways. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:29] What is your biggest joy when it comes to doing this work?

Jasmine Mans: [00:24:39] Seeing people feel seen. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:42] Yeah. What a gift to give

Jasmine Mans: [00:24:46] Yeah. When people feel like, when people tell you that that’s their story. I think that’s the biggest joy because they remind me that I’m not alone. It’s just like, people like, why don’t you do this? I want to remind people that they’re not alone, but then when someone says, I read your work and on this page, it’s like, oh no, you’re actually reminding me that I’m not, 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:09] That’s gorgeous. Could you share a craft tip of any sort that you use in your poetry? 

Jasmine Mans: [00:25:31] I was trying to find this quote about craftsmanship that I say all the time, but that’s not coming to me. I go back to play that playing is the most significant thing, to find inspiration in everything. And so often the conflict with inspiration is, so many artists in different mediums will say, I’m waiting for inspiration. I’m waiting for the song for the image to paint, I’m waiting. And so now your craftsmanship is always dependent on an outside variable to hit you in the head and supposed to be inspirational. But, like I remember a friend of mine held a red cup and said, this is fire. And it was fire because he said it was, and this is my little sheep here that a friend got me, but it’s a cloud and it’s a cloud because, because I said it is, and if I’m going to say this and what, what is the work that I’m going to do to prove that to you? And that’s what I’m doing here as a poet. And that should be playful and joyful. And I’m realizing that that poetry and the form, the practice of writing has to be playful and joyful because we have to get through and we have to be able to write traumatic things and you can’t stand in trauma without giving yourself joy. That’s why, when you have so much salty foods, they have to give you an extra large soda. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:13] That’s exactly right. The contrast. Yeah.

Jasmine Mans: [00:27:18] Yeah. If I’m going to say, or try to be brave enough to stand in the narrative, it has to go through it, the body doesn’t exist without both. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:33] Yes. What thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way? 

Jasmine Mans: [00:27:39] Running. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:42] Actually like physically running, 

Jasmine Mans: [00:27:43] Physically running. I realized because sometimes oftentimes I don’t want to write poetry, like, especially engaging in black literature. I didn’t call myself black. But when I do write about things that are engaging black folks, and I don’t like, someone’s like what inspires you to write about death? And I’m like, it’s not like a gorgeous, beautiful thing that happened upon me then, like, I can say gorgeous things about murder or harm or trauma, right. And running helped me notice that you are going to do things that are hard and that don’t feel good, that are important, and that are right, and I get up and I run every day and it’s hard and I don’t like it. But it’s right and I have to do it. And it’s a part of the discipline. And I didn’t know that my body needed to be disciplined in order for my mind to show up there. Right and so that’s what I’m learning. I’m learning how the body and the mind engages each other emotionally in order to induce a product. And if I’m going to do this, we have to be healthy and safe and running put yourself, puts you in a space of like this ain’t fun, this ain’t, but it’s going to render me something good. And the same with writing hard stuff. This isn’t going to writing about some of this stuff don’t feel fun at all, but it’s worthy. And how do I get my body to stay present when I want to run away from the computer. When I run away from the pen, it keeps you disciplined though. Like my body can, I can stay here longer and do it. I’m okay. And I think that you want that, 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:45] Yeah, there’s that physical training I ran, I’ve run two marathons and now I don’t run at all. Now I swim, but I ran- when I first, when I completed my first marathon shortly after that, I was able to complete my first novel, but I had never been able to complete a book until I proved to myself that my body could carry me over the finish line, which I thought was impossible. So, and I always think that those things are linked

Jasmine Mans: [00:30:10] It all starts with our mind and the body does follow and they have to be, they have to work together. 

Rachael Herron: [00:30:21] Yeah. And unfortunately I would like just to be a brain. That’s what I would really like, but it doesn’t work. What is the best book that you’ve read recently?

Jasmine Mans: [00:30:33] Oh, my gosh. Well, I just read Sula that was the best book indeed, and I just read it and I’m in love. Oh On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. 

Rachael Herron: [00:30:46] I have that from the library right now and I haven’t cracked a spine yet. It’s so good. 

Jasmine Mans: [00:30:51] You just read it, I would just love for you to just call me back so we can talk about that book. And I borrowed, I gave it to somebody and I got all my notes in it because I’ll write poetry within someone’s poetry book and within someone’s novel, and I’m reading and I’m just like, I’m so inspired that I’m writing all through it and I’ve let someone borrow it. And I’ve been trying to get that book back and you just reminded me to go get my book. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:18] You have to get that book back. Yes.

Jasmine Mans: [00:31:21] Let me get it. And I, that book is stellar.

Rachael Herron: [00:31:27] Oh, okay. I cannot, I’m going to start it tonight. That’s what I’m going to do. Can you tell the listeners where to find you, please?

Jasmine Mans: [00:31:35] Yeah. Any YouTube, JasmineNicoleMans for all creative work, PoetJasmineMans on Instagram, and if you by chance, find yourself interested in Black Girl, Call Home, it’s available at Target finds noble and on Amazon and why not request it at your local library and bookstore? 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:56] Local libraries are the best, independent booksellers are the best, but hello, congratulations on getting Target. 

Jasmine Mans: [00:32:02] Oh, yes right. 

Rachael Herron: [00:32:03] Huge. Huge. Oh my goodness. Jasmine, thank you so much. I can’t thank you enough for this conversation. I feel like hanging up with you and trying to write a very bad poem, which then I can polish later, which is what we do.

Jasmine Mans: [00:32:18] Very, that’s what life is about

Rachael Herron: [00:32:26] Thank you for everything. Congratulations on finishing your media blitz today. Now you can relax and have something delicious to eat, hopefully. And thanks for being here with me and my listeners. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. 

Jasmine Mans: [00:32:38] Pleasure is mine. Talk soon. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

The post Ep. 228: Jasmine Mans on Harnessing Play to Expose the Truth appeared first on R. H. HERRON.

Elly Griffiths was born in London in 1963. Her first crime novel The Crossing Places is set on the Norfolk coast where she spent holidays as a child and where her aunt still lives. Her interest in archaeology comes from her husband, Andrew, who gave up his city job to retrain as an archaeologist. She lives in Brighton, on the south coast of England, with her husband and two children. The Postscript Murders is her most recent novel. 

