#AmWriting

Our guest this week is children’s fiction and YA author Julie Berry, and here’s why: she gave a talk at a conference about visualizing and imagery that Sarina has “been thinking about for 7 years.” That should tell you how much gold there is in this episode—all kinds of useful stuff about how we use images and senses to spark our own creativity and build a connection with our readers in every genre. We think you’ll love it. #AmReadingJulie: The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George SpeareBeauty by Robin McKinleyThe Blue Sword by Robin McKinleyThe Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinleyThe Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie PopeThe Secret Life of Trees by Robin BlackwellBlack and British by David OlusogaStaying Power by Peter FryerSarina: Love Lettering by Kate ClaybornKJ: Tiny Imperfections by Alli Frank & Asha YoumansFind Julie at: Her Website: www.julieberrybooks.comOn Twitter: www.twitter.com/julieberrybooksOn Facebook: www.facebook.com/julieberrybookspageVia Instagram: www.instagram.com/julieberrybooksThanks to everyone who supports the podcast financially. To join that team, click the button below:But it’s all good. The pod is free as it always has and always will be. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it every time there’s a new episode.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

We’ve got a great interview for you today with a freelance journalist who does a different kind of work than any of us ever have—out in the field reporting on his favorite subject: reality adventure TV on trips rife with travel and danger and expense reports. I think you’ll love it. We talk about finding your topic and making that topic, well, topical by looking for what’s happening within the world you’re covering that reflects what’s happening outside of it. We also discuss MFAs (he’s a fan), email (not so much) and how to keep from “opening your email and letting somebody else dictate what you do with your time.”Links from the Podcastfresh.inkLongform on Twitter#AmReadingAndy: Fates and Furies by Lauren GroffThe Secret History by Donna TarttJess: The Summer of ‘69 by Elin HilderbrandThe Book of Eels by Patrik SvenssonKJ: The Guest List Lucy Foley#TBR: The Mountains Wild by Sarah Stewart TaylorFind out more about our guest:AndyDehnart.comReality BlurredAndy’s newsletterFind Andy on TwitterSee Andy’s book recs on BookshopAnd if you love the podcast, have you considered kicking in some cash? Our sponsors cover our production costs, but our time is basically sponsored by you, our loyal listeners. If we’ve added a little value to your day or week or year, please consider supporting us. How? Click the button.As we say every week—we’re so proud to be sponsored by Author Accelerator and Dabble. If you’re wondering—why Dabble and not Scrivener? For us, it’s that plotting tool and the intuitive way it works, but others have weighed in—check that out here with a little Dabble v. Scrivener scoop.And if listening to all of our conversations about book coaching has made you think, hey—that’s the career for me—then you’ll want to head to Author Accelerator’s BookCoaches.com to see how you can make that happen. Or if listening to the promo this week made you wonder about book coach Kemlo Aki, find more about her here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Write every day. Don’t read fiction while you’re writing fiction. My way or the highway. In a burst of frustration, we’re reminding ourselves—and you—that there’s no one way to get this job done, and if your way is counter to what some of the greats might tell you (we’re looking at you, Stephen King, even though we love you), that doesn’t mean it won’t work.A few links from the episode:Minisode: #AmQuerying: How to write a fiction query letter that makes an agent ask for moreBecca Syme: https://betterfasteracademy.com/beccasyme/#AmReadingSarina: Notes of Silencing by Lacy CrawfordJess: Unacceptable by Melissa Korn & Jennifer LevitzUnspeakable Acts by Sarah WeinmanKJ: Big Summer by Jennifer WeinerThe Vanishing Half by Brit BennettOur amazing sponsors: Dabble Writing Software, which I can’t wait to use to line up all my scenes and plot points AS SOON AS I START FIGURING OUT WHAT THEY ARE and which you should absolutely try.And Author Accelerator. Jennie Nash is doing a Facebook Live coaching of a memoir outline on August 14, 2020—that’s next week. I can’t wait, I love watching her do these. Sign up here, or just go learn more!KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00 Writers, KJ here. Have you heard me talk about Dabble yet? I mean really listened. Dabble writing software is our new sponsor, and we love them. Sarina and I can't stop playing with the outline piece of it, which is every bit as flexible as a bunch of post it notes on your desk and a whole lot more portable. You can track everything that belongs within a scene, how that scene fits into multiple plot lines, and where that scene belongs in the book. And you can move it with the flick of a mouse. It's honestly a little too much fun. We don't want to encourage you to procrastinate, but getting your storyline right isn't procrastination. It's part of the work. So try out Dabble and let us know if it helps you get your work done by downloading a free trial at dabblewriter.com. Is it recording?Jess Lahey 0:50 Now it's recording.KJ Dell'Antonia 0:52 This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone and try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. Jess Lahey 0:56 Alright, let's start over.KJ Dell'Antonia 0:58 Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now one, two, three. Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting. The podcast about writing all the things, fiction, nonfiction, short pieces, long pieces, entire books, be they small or long, pitches, proposals, and as I say every week, this is the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done or not, but trying. I am, as I've previously stated, KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the author of the novel The Chicken Sisters, which will be out in December of this year, which is 2020. I'm the former editor of the Motherlode blog at the New York Times where I still sometimes contribute and the author of How to Be a Happier Parent, which is out in paperback and available everywhere now. And I'm Jess Lahey, the author of The Gift of Failure. And I have a new book coming out in April. I just finished the galley edits so it feels real, called The Addiction Inoculation. And you can find my work right about now when this thing comes out in the Washington Post, but I write for lots of different places.Sarina Bowen 2:19 And I'm Sarina Bowen. I'm the author of 35 romance novels. And you can always find more of me at Amazon Apple books and everywhere romances are sold.So today's topic is kind of about keeping your head in the game.Jess Lahey 3:06 It absolutely is. I'm optimistic. I'm going to go with the it is about keeping your head in the game. What is our topic for today, Sarina?Sarina Bowen 3:14 It's myths about writing. All the things that we have absorbed over the years that may or may not be true. And myths come from a place of cultural reference. So these myths aren't out of left field, but we still want to examine them just to make sure we're taking the right advice.Jess Lahey 3:36 Well, I think it's important to do that because some of these myths come from people. I mean, heck, if we took our oft cited David Sedaris advice about never, ever asking for anything, and that became sort of the way that writers were supposed to do things, then not a lot of writers would get stuff done. It happens to have worked beautifully for him. There are a couple of other authors that I'm going to cite while we're talking about some of these, and it can become the word of the writers. And it's not necessarily so because writing is different for different people.Well, I think in particular, there is one myth that we really want to blow up today for all of our sakes. And that myth is the 'you must write every day'. Am I right?It can be a goal.And you know, I think we often make it sound like we do write every day. And we often do write every day. But I think what we don't talk about is that it is seasonal and cyclical. And that writing can sometimes mean other things.Sarina Bowen 4:45 So I came up with the idea of myths, I mean, it entered my brain this weekend when I was listening to a talk by a writing coach named Becca Syme. And she was speaking at an event called Inkers Con that I was enjoying listening to. And she does some myth busting in hers but what she got to was that you have to examine the premise of these myths, like what premise are we accepting if we go along with it and KJ just said writers write every day and I would say that there's an even deeper premise to that one which is writers right because they must, and this one always makes me roll my eyes. Because I am definitely a writer. You know, my whole career is set up around this, but I have never once looked in the mirror and said, I'm a writer because I must, it's a compulsion for me. It's not it's actually my job and some days I just don't feel like doing it.Jess Lahey 5:55 I think that for me, it's how I best express myself. I mean, I always would rather express myself in the written word than trying to explain something to someone orally. And that's just my preference for how I tend to make the best contribution. Do I have to write? In fact, if someone said I couldn't write for the rest of my life, I think I could be okay. I think I'd be fine. I may not be as well understood, but I think I would be fine. I'd have to make more phone calls. Oh my gosh, that would be the worst.Sarina Bowen 6:33 You know, Jess, you just reminded me of that thing that happens at the very end of Spinal Tap the rockumentary. At the very end, when the credits are rolling, they asked each band member in turn, like, 'If you couldn't