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #227 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron, and I am so glad that you’re with me here today. Today, I’m talking to Elly Griffiths on Writing in the Garden. The Postscript Murders is her most recent novel and it just came out and it was really a joy to talk to her. So I know you’re going to enjoy that interview. So hang on for that. What is going on around here in Rachaelandia? That’s a weird thing to say, Rachael-landia. Probably just one L. Oh my gosh. So much stuff, honestly so much stuff. I told you last week that my wife’s visa came in for New Zealand and the dog died which means that we’re moving to New Zealand and we talked to the realtor. So now we are starting to get ready to move. Our realtor is going to come walk through the house tomorrow, which terrifies me because we don’t live like we’re in college, but we live like we graduated from college maybe a couple of years ago. Most of our furniture is inexpensive and, or has been found at a flea market or a thrift store. I’m nervous.[00:01:37] She’s going to look at her house and say, okay, Rachael, I sold you this house to you 15 years ago. What have you done with it? We have gotten a new electricity and we have gotten the house air conditioning. Other than that, it pretty much is in the same shape. Which you know is fine. Apparently it’s a buyer’s market. No, wait, sorry. It’s a seller’s market in California right now, which is why it’s a good time to sell, but I’m terrified. What other things am I scared of? I just feel scared right now in not- hello, dozy. And not a terrible way, just in a normal human way. Still a bit sick, still finding whatever pain that is that I’ve been finding out for three months. Had my MRI yesterday, haven’t heard anything back. But that was, it was like a four part MRI. So 90 minutes inside the machine, and I must think two things. Number one, my meditation practice, because I was able to meditate through it. Number two, the Valium that they gave me to be in there for 90 minutes, it made the meditation a lot more interesting and easy as I was pretty relaxed, still was not pleasurable. And I’m still kind of feeling the aftereffects of that kind of fear. I’m still feeling plenty of emotions, living with emotions, accepting them, feeling them, crying when I feel like crying, boy, y’all crying is great. I love crying actually is a release valve. It’s-it takes the pressure off, also it sucks. It gives you headaches. I feel like there are times in our lives and I talk about this a lot. You know, there are seasons in our lives, there are seasons to be comfortable or to be digging up the field, not so comfortable. You’re planting there are times to rest and right now our time is to do stuff and to do a lot of stuff and to figure out the order in which to get stuff done.[00:03:42] Which I love, I am a planner to my teeth. I have realized recently that most of my journaling is just planning. That’s all it is. I’m either planning for the rest of the day or for the rest of my life. But that’s what my journal is. So I do love a good plan. I do love thinking about plans. I love talking to my wife about the plans that we are making and of course, it is also a little bit stressful. So we are dealing with that as well as can be. My darling little dozy dog is going to have to live with somebody for a while when we first go to New Zealand and figure out where to live. And I have- she’s going to stay with my best friend. And that’s amazing. So that is really, really a weight off of our shoulders. We don’t know what we’re doing with the cats yet. They’re both too old to go. They would not safely make the trip they’re geriatric and they do not recommend that geriatric cats spend 24 hours traveling in a plane and then do a quarantine. So, we’re going to have to rehome them. And one of them just got sick. So that is making me stressed out. He’s been sick before. He’s sick again. Can be disease and maybe some other things. So that has got my brain working too, but all this whole time, all the while all of this stuff is going on. Guess what? I’m still writing. And that’s what this podcast is about. This podcast is about getting up and writing anyway, even on the days when I want to lie in bed and make plans, or I need to spend half the day on the phone with a vet, we still show up and do our work. On those days, we write as well as we do on other days on the days that we are completely present emotionally and we’ve gotten a lot of sleep and we feel really heavy, perhaps not, but we’re still showing up and doing our work, even if it is for 10 minutes at a time, 15 minutes at a time we show up because we’re writers.[00:05:48] And that is what I love reminding you of, that even though there are seasons in our lives as writers, every season is for writing. I truly believe that. I write more a lot of times in my wintery phases and it may be more in my journal. Nobody’s ever going to see these things, but when times are hard, not only do I tend to ramble on my podcasts like I’m doing right now, but I tend to ramble in my journal.  Our writing is an outlet for us and aren’t we lucky? That we have that, there are so many people who have to deal with such enormous difficulty in their lives. How do they process it without writing something or somewhere? I just, I honestly don’t understand how people do it. So I’m just feeling very grateful that I have this, that you have this, that we have this super power. So don’t forget that you have it. You own it. You’re listening to this podcast because you are a writer. Use that super power. [00:06:54] Okay, quickly, just a couple of new patrons or a few new patrons to thank, thank you so much, Lucia. Thank you or Lucia. Thank you so much for your patronage. Jenny Darlington edited her pledge up and oh boy, that makes me feel amazing when you do that. Tammy Whitesoul. Hello, Tammy! Welcome, welcome. Lisa Sy, thank you so much. And Christina Colada, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Brian Souders, I hope I said that right. Thank you Brian and Liz Barrett, something has changed in Patreon where when you do get a Patron in a different country now shows in their money form. So Liz Barrett is hers comes in pounds, in, that is pounds. Yes, that’s pounds. And I just love that. I love seeing that in my email that’s a bit of a thrill. So thank you to all of my patrons who allow me to write those essays, hoped that you enjoyed the last one about wintering. It was hard to write. It was hard to send and I’m proud of it. So if you did read it, let me know what you think. Thank you for being there and for supporting me, it means the world.[00:08:06] Okay. With no further ado, let us jump into the awesome interview with the amazing Elly Griffiths. I know you’re going to enjoy it, and I wish you, my friend very, very happy writing.  [00:08:17] Hey, you’re a writer. Did you know that I send out a free weekly email of writing encouragement? Go sign up for it at www.rachaelherron.com/write and you’ll also get my Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use today to get some of your own writing done. Okay, now onto the interview.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:36] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show, Elly Griffiths. Hello, Elly! 

Elly Griffiths: [00:08:41] Hello! Thank you for having me. I’m very excited.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:42] I am thrilled to have you. Let me give you a little bit of an introduction here. Elly Griffiths was born in London in 1963. Her first crime novel, The Crossing Places is set on the Norfolk coast, where she spent holidays as a child and where her aunt still lives. Her interest in archeology comes from her husband, Andrew, who gave up his city job to retrain as an archeologist. She lives in Brighton, on the South coast of England, with her husband and two children. And The Postscript Murders, which just came out is her most recent novel. And Elly, I have really been in, I haven’t quite finished it yet, but I’ve really been enjoying The Postscript Murders. It is such a, it’s such a unique premise and also, I must just say right off the top of the bat as a queer woman, I really, really appreciate that queer representation. 

Elly Griffiths: [00:09:31] Oh, I’m so glad. I’m so glad. I’ve been dying, it’s a character that she appeared in my first sort of standalone, Stranger Diaries, and then she just wanted to appear again. So, yeah, she’s a gay woman. She’s a British Indian woman and she doesn’t really take any prisoners. Does she? So that’s what I love to write about.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:52] She really takes no prisoners, but I so much love being inside her head and the way that she thinks. And I’m so enjoying this book and we were just chatting a little bit before we started. But you know, you’ve got book after book coming out around in different countries and all of that. And you said the great line, you’re never more than a few weeks away from a new Ellie Griffiths now. So this show is about the writing process. Oh no, here comes the cat.  

Elly Griffiths: [00:10:18] I love it! I just saw your cat come in, and my cat normally comes into my study, but I think it’s a bit cold for him at the moment. So we had to come home. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:27] Your cat doesn’t howl the way mine does, like we’ve never fed him before. 

Elly Griffiths: [00:10:32] He does! He absolutely does this other free growling and he’s black, black and white. Yes. Black and white as well. I don’t know if it’s such a cat, but oh my goodness, the unearthly howling   

Rachael Herron: [00:10:43] Yes and he liked to be right up next to the microphone when that happens next. So you have a house full of people and animals, or at least one cat, how, and where? Oh my gosh. Now we’re connected. Now we’re tangled. How do you get the writing done? How does that happen in your life? 

Elly Griffiths: [00:10:58] Well, I’m speaking to you from a shed at the bottom of my garden

Rachael Herron: [00:11:01] Oh I’m so jealous

Elly Griffiths: [00:11:03] Yeah it is really good, I do recommend a shed. My husband says I shouldn’t call it a shed, but it is basically a shed and so I kind of escape and I do recommend it because you can just get out of the house. And it’s only like a little trek up through the garden, but just that bit of distance. And, you know, it’s just too far away for people to say, oh, where are the eggs? You know, you’re just that little bit too far away. And as I say, my cat usually comes up the garden path, but usually other people don’t bother me. On the minus side is a little too far away for people to bring you cups of tea and things. But it’s very good for working, 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:39] Well, especially in the pandemic because, a lot of the people that I’ve spoken to recently and myself included, I always wrote out of the house. Revision I would do it in the house. That was fine, but first drafts really needed to be at a cafe or outside. And you’ve got that, you still have your sacred, precious space. How long have you been out in the shed, shed-ish? 

Elly Griffiths: [00:11:59] Couple of years. I used to work, I had like a, what I called it, a study in the house, but really everyone else called it, the other kids called it where they played on X-Box you know, my husband was always mysteriously shredding things in there don’t know why. So, yes, that was a little bit hard to see that as my own space. But couple years ago, I did decide to, you know, to have my own space in the garden. And that has helped. Yes, I do feel so new. My writing friends, like to go to cafes and have that sort of ambient noise around them. And that’s been really hard isn’t it? It’s been really hard as well. I mean, so many things have been hard too. I know, but it has been hard. 

Rachael Herron: [00:12:35] Yeah. We have to figure out new ways. So when it comes to your process and when you’re sitting down, are you a binge writer? Are you a steady on every day kind of writer?

Elly Griffiths: [00:12:45] I’m quite steady. I am thousand words a day person. You know, I that’s my minimum. I try and do thousand words a day. I start in the morning and my cat does normally comes up to my shed in the morning and he sits outside at about sort of seven, eight. And he waits to be let in. And he’s like my little conscience, you know? So I kind of know that I have to go into the shed and start writing. So, I usually go up there in the morning and you know, I try and do at least a thousand words a day and it is steady like that, you know, but of course, when I’m near a deadline thing, I call it this deadline thing then I tell it dry when I’m busy magic lighting, but usually I’m a little bit a day. And I try not to go back over the previous day’s stuff and just add another thousand words, you know, you know, the temptation to keep writing the same thing 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:32] and then we would never get books done. Exactly. Oh, I love that. I love that. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing? 

Elly Griffiths: [00:13:38] I think, well, one of the challenges always is, you know, to find that time isn’t there every day. But another challenge I have, and I think right is a kind of divided into writers who write too much. And I just, you- they write enough. And I’ve got lots of very good friends who are writers and we always have discussing it. And one of the best writing vendor is Leslie Thompson, is a great crime writer and she always has too many words. And I always say to give me some of yours, because when I finish a book, it’s usually about 70,000 words long, and I know that my publishers want 80,000, at least. So it’s finding those extra words. I do find a bit of a challenge. I think I might’ve been suited to the golden age, you know, and obviously you never see them, The Postscript Murders, a lot of sort of golden addresses when those Agatha Christie’s handled there were about 60,000 words and I sometimes think that might have suited me.

Rachael Herron: [00:14:32] That’s so interesting that you say that though. I really believe there are these over writers and these underwriters and I am like your friend. I’m an over writer. I have miles of pages about a scene that could have been done in a page and a half. You know, I don’t know. I think that the people who are underwriters tend to have a better time plotting, they have more plot. 

Elly Griffiths: [00:14:53] Maybe, and funny enough, Leslie and I recently have been trying to just for fun, write something together. And actually it does work quite well because I’ll say this is what happens then that happens. And that happens, then that’s the end. And Leslie says, cool, perhaps this happened in the, and actually work’s going well because I’m forcing her to go to the end and she’s sitting at a ticket to take a bit of a deep breath. Let’s do something else. So. Yeah, it does work quite well working together. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:20] Oh, I love that. That’s gorgeous. Okay. So what is your biggest joy when it comes to writing? 

Elly Griffiths: [00:15:25] I think, especially in the sort of COVID times, the biggest joy has kind of been escape, you know, way to find an escape to. And what do people do? Actually they don’t have a world to escape to you know, I’ve always had that. I’m sure you’re the same as a child is I used to tell myself stories. My mum says, I used to walk round and round the gardens up telling myself stories.

Rachael Herron: [00:15:46] And you still do that. 

Elly Griffiths: [00:15:47] I can still do that. You can look up the garden and it is exactly something about gardens and there is it’s escaping into another world really. So, I definitely think that’s the biggest joy, but also sharing the book, having people read them. I mean, I do get nervous before a book comes out and that gets sort of worse with each book actually. But actually when it’s out, the fact that other people read it and people say to you that they’ve enjoyed it. I mean, that’s such a joy, isn’t it? That’s wonderful. 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:13] It’s the best feeling in the world. Actually the best feeling is writing the words, the end and those four hours afterward. And then it wears off but

Elly Griffiths: [00:16:24] and those four hours. But then I always, after I’ve written the end, make myself write the first line of the next book, even if it’s just the first line, because then I think I’ve started the next one 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:35] On the same day?

Elly Griffiths: [00:16:36] Yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:37] I love that tip! That’s a gut- that is so fun because then you can say I’m in the middle of my next book or somewhere in the middle. 

Elly Griffiths: [00:16:45] When your editor’s got your book, I’ve started it. 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:48] I am working on it. Right. Can you share- that was a good craft tip. Can you share a craft tip of any other sort with us? 

Elly Griffiths: [00:16:56] Well, I’m, one of the tips that I would say, is to read this aloud. I don’t know if you did that on my iPhone. 

Rachael Herron: [00:17:04] I always mean too, and I never quite steal the time for it. 

Elly Griffiths: [00:17:07] I’ve never been able to read the whole thing aloud, which I would like to do that. Some people do that, but always if you get stuck or if there’s, I would, you know, read this aloud or maybe put it into dialogue, just imagine yourself telling the story. I’ve got a niece, who’s a barrister, which makes me feel quite old. She’s a child barrister. And she says, very interesting thing. she said that in court, the police want to tell the story from the crime, but sometimes it’s a defense barrister’s job to tell it from the beginning. A different point and I find that useful. So sometimes I say to myself, maybe just talking out loud. So what happened at the beginning? What happened when A met B long before C murdered B, I’m going to get confused now with these letters to me. So really start, you know, really what happened right at the beginning. So that would be a tip and another tip that somebody told me, and I can’t remember who, said that, they said follow the feet. So just to look down at your practice feet, and just go where they want to go. So I found that quite useful. 

Rachael Herron: [00:18:11] That is wonderful. That could be very, very surprising. And also I think that would be great, I’m one of those writers that writes a first draft and there there’s, there’s basically no, nothing around them. They’re just standing in air talking to each other. And if you look at the feet and then look at what’s around them and what they want to see and touch, I think that’s lovely.

Elly Griffiths: [00:18:30] I think it is really helpful. I teach creative writing and sometimes the biggest thing my students struggle with is point of view. You know, seeing, just seeing through that character’s eyes and I find that quite useful. And also it’s a bit like the actors you start from the feet, isn’t it? What shoes are they wearing? Where are they going? What do they, so I do find that quite useful too, to think that what they’re wearing on their feet and where are they going.

Rachael Herron: [00:18:55] Thank you. I also teach creative writing and I’m absolutely stealing that with attribution. I will always give you attribution 

Elly Griffiths: [00:19:03] Well I stole it from someone else. I’m not quite sure who

Rachael Herron: [00:19:05] Oh that’s right

Elly Griffiths: [00:19:06] It’s all in the ether, I think 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:08] It is. So speaking of the ether, what in your life affects your writing in a surprising way? 

Elly Griffiths: [00:19:14] Such a good question, funnily enough, I sort of think of hot and cold affected, in a weird way and that when I’m right, when it’s hot, I mean, I’m living in England. It’s never that hot, but you know, when it is hot, I tend to want to write about cold places and when it’s cold is into what do I do about hot places and I have noticed actually on my creative writing course, because with COVID restrictions, we have been able to do some face-to-face teaching, but I had the doors open all the time in the wind. And my students just write about colder and colder stories. You know, everything in there is like encased in ice. And, but I actually, I quite like writing about sort of poetic things when it’s cold. And but it is about knock down generally, has kind of surprised me. I think it has affected my writing. So Postscript Murders was written just at the beginning of lockdown, but mostly written, freed at this terrible code in time. And I think it’s quite lighthearted in places, and it’s a road trip they go often they’re on a journey and they travel and they’re quite free. And the next book that I wrote, which was entirely written in lockdown was the night or the next group book. And that feels quite claustrophobic and quite sort of hemmed in a lot of the action takes place in a sort of spooky fall now. So I think that, I think when all finds that lockdown has probably affected us in mind and in all kind of surprising ways 

Rachael Herron: [00:20:41] You have the same thing that I do where I, I won’t really notice any of these things when I’m writing them. But then later I will look back and say, Oh, that’s the book I wrote when I was going through this mental landscape or that’s what I was doing when this person was ill or whatever. And it’s in the book, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Elly Griffiths: [00:20:58] That’s absolutely true, isn’t it? And sometimes it surprises you doesn’t it, because in fact you can be going through and I’m going to the book that I wrote, you know, when my mum was ailing and then dying, you know, it’s not actually a depressing book, you know, sometimes it doesn’t work like that does it, but it is interesting to look back at then, oh I wrote that then, and there is always a shadow of it on the book. Isn’t it? Even if you don’t know at the time. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:24] Yeah. I like that word shadow. The shadow of it is that we’re casting as perhaps the writer with the light behind us casting onto the page. Oh, I think that’s beautiful. Okay. So what is the best book that you’ve read recently? And why did you love it? 

Elly Griffiths: [00:21:36] Well, I just recently read a book called We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:41] I haven’t heard of it. 

Elly Griffiths: [00:21:42] It’s really fascinating because it’s not exactly fiction. It’s about a real life murder at Harvard that happened in 1969. And it’s about a modern day Harvard student, trying to work out what happened to this woman. And it’s fascinating story. She was an archeologist theater, which obviously really interested me as well, there’s archaeology in there but there’s also a lot about women’s roles. What it was like to be a female student at Harvard in 1969. I think they’d only just become co-ed because she was at Radcliffe first. So there was that, and the why she was treated by various men in her life, including her lecturer. So there’s all that and they’re layers of it. And it’s almost like it’s, I’m trying to think what it’s like. It’s almost like a real life secret history. 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:33] Ooh, you know what that’s so interesting. I, my brain went immediately to the secret history.

Elly Griffiths: [00:22:37] Yes and I love

Rachael Herron: [00:22:38] That’s what it sounds like

Elly Griffiths: [00:22:38] I love the secret history. 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:39] Me too

Elly Griffiths: [00:22:40] I kind of love books set in universities, but particularly American investors. I don’t know why 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:46] Really resonating with you. I have this, I love an academic setting, but I have to say that I love the ones in England. 

Elly Griffiths: [00:22:54] We’ll have to swap. You can have Cambridge. I’ll have

Rachael Herron: [00:22:56] Thank you

Elly Griffiths: [00:22:57] you know, it isn’t, it’s something like, you know, I feel like I, I kind of know some of the settings on the quads and the autumnal life. I can, you know, it’s delusional cause I’ve never been to all of it, but, you know, I love it. So I would really recommend it. We Keep the Dead Close. I haven’t quite finished it. It’s very long and it’s been perfect for this period really

Rachael Herron: [00:23:17] That is flying to the top of my TBR pile. And that is why I asked this question. Thank you very much. Speaking of marvelous books that everyone will want to get, will you please tell us about The Postscript Murders? Maybe your elevator pitch for that. 

Elly Griffiths: [00:23:30] Okay. Postscript Murders. So, when an elderly lady called Peggy Smith dies in assisted living apartment on South coast of England, nobody thinks it’s strange. She’s 92, wasn’t in very good health. But then when her carer starts collecting, putting away her books, she notices that Peggy owns a lot of crime books, which is suspicious, of course, but a lot of them were dedicated to her and they say things like, thank you for the murders. And then it transpires that Peggy, are far from being a harmless elderly lady was actually a murder consultant. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:08] So she has a card that says everything

Elly Griffiths: [00:24:09] She has a card that says it and there’s a sort of diverse group of people who solve the crime. There’s the detective, Alvin Decor, who we talked about earlier, but there’s also an, a telcom, the carer there’s Benedict who owns a local cafe. And they’re sort of paid these redoubtable friend, Edwin who’s an 80-year old ex BBC music producer and they together they’d have to solve this crime. And I hope it’s a lot of fun. It was, it’s a book, some people said it’s a book about writing, but actually I think there’s a book about reading. So it’s a book about the joys and the excitements and the dangers of reading. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:45] I think it’s both because as a writer reading it, I’m enjoying it so deeply for the writing surrounding it. So everybody listening to this show are writers, so they will want it for that. But of course, everyone listening to the show are also avid keen readers 

Elly Griffiths: [00:25:01] Do you think it’s perfect book for writers, because I think we will all, you know, you’ll read as a new, we’ll get loads of inferences about the sort of publishing world that maybe not everyone will get, but yes, it’s a book for writers and readers definitely.

Rachael Herron: [00:25:13] Thank you so much for writing it. Where can we find you online? 

Elly Griffiths: [00:25:16] So you can find me online. I’m quite active on Twitter to just @EllyGriffiths. I’ve got Instagram as EllyGriffiths17. I’ve got a Facebook page, EllyGriffithsAuthor where I quite often do readings and things like that. And I have a website that I’m always bound to update. (EllyGriffiths.co.uk)  

Rachael Herron: [00:25:33] Oh, me too. And you’re never more than a few weeks away from the next Elly Griffiths

Elly Griffiths: [00:25:38] Exactly. I’m afraid that people sort of say that about rats in London are never more than a few, a few meters away from a rat, but I hope it’s not the same with mine. 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:47] I would prefer the book to the rat, but yes

Elly Griffiths: [00:25:49] Exactly

Rachael Herron: [00:25:50] It has been so lovely talking to you. Thank you so much. I can’t wait for people to get their grubby little mitts on your book, and I wish you happy writing in the garden shed. 

Elly Griffiths: [00:25:59] Thank you Rachael, same to you. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:03] Yeah, of course. Cheers. Bye. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

The post Ep. 227: Elly Griffiths on Writing in the Garden appeared first on R. H. HERRON.

In this episode, Rachael dives deeply into hybrid presses. What’s the difference between them and assisted self-publishing? Or vanity presses? How can you tell the difference, and most importantly, how can you protect yourself from being scammed? 

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers: https://join.slack.com/t/onwardwriters/shared_invite/zt-7a3gorfm-C15cTKh_47CEdWIBW~RKwg

Links: 

Hybrid Publishing criteria: https://www.ibpa-online.org/page/hybridpublisher

Jane Friedman: https://www.janefriedman.com/evaluate-small-publisher/

Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #226 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. This is a mini episode and it is about Hybrid Presses. So welcome to this. This is one of those questions that I get asked over and over again by students, they’ll come to me and say, I found this, this publishing house, this small press. Do you think they’re reputable? They call themselves a hybrid press. I love to get this question because I get so angry at predatory practices within publishing. So let’s talk about what you should look out for and how you can test what you are finding out there when you are looking for presses to publish your work, when you are looking for places to submit your work to. So let’s start at the very top. We’re going to start talking about this hierarchically, which is not that easy to say.[00:01:12] So in publishing, we have traditional publishers and what is a traditional publisher? A traditional publisher is someone who buys your book from you. You signed a contract, giving them certain rights. They then edit, copyedit it, make the cover, do the press, do the marketing as much as they can. We know that traditional publishers struggle with this as much as we do as authors, but with a traditional publisher, there’s never going to be a charge for you. They will only pay you either in advance or in royalties, hopefully both. But there’s never any charge for the author. What is a traditional publisher? A traditional publisher includes anybody in the big five, which are the big five New York traditional publishers left soon to be the big four since Penguin Random House just bought Simon and Schuster. So all of their hundreds of imprints that those four big, the big four have, they have hundreds of imprints and they publish about a hundred thousand books a year in the States total. They are the big, ones. The biggies, you cannot normally there are sometimes a couple of exceptions, but you cannot get a traditional publishing deal without an agent. You must have an agent. They do not accept un-agented manuscripts in the big four or the big five wherever we are when you’re listening to this. Also falling under the umbrella of a traditional publishers are small presses. They are still traditional publishers because you don’t pay them anything. They buy rights to your book and they pay you in advance and royalties. They are like Grey Wolf or 10 House Press or Catapult. You can Google what the best small presses are. It’s a little bit confusing cause words are always changing in and around publishing small presses also used to be known as, or small publishers also used to be known as independent publishers, independent presses.[00:03:22] However, a lot of the time now, when we say independent publisher, we’re talking about self-publishing. So a more common term for these smaller publishers is either small publisher or small press and they are legit and they do a great job purchasing the rights and then doing the best with those rights to produce beautiful books that are then distributed and marketed in physical format into bookstores. That is what traditional publishing does. It helps your book become its best by using the best people to help you. And then it is distributed into brick and mortar stores, traditional publishing that’s the model. Then we come into some other ideas. We have self-publishing, also known as indie publishing, which is where you do it all yourself. You write the book, you hire an editor, you hire a copy editor, you hire a proofreader, you hire a cover designer. You must hire all of those things out. I mean, you don’t have to. You can do whatever you want, but it’s generally safer. You will get better reviews and better sales. If you make your book the best product it can be. Then there are these confusing places. And these, this is what I’m really talking about today. This is, these are where I get these emails from students or from listeners to the show saying, is this legit? Is this legit? Obviously a vanity press is not legit. In vanity press is anyone who says, you give us your money and we will produce your book for you. There’s- in a vanity press, there’s not even a nod toward quality or editing. There’s no nod toward marketing. It is just a scam to get your money. They are not making money from selling books. They are making money from you, the author paying them. Honestly, if you’re writing one book that you want, your three grandkids to read, perhaps a vanity press would be for you, you get the copies of your books. They can give them to you, three grandkids you’re done, but otherwise they are for no one. They are a scam. [00:05:34] The big question comes when we are talking about hybrid presses or hybrid publishers, the problem with this term, okay let’s back up a little bit. We use hybrid in a couple of different ways in publishing. I am a hybrid author. I’m a hybrid author because I publish my books traditionally and they also published my books, myself, self-publishing. Therefore, I am a hybrid author. When we’re talking about hybrid presses, it has nothing to do with that. It’s completely separate. So let’s align our minds to hybrid presses, which a lot of presses, a lot of publishers call themselves a hybrid publisher now because they are running away from the term vanity. However, the vast majority of hybrid presses that I have seen are just dressed up vanity, vanity publishing scams. So how can you tell which is which? So there- the hybrid press is going to either publish your book for you, they’re going to help you edit it, and they’re going to publish it for you and then distribute it or because there’s no real standard operating procedures on what a hybrid press is. Sometimes they will have you pay for a package in which you become published, basically, you’re becoming self-published, but they’re helping you with it.  [00:06:58] So they are more of an assisted self-publishing service when it comes right down to it. But here’s something really, really to think about. If you’re paying someone to help you publish your book, they are making money on you, the author, therefore they have much less of a vested interest in making money for themselves and trickle down to you by selling your books. And that is the big problem. So there are criteria that are in place for actual hybrid publishing, which most of them don’t adhere to. But the independent book publishers’ association IBPA has a list of nine criteria detailing what it means to be a professional hybrid publisher, a hybrid publisher that you can trust. Number one, it must define a mission and vision for his publishing program and that was pretty easy to fake. Number two, it must vet submissions. Therefore, it is not publishing everything it gets because not everything it gets. Most of what it gets won’t be up to quality. Good enough to be published. They, so they must vet submissions and not just accept everybody. Number three, they must publish under its own in print and ISBN. They are the publisher on record. They will publish your book under their name. That’s really important. Number four, they must publish to industry standards, meaning no bad books. Number five, they must ensure editorial design and production quality. Again, saying no bad books. Number six, they must pursue and manage a range of publishing rights. So they’re not just looking to sell you in E-book form only at Amazon. They may have other publishing rights that they may want to talk to you about. This is so important here. Number seven, they must provide distribution services and that is not, you will be available to buy an E version on all the platforms. That’s not distribution service. That is basic. That is the lowest level. They must provide distribution services into brick and mortar stores. They must have some kind of in-house sales team with a distribution arm that says we go to these independent booksellers; we go to these chain bookstores. This is how we sell your books into stores. Number eight, they must demonstrate respectable sales. The average book published sells fewer than a hundred copies. If you’re with a hybrid press that is reputable, you need to be able to demonstrate better sales than average, and the last one, number nine, they must pay authors a higher than standard royalty.[00:09:51] So in traditional publishing, you’re going to get paid between about 4 and 25% of net as your royalty on each book sold. Standard in a good hybrid publisher is going to be 50-60% you’re going to be making and you’re making higher because they are extracting payment from you for other things, for things like editing or things like cover design. So they must pay you a higher royalty rate. A legit hybrid press is not going to ask you to buy your own copies of your book. That is a standard vanity press method. A legit hybrid publisher wants you to make money by selling your books to other readers to real readers. Jane Friedman has a good post on this. If you Google Jane Freeman and how to evaluate a small publisher, this will come up. But I really liked the way she says this. Does the hybrid publisher have a distributor that pitches books to accounts means meaning to other to stores? You can ask directly or visit their website and pretend you are a bookseller or other retail who wants to order and stock the publisher’s books. Fantastic. Look for a page with a bookseller info or trade accounts info. If you can’t find anything, check their FAQ about page or contact page. The hybrid book publisher must be able to get your book into stores. They must have a plan for it. Otherwise they are either a vanity press or they are assisted self-publishing. What’s wrong with these assisted self-publishing services that are calling themselves hyper presses?[00:11:33] Not much, honestly, if you are looking at someplace that calls themselves a hybrid publisher, but they’re really just helping you get your book edited, helping you get the cover design. The fact is they’re probably overcharging you. And you could do this easier and much better for much cheaper. For example, if you pay the hybrid publisher X amount of dollars for the, for the editing process, how do you know what you’re really getting? One somebody emailed me, what is this place called? New degree press. It’s a hybrid publisher. They have your manuscript edited by an MFA candidate. Someone who’s getting their master of fine arts in writing. You know what? I didn’t know how to do with my MFA is judge any book for anything. I couldn’t have done it. I barely knew what I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I didn’t know back then, that is not an editor. You want professional editing my editor who has been doing this for a long time in the field. It is why I like to recommend Reedsy to hire an editor, RachaelHerron.com/Reedsy (Reedsy.com/a/Herron) We’ll get you vetted editors and you get to choose the price point that you’re looking for. You get to talk to three or four editors, they’re all going to give you different prices because they’re all independent freelancers. You get to decide who you go with. For some people, I will say this assisted self-publishing service, where you give them $10,000 and they edit it, they give you a cover. They put your book up online. They get you to all the e-platforms and maybe they get you a print on demand print book. If you’ve got the money and they do a good job, some people are just more comfortable handing over the $10,000, the $20,000, whatever it is for them to do all the work. But before you do anything with any kind of hybrid press, whether it is a legit hybrid press or whether it is an assisted self-publishing service calling itself, a hybrid press. [00:13:36] What you want to do is go to Amazon.com, do the advanced search in books and put in their press name. As we know, hybrid press will publish books under their publisher name. They own the ISPN, they own their publisher name. That’s how they publish your books. You own the copyright of course, but they’re publishing it under their name. So you can search for all of the books that this press has published. You want to search for them. You want to look through them, sort them by most recent. You want to look at what their sales rank is? The lower the sales rank, the better they’re selling well, they’re selling really well. If they’re under 15,000 in books on Amazon, that’s just one way to tell. Look at their reviews. Do they only have 5 or 10 reviews? Those could easily be from people’s friends. Are they continuing to sell? Are they continuing to, did they get a bunch of reviews when the book came out, but none since then, which means no one’s reading it, red flag. What are their covers look like? Do they look professional? You can click the look inside and actually go through the interior formatting of the book too. Does that look professional? Really, really important to do if you’re thinking about any of these hyper presses is find their authors by doing that search on Amazon, using the advanced search, using the publisher name, and then contact those authors. Contact recent authors and older authors, go to the authors webpage, their contact information will be there. If they’re a professional author and have set this up correctly, you’ll just be able to email them and say, hey, what was your experience with this hybrid press? Would you do it again? Anything you would advise me against, super important. If you are considering taking a contract from one of these groups. [00:15:18] Another really, really, really important thing that you must do if you’re considering taking a contract from a hybrid press is, do not believe their website. You cannot believe their websites. You must do your due diligence. And for that, put the publisher’s name in quotation marks. So it doesn’t separate it. And then add the word scam, read the results you get, add that, then do it again. Add the word predatory, read the results you get, then do it again. Add the words vanity press. Read the results you get, people will complain about poor treatment from hybrid presses and they do complain. It is easy to find. So you have to do that due diligence. I got asked recently about a press that I didn’t know about New Degree Press and it turns out that this is the press that also uses MFA candidates to edit their books. But they advocate, this blew my mind. They advocate dropping the price of your book to 99 cents, what you get to do, right? Or they should actually be doing at that your publisher, and then they encourage you to Venmo a dollar to everyone you know, so that they can buy it on Amazon and then leave a verified review. That is shady as F. Honestly, that is I mean run if you hear those kind of practices, there are some hybrid presses that use the crowdfunding model and that doesn’t have to be a red flag. What they’re basically asking, instead of you paying them $10,000 or $20,000 or whatever it is, they want to publish your book.[00:16:57] You are raising that money first and then giving it to them. That’s fine. As long as they are a legit hybrid press and they are going to give you a higher than traditional publishing royalty and they are, they have some kind of distribution and sales arm that helps your book be bought. We want these presses to be making money on the books sold, not on you, the author paying them. So you might be asking, who can you trust then? You can trust traditional publishers. Both the big five or big four and small presses because they have those just your distribution channels in place. Of course, some of the small presses are going to be better than others. I personally love Tin House. They have incredible distribution. They do incredible editing, gorgeous covers and they’re really well known. And you can put in Tin House Press into the advanced search on Amazon and look and see what kind of awards they’re submitting their authors for. You can see how they’re selling, what their reviews are like, again, it comes down to due diligence. You can trust the traditional publisher who is not asking for any money from you. They are selling books in order to give you money. That is trustworthy. In terms of deciding between a hybrid press and not doing a hybrid press, ask yourself of what you want, are you looking for full on cushy assisted self-publishing than some of these places are going to be right for you. If you have the money to throw at them, they’re going to put you up online. They may not do a great job with editing. Do you care? I mean, is that important to you? Something you have to ask yourself? The, I can honestly say that the only good hybrid press at the time that I am saying this that I have ever heard of is She Writes Press.[00:18:51] They have a great reviews, great publishing. They understand the criteria that they are trying to adhere to by being an actual hybrid press. And She Writes does a great job. Every other one that I’ve ever been asked to investigate is a vanity press. It’s either a vanity press calling itself a hyper press or it’s assisted self-publishing calling itself hybrid press. Assisted self-publishing, again, that’s fine, but you can do a better job for cheaper yourself, hiring everything out in the way that we talk about on this show in the way that Joanna Penn talks about on the Creative Pen. You can hire those out for much cheaper. You still don’t have to do any of it. You can hire somebody to do the editing, to do the cover, to do the uploading. But you’re not giving somebody a huge chunk of money to do it. You’re giving a lot of different people. You’re hiring freelancers to do the best job because you have devoted time to researching who does the best jobs, rather than just accepting whoever happens to work at this very small hybrid press. How can you trust that their in-house editor, the only one that they have? How can you trust that they’re great? They should be able to tell you why this person is great and who they’ve edited and show you the reviews because of working with this editor, does that make sense? With the hybrid press, you have to be able to ask questions and they have to give you the right answers for you to move forward with them.[00:20:21] Again, you cannot trust their website. You have to do your due diligence, you have to be checking them out. So when it comes to asking yourself what you want to do, do you want to go the trad route? That means that you need to go the agent route. There are some small presses which are included in traditional publishing that don’t require an agent. But honestly, most of the really good small presses, a lot of the time prefer agented queries. In the big five or the big four, you have to have an agent in the small presses. It’s a iffy. You can sometimes get away without that. But I will say that if you go with a small press and you are not agented, please hire a publishing attorney to go over your contract, has to be a publishing attorney. Not a regular attorney, has to be somebody well versed in book contracts. And that will be so worth your money to have that one-off then go through your contract because the contract you get from any traditional publisher is a boiler plate and they are expecting you to cross things out and refuse things. No, this is way too much. You’re asking for all future rights for all future formats, both those invented and not yet invented. Yeah. You’re going to strike that one out. Your attorney or your agent is going to strike that one out. And the publisher will still want to work with you. Don’t worry. They send out boiler plates expecting to have them returned and corrected and negotiated.[00:21:47] So are you going to go track pub with an agent perhaps without an agent, if you’re at a small press or are you going to go self-publishing where you hire it all out and you hire the best job that you can afford? Or are you going to look at hybrid presses? Who will do a bunch of this stuff for you, but you will take your time doing your due diligence, making sure that they have a distribution arm that can get you into bookstores. Making sure that you’re going to make a 50 or 60% royalty, making sure that they are focused on selling books to readers, not packages to authors. There is no reason to trust a company whose mission is to make money off of authors. So I hope that this helps, I do enjoy looking these things up. So, if you ever are really stuck and you can’t tell after I’ve given you this criteria, if it’s a good hybrid publisher or a bad one, you can always email me. But now I feel like I’ve given you the tools to do this due diligence, to search out the answers, to accept it. When you’re disappointed when somebody says, Oh my God, this is the biggest scam and here’s why, it’s a bummer when this, when you’ve already reached out to this hybrid press and they’ve said, Oh my God, your book, your book looks amazing.[00:23:07] We would love to help you publish this. We would love to do this with you. And here are the things we can offer you. It’s a bummer when somebody comes back to you and says, Oh, hello, dozy, squeaking in the door. It’s a bummer. When somebody comes back to you and says, no, this is a scam. But you are brave. You are strong. You are a writer. You do things the best way so that you can be read that is that’s the point. That’s the point. I think that being read is a bigger point even then making sales. I mean, it is for me anyway. I want to be read. I want to affect people with my words. I do not want to go with a hyper press that will leave me languishing in an Amazon back alley with my four fake reviews. That’s not what I want to do as an author. And I want to encourage you not to do it either. So in further research that you should do for yourself and I will put these into the show notes over at HowDoYouWrite.net. Reedsy.com has a great article that- Reedsy.com you know, I love them. They do great articles as well. Search their article for hybrid publishers. They have a lot of information there that is helpful. And then, like I said, search for Jane Friedman, evaluating a small publisher. Those are two great, very in depth articles that can go a little bit deeper than we are going right now but can help you not get scammed. Please don’t get scammed. We don’t want you to get scammed that just bumps everybody out and then you don’t want to write and we want you to keep writing. So, thank you for listening. Thank you for being careful and thank you for being amazing authors. And I wish you and Dozy wishes you as she tipped taps in the room behind me, a very happy writing. Bye. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

The post Ep. 226: What’s a Hybrid Press and What Should I Watch Out For? appeared first on R. H. HERRON.

In this episode, Rachael Herron answers questions from her Patreon supporters. What does a crappy draft actually look like, for real? Also, we talk about making sure stories move forward in a real way when constrained by historical facts, how to incorporate beta reader feedback if it’s all over the place, and why we flip away from our manuscripts when we’re “thinking” about them. 

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Go HERE to see Rachel Lynn Solomon’s awesome example of writing quickly looks like (Rachael’s drafts look exactly like this!) Swipe to the second picture to see.

Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 225 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I am thrilled you are here today. Today is a cool question and answer podcast from the questions that you have left me over at patreon.com/Rachael at the $5 a month level. You get not only all the essays, but the access to ask me any questions you have about anything particularly writing. Mostly we talk about writing, but if you don’t, feel free to ask me anything. So I’ve got a bunch of really good ones here, and I hope that they help you out. Just a quick update since this is the week’s episode, we had a shitty week. Lost our dog Clementine, who was really a dog of our heart. Aren’t all dogs? But this one was really, really special. If you want to see how beautiful she is, you can go to RachaelHerron.com/Clementine  [00:01:13] I did a little bit of a remembrance of her as I usually do when we lose our animals. But this one was a really hard, y’all really hard. I feel like my grief around Clementine is bigger than just losing our old sick dog who was on hospice, pet hospice was the best she was on it for about six months. She came off of it a few times. She was doing so well and to have them come to our house and put her down in a slow, gentle manner where she was completely comfortable, it was really everything. But the grief around her, it’s just holding a lot more than grief around just Clementine. I feel like I’m grieving all the old animals that I’ve lost and all the mothers that my wife and I have lost and the people that we have lost and 2020, and also Clementine. And this is going to sound weird, and I don’t know how to explain this. I’ll just say it. We were not making concrete goals, concrete plans to get to New Zealand until Clementine died. And I know that sounds awful, but we weren’t willing to go without her. And she couldn’t make the trip. She’s just too old and she was too precious for us to leave.[00:02:26] So, on Friday, I think it was Friday or Saturday. It must’ve been Friday. Lala got her visa, so we can go to New Zealand and on this visa, we have to go by August 19th. Which is six months from date of issuance. Oh my God. We were told by immigration that we would have a year to enter after she got her work visa on her way to getting her permanent resident visa. But this has happened a couple of times with immigration in New Zealand, they were fantastic. They answer all your questions, but they don’t always answer them the same way. So that one year was wrong. And we got to get out in six months if we want to hit this visa, which I think we think we do. So that was on Friday. And then Sunday Clementine died. All hindrances are out of the way. And so grieving Clem, Oh, I’m feeling getting choked up. Grieving Clementine is also like this precursor to grieving the loss of our life here in the States, which is normal. I know we’re going to grieve the people that were leaving and the house we’ve lived in for 15 years and our way of life. And we are moving with such excitement into this new world, but, so it’s like I’m saying the loss of combination has just been something for me that has been difficult to handle and I’m moving through it at my own pace and actually letting myself grieve and feel feelings. I’m not good at that, but I am getting better at it. I have to say.[00:03:52] So that’s what’s been going on around here. A little bit of writing been happening. Not a lot. I took Monday off, which is my fiction writing day, just to cry and I cried all day and it helped. So other than that, everything’s going as well as it can be. I’m swimming again. And that’s amazing. I managed to get, I’ve found a place where the swimming pools open and it’s an Alameda and it’s on the estuary and you can look out into the estuary right across the Bay and actually see the lights of San Francisco. When you swim at night, it is so incredibly beautiful and affordable, and I’ve been swimming three times a week and it is the best thing I can do for my mental health right now is swimming. I can’t believe that I went a year without doing it regularly. I’m a late to swimming swimmer. I only learned really to swim about two and a half, three years ago. When I took lessons as an adult, I always knew how to swim. I could get to shore if I need to do, but I didn’t know how to do it efficiently and gracefully. And I swear to God last night as I was swimming was the very first time that I felt like I got the grace and the efficiency and it was just easy. And I, you know, it’s not because I’m terribly fit, but it’s because I know how to move with ease and grace through the water now because somebody taught me and it just reminds me that as adults, we have this amazing ability to keep learning, to do the things we wanna do, so if there’s something that you’ve been scared of doing, God knows I was terrified of taking swimming lessons, but it has paid off in such a huge way. And now that is my bomb. Being in that place, being in water is where I feel the best. So I just wanted to mention that that’s enough of an update.[00:05:33] Let’s jump into questions. This is from Michelle. Hi Michelle! I have a new question, it’s process-related. Sometimes when I’m editing, I feel the need to flip to a new screen or look at my email or something while I think about the editor’s comment and how to do what she’s asking, which is what I’m doing right now, and I am I just telling myself that because I want, am I just telling myself that, because I want to distract myself or is this a real need in order to process information? This is an awesome, multi-sided deep question, Michelle, and I’m really glad that you are asking it. We all feel this way and it’s a case of it’s going to be one thing or the other. It is a case of your editor’s comment is telling you to do something that you don’t want to do or that you don’t yet know how to do, and that makes you uncomfortable. And therefore, I’m going to look at my keyboard here, on a Mac, if you hit command tab, you’re toggling, you’re toggling over to your email. You’re toggling to Twitter. You’re toggling to anything that is open on your desktop. I do that as soon as I hit a patch of I don’t even know what this next sentence should be. I tend to hit command tab. I have to look at it every time because I do it so frequently. I have no idea what I’m actually doing, and I can flip flop around all the screens that are open on my computer. I’m sure there’s a way to do that on a PC as well. So I do that in moments of discomfort. Therefore, when I’m really focused on writing, and when I am writing, this is what I do. I close every other window. So I do toggle, I toggle and I can’t get anywhere. There’s nothing else open. And so I’m just left, staring at my computer.[00:07:19] For me, that is when I’m toggling like that, it is a distraction. It is I’m uncomfortable, let me do something more comfortable, like check email, or look at Twitter or whatever it is. Sometimes we’re just trying to get out of writing or doing the hard work. But other times your brain has been asked this major question by your editor that you’re not sure of the answer yet. And you haven’t thought it through, our brains do incredible excellent and necessary work while we are processing other things while we’re driving, while we’re taking a shower, while we’re feeding the kids, while we’re checking email. Sometimes, although I think email probably is such a thinking busy task at the same time. Your default mode network of the DMN is this network in your brain of interacting brain regions that is active when a person is not focused on what they’re trying to think about. So if you are focused on doing something else, the default mode network goes into play in your brain and starts to create connections between the things that you have been thinking about at other times.[00:08:30] So when you are thinking and processing this editor’s question, it can be very useful to do something else. And perhaps that is what you’re feeling is that, it’s literally the sleep on it principle don’t know how to fix something, sleep on it. The default mode network is incredibly active when we sleep. It is literally cleaning out detritus in our brains, actual physical detritus. It is opening the neural pathways. They actually expand in order for this cleaning to happen. And at the same time, they’re making these connections that we can’t make easily just by thinking really hard by making ourselves think really hard. So if you’re feeling that yes, make yourself a list of the questions that you don’t know the answers to. And this goes for all of you who are writing as you’re writing VA don’t know what to do next. Write it down, look at it and go do something else. Your brain will be processing the whole time. It is this wonderful magic trick. I like to think about the big questions before I go to sleep. I don’t think very hard on them. I don’t close my eyes and try to think about them, but because I’ve looked at the questions that I’m asking myself shortly before I go to sleep, oftentimes more often than not in the morning, I ask myself, did I figure out the question? Did I figure out the answer to this question? And my, the front of my brain will say, no, of course you didn’t, you were sleeping. And the back of my brain will say, surprise, here you go. Serving it to you on a platter. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens reliably enough that I’m a big believer in doing it. So yes, if your brain Michelle is telling you that you want the default mode network to do some work while you’re doing something else that is part of your process, just don’t let it become a distraction and you know, the difference, we all know the difference. So really good question.[00:10:30] Okay, Maggie. Hello, Maggie! Maggie says my work in progress is a solid draft and I have feedback from five of the eight beta readers slash critique partners I sent it to. However, feeling overwhelmed, trying to bring this manuscript to the next level. So in class you have said you can do each manuscript pass, like setting pretty firing words, et cetera in two to three hours, how on earth do you do it that quickly? My mind can’t wrap around doing it without reading the whole thing, every pass, which takes out which takes hours and hours. Suggestions on compiling, evaluating and using feedback from beta critique readers once you have it, feels different from a paid editor where you should probably accept most everything they say. In fact, many of them conflict with each other, you know me, I’m sure I’ll have more questions in the future. And I’m grateful for that. Maggie, please send me more. But first let me clarify something that I have said, I often have passes, which are after my second and third draft. I do these smaller passes in my revisions, which are something like setting. I can look at every single scene and ask myself, is there a sentence of two or two at least of setting in this scene? [00:11:39] If not, let’s add it right now. I can do that for an entire book in two to three hours, I do not feel the need to, I actually prevent myself from reading the whole manuscript. I skim it at best. Skimming each scene, where’s the setting, not there. Okay. Drop some in. Good. Move on to the next scene. However, like you said, the predefining words, the making all the words on the page beautiful, that last, the very last pass that we do, because if we do it earlier, we may get too attached to the scenes that are in there and then we won’t know that we need to change them or remove them. Which is why we don’t predefine and make our sentences perfect. Make our paragraphs perfect until the end of revision, the end, the very end of a book, not in the first draft, not in the second draft, not in the third draft, but in the passes later on. That my friend I cannot do in two-three hours, that’ll take days of long concentrated hours. However, I will say that while I preach not to make your sentences pretty while you’re working on them, every single revision and every single pass that you do, you are going to be touching sentences. You are going to be making them better. So this predefined doesn’t mean that you are dealing with first draft ugly sentences. These are a little bit more grown up. [00:12:59] So and it’s, I think one of the most fun passes, sometimes I call it Twitter-fying in my head, if you have 140 characters, but you write 300 and you need to get it down to the old 140 characters, it is so much fun to revise each sentence, to make each sentence tighter, get rid of all the extraneous words that don’t need to be there. Oh, I just find it delicious, but no, I can’t do that in two to three hours. I’m sorry that I gave you that impression. Some passes are simple. Like adding character description, two to three hours, making my sentences beautiful, days, days and days. Okay. And then your other questions, suggestions on compiling, evaluating and using feedback from beta slash critique readers once you have it. Yes, my suggestions are always to be very careful. We do not want to entrust our books entirely to non-professionals. Non-professionals are going to give you opinions and by non-professional, I mean, someone who hasn’t published quite a few books and hasn’t gone through the editing process quite a few times. So it’s fine to have beta readers who are new writers, who haven’t published a book or just really good readers. It’s fine to have them, but you have to take their advice with a grain of salt and you only use it if it resonates deeply within you. If it does not resonate deeply within you, then you throw it out.[00:14:31] You can thank them kindly for it. They’ve done their best, but it doesn’t work for your book. The exception to this is the 3-person rule if three different people without talking to each other. So we’re not in like a room where people start to agree with each other. Like when one person says something, the other person agrees with it. If three separate people come to you, and say your main character is super frustrating in this scene, I just wanted to smack her. I don’t know why readers are so violent, but readers always put that review. I wanted to smack the character. If they all say that, then if three or more people say it, then you should probably listen to it and figure out what they’re trying to say. They won’t have the answer for you most likely, but it will be a clue toward what you should be looking at, but otherwise just take what really resonates with you. You are right. This is not a professional editor that you have hired to help you with the book. So you just have to take what you love. The best way to learn about your writing and fix your writing of course, is to eventually hire an editor or get an agent who sells your book to an editor at a traditional publishing house. One of those two options, but then that professional editor, you will type, you will take most of their ideas because they’re right. They know what they’re doing. They’re the height of their game, because they’re good at what they do. And that’s how we learn about our writing. And that’s a lot more, it’s easier to trust a professional editor because they do know what they’re doing. So grain of salt, take what you love and leave the rest of your beta readers suggestions. Never have to, you never have to back up your decisions to them either. They’re merely trying to be helpful. And that’s it. [00:16:20] All right. This is from Christina Kaye. Hi Christina! Okay, I’m in the process of drafting my first novel where romance between two central characters is both the theme and the main story I want to tell. I have a solid premise and I know my characters inside and out. Still, I’ve struggled to develop the finer points of my plot in a way that supports my characters’ development while also keeping the story moving in an interesting and satisfying way. My concern is that my plot devices will feel forced or inadequate. Do you have any advice on crafting a story driven plot without over complicating the heart of the story? My novel is loosely inspired by sensitive and important events in history. However, my goal and vision is not to write the historical fiction. What are your thoughts on how to be sensitive to historical themes without needing to make sure I’m being historically accurate in my representation of the events? I hope that makes sense. [00:17:15] Okay. So your first question here, about, I think it really comes down to supporting your characters’ development while keeping the story moving in an interesting and satisfying way. You do not want, as you say, your plot devices to feel forced or inadequate. When we are dealing with any book in which two people are coming closer together over the course of the book, which is most books, not just romance, these characters have to be reacting to things that are happening because of them. Our plot devices feel forced or awkward or wrong when outside events are happening to our main characters, that’s fine. We can have outside events happen to our characters. That is sometimes what it takes in plot, but what really, really matters is, how they react. And of course we want them to react in the wrong way so that it makes things worse. They are probably reacting in the wrong way, out of a sense that this is the right way to do something and they are further complicating and making things messier. But this is something that, especially in a first book, it’s easy to forget. We want to make the story, have enough tension and have enough conflict. So we throw things at the characters, whereas that doesn’t actually work. It doesn’t fulfill the readers need to see true organic complication caused by the people inside the book. So two people who are falling in love in a book like this, they are both each other’s love interests, and they are also both each other’s antagonists.[00:19:05] And they, because if they were to fall in love and get together in the beginning of the book, there’s no book. We have to keep them apart for organic, very real reasons. They have to look at the world in different ways and respond to the world in different ways that complicate the plot because of what they are doing and because of what they’re thinking. And that can be really, really hard. These are characters that we believe in and that we want to see do the right thing and we need to make them be doing the wrong thing, especially for each other. Keeping in mind that is not real conflict. If the conflict can be solved by having a 10-minute heart to heart. So a conflict is not a mistaken identity or overhearing part of a conversation, but misinterpreting it. So that they hear, you said this about me and my feelings are so hurt, but really if they sat down for 10 minutes, the other party would say, but no, I was talking about you in this way and you didn’t hear the other part of the story. And I was actually complementing the way you handle this.[00:20:11] Oh, now there’s no more conflict. That’s not real conflict. So anything that can be solved in a 10-minute heart to heart conversation, not real conflict, not big enough conflict. I shouldn’t say not real conflict, but not big enough conflict for a story. The conflict that we want to see in a story, especially when it’s put in historical setting is yes, the things happening around them to them, but much more importantly is how do they screw it up once they’re inside that situation? How do they screw it up in a real organic way that pushes away the other character for long enough that the tension is built inside the story? And this is true of not only romance, but of any book in which characters are interacting with each other. Good people are interacting with each other on the page. I’m not talking about antagonist, antagonists look like the classic bad guy, antagonist, they’re easy to deal with. What is more difficult to deal with is the good guy, antagonist, which they’re both being for each other until they’re finally together in the end. I hope that that helps. [00:21:14] Oh, and then your second question, what are your thoughts on how to be sensitive to historical themes without needing to make sure I’m being historically accurate. I say, use your imagination, do it in whatever way you want. You are in charge of this world. And in your brief, three or four sentence preface to the book, note to reader, or you can use it at the end of the book saying this is loosely based on X, Y, and Z thing in history, but I’m a fiction writer and I fictionalized it.  So you’re going to see a lot of things that I made up. Good. Great. Now they just get to follow you. Knowing that you have built this world, you have built the rules, you’re breaking the rules whenever you want to. And you’re making stuff up. And that is excellent. Readers love that. Great questions. Thank you.[00:21:59] Alan T. Hello, Alan says that your mantra is that we should just get crappy pages on the word as quickly as possible. On a pragmatic level, I understand the benefits. I equate it to songwriting. First, you make a quick demo on an acoustic guitar, then you head to the studio and polish it. I love that. The problem I have is that I can’t seem to let myself do it. Partly because I don’t think I would enjoy it as much. Do you have any tips on how to nudge myself in that direction and how crappy is too crappy? It would be great to hear some before and after examples from your own work, if possible. So here’s the crux of your question. This the sentence that says the problem I have is that I can’t seem to let myself do it partly because I don’t think I would enjoy it as much.[00:22:47] That tells me that you haven’t spent a lot of time experimenting with it. It is at its essential base, an uncomfortable place to be, to be putting crappy words on the page, letting them stay there, walking away from them and starting the next scene. However, if you’re not finishing books, if your method of writing books is not getting you to completed books, then your method is not right yet. You have not figured out your method and most writers methods, and we all hate realizing this the 99% of us who this is our method. We all hate realizing this is that we must try and we must write that crappy draft first, and it doesn’t feel good. And a lot of writers give up. Because their method is not completing books and they don’t want to write the crappy first draft. That is normal. You are normal if you are in that position, the only way through it unfortunately, is to do it. And for me, I like time-based parameters. You can do that or word count. A lot of people work well to word count. I work well to word count, but I also sometimes work even better to time parameters. I know that if I sit in front of my computer for one hour, with nothing else open on my desktop, preferably the wi-fi turned off. So I can’t even accidentally toggle to something because nothing would be there and my phone in another room or just put out of sight. My phone is actually not a problem. I don’t use it for much, but if your phone is a suck and leave it in another room. I know that if I sit in front of the computer for one hour, with those things around me, I will generally get about 1400 to 1600 words done. That’s my pace. That’s my staring at the ceiling. That’s my get up and go pee, get another cup of water, sit down. I’ll get 1400 words eventually. Cause I’ll get so bored of not being able to do anything else. I’ll start to write and I’ll write crap. Another, oh, my stomach is talking. I don’t know if you guys can hear that, but you know what? Real life happens on the show. So I’m not even going to cut and, and retake that. Another thing is all of the tricks, finding out all the tricks you can do to make yourself do it. I really like using v2.WriteorDie version II online. Don’t buy it. Don’t download it. He doesn’t support it anymore, but write or die version two online, you can use it as an, this was essential to me in learning how to write a crappy first draft, turn it on.[00:25:12] You write as fast as you can. If you slow down, the screen will go red. If you set it so that it will, if you slow down enough, if you don’t type, it’ll start erasing your words and believe me, you will keep writing. If there’s a threat of your words being erased and you can’t get them back, there’s no control Z. v2.WriteorDie version II online is not a place to store your work. It is not a word processor in any way. It is a place where you go to write. And then when you’re done writing you copy and paste out what you wrote and you put it into your document. A site that works a little bit better and is less punitive that I have students who really love, is WrittenKitten, I think its just writtenkitten.com or Google it. And every hundred words, you get a kitten. And I have a student right now who is measuring her writing in kittens. If she writes 2000 words, she- that’s a 20 kitten day. The other day, she had a 65 kitten day. It was either 65 or so 67 kitten day. Holy cow. I’ve had like a 67 kitten day once in my writing career, I can’t write that much in one day.[00:26:18] But she did and she’s counting it and kittens, same kind of idea as Write or Die Version II, you must copy and paste your words out and put them into your document, but it is a place that reminds you. And of course, you have to be online to use these. You can’t turn off the Wi-Fi for these, but it reminds you to keep going, to keep going, you must keep writing. You gotta write another a hundred words. If you want a different kitten to pop up another image of a kitten, you can take screenshots of them. They’re amazing. So getting crappy words on the page requires tricks and rewards. Figuring out how you best work, where you best work. For me, one of the best ways to get crappy writing done is that I have an Alpha Smart Neo 2. It has revolutionized drafting for me. I’ve only used it for one book, but it was extreme. You can get them for 50 or 60 bucks on eBay. They don’t make them anymore. I’ve talked about it on the show before, but basically it is a typing- typewriter emulator.[00:27:20] So you can only see three or four lines at a time as you type, you can’t go back. You can’t edit. You just go somewhere, go lie in the hammock, go sit on the couch. You’re not online. You can’t be online. And you just type, you type as fast as you can, or as slow as you want, really. But you just keep going. You don’t go backwards. You keep going forward. And then when you’re done with your session, you come to whatever computer you’re using. You plug in the Alpha Smart Neo 2, and it then types out your words. And if you’ve typed a lot, it’ll take a long time to type onto your document, into your word document, into your Scrivener, wherever you want it to go. I have found that that has been incredibly useful because I cannot toggle away. I can’t get distracted. I can’t predefine the words at all. I know that you’re asking for before and after examples. I think those would be hard to read on the air. So what I’m going to do instead is if you go to, HowDoYouWrite.net and click on this episode, I’m going to embed Rachael and Solomon’s image of her crappy first draft because it looks like my crappy first draft. And then it’s awesome. It shows the blanks, the holes, the things that we skip over the skeletoning that we do as we’re going. So please come to HowDoYouWrite.net and look at that image. I will embed that over there, and that will be helpful to look at because it’s really bad. It is unreadable by other people; my crappy first drafts. Some people’s crappy for drafts are a little bit cleaner, mine are not. They’re fast. They are hurried. They are best at if I can’t remember the name of a character, I’ll just write name all in caps. If there’s something I need to figure out later, I put it all in caps. I put asterisks everywhere for things to look up later. I just keep moving forward every single time that I write. [00:29:09] So I hope that this helps to hear Alan. It’s a great fantastic question. Thank you everybody for your questions. If you are a member of the mini coaching at that level, please send me some more questions. I am now out of questions. I will be doing a podcast soon on Hybrid presses because I get a lot of questions about Hybrid presses. Hybrid presses are not like Hybrid authors. They have nothing to do with each other. I’m a hybrid author because I traditionally published my books and I self-published my books. Therefore, I am a hybrid. A hybrid press is something totally different and can be very, very scammy. And that serves its own mini podcasts. So that’ll be coming soon, but I’m out of questions. So people on my question list, on my mini coaching level, please send me questions. Please help me help you. I really love talking about this stuff to all of you. I wish you very, very happy, very messy, very crappy writing that you can leave behind you and reward yourself for everyday doing, knowing that someday you’ll be able to clean them up and actually form it into a book. And I do love Alan that songwriting metaphor. It’s just, the songs are so much easier to do because there’s so much shorter than a book, but it is exactly that idea. So thank you very much. Thanks to all of you and happy writing my friend. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

The post Ep. 225: What Do You Actually MEAN When You Say to Write Fast and Badly? appeared first on R. H. HERRON.