have rock and roll, how would you go on?' And the first one says something like, 'Well, but I'd still have the sex and drugs.' And then the last one is like, "Well, I could work in a shop.'Jess Lahey 7:19 But yeah, I think that the whole I have to write or I will perish is along the lines of I couldn't live without you because I just don't think those are healthy ways to think about the world, but that's just me.KJ Dell'Antonia 7:33 And you know, it is true that there are easier ways to make a living. So, you know, you probably aren't doing this unless you want to do it, but I feel like have to is awfully strong. So the you have to write every day...Stephen King, every day including Christmas, right? Or whatever your holiday of choice is, just every day, sit down every day. When I am working on something, I do write every day, generally including weekends. Sometimes I can't. Sometimes you're spending 12 hours taking a hike with your family. I guess what I'm trying to say is just you don't have to. It is possible to stop for a week or a couple of weeks, or I have somebody that I was reading said in between every book they spend like a month just gardening. I don't remember who it was. But yeah, when you're in the midst of something, writing everyday is a good way to keep your hand in, and make sure that you know where to start, and that you're still going, and that it's going fine. And especially if you have deadlines or goals. But when you're in between things, like I just turned in a manuscript and I don't know what's gonna happen with that manuscript, but because someone else has it, it's pencils down for me. And I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do next. But if I was writing 1000 words a day without knowing what I was going to do next, that would not be pretty.Jess Lahey 9:59 I have to second your thing about writing every day when you're working on something because if I don't write every day when I'm working on something, I number one get lost. Like, I can't find where my brain was when and then it takes me like two hours to sort of get back into it. But I also feel like it gets stale for me a little bit. So when I'm working on something, I absolutely have to work on it every day. Sorry, Sarina, what were you gonna say?Sarina Bowen 10:26 I was just gonna go one step worse than that, which is I get afraid of my own project.Jess Lahey 10:31 Really? Interesting.Sarina Bowen 10:33 Yeah, I develop a fear about it. That I won't like it as much when I go back and I won't want to continue. It's just a fear of the unknown.Jess Lahey 10:44 It varies for me. There are times when even in mid-massive draft, serious know what I'm doing, have it all, sometimes you have to drive someone somewhere that's 12 hours away. But sometimes I make it an affirmative decision to just be like not today, this day gets a cross. And I love those days.KJ Dell'Antonia 11:37 And that's okay, too.Jess Lahey 11:41 The week after I finished my manuscript and I went on vacation with my husband and my in-laws, it was so nice to say I am not writing this entire week and that can be incredibly freeing. And as it turns out, my brain had the space to think about other things and to sort of muse on other topics. And it was really, interestingly, a very productive week for me from a brain standpoint, but not at all from a writing standpoint, it was just so freeing.But even mid project, sometimes there's just a day when you either can't or choose not to. And I don't find that that stalls me at all, it's fine. You know, that maybe shouldn't be every other day. But yeah, you don't have to write every day. So cross that one off.I can relate to what Sarina said about getting afraid of things. Because I'm sure you've had this moment where you get that email about edits that need to be done and it feels so massive and unwieldy until you actually start and get into the document. And for me, my work always feels manageable when I'm in it, and it's only when I stop being in it that it starts to feel like something I can't even start. So for me it's a bit of self preservation to stay as in it as possible. Otherwise it gets out of my arms and it starts to feel like just something that's way too big. So it's definitely something I have to do for my own, just moving forward kind of thing. Sarina Bowen 13:11 Okay, KJ, what else you got in the myth box?Jess Lahey 13:14 Oh, well, my current favorite myth is you shouldn't read anything similar to what you're working on while you're working on it. When I was just getting started as a writer, I tried to follow that but it's just not what I have found to be true. First of all, whether I'm writing fiction or nonfiction, I find that reading things in the genre or something similar, it's not like I'm suddenly going to rewrite The Bromance Book Club by accident. I feel like it's helpful, because it can be very freeing to be reading along and see what another author has done. Or how they've transitioned, or to realize that, gosh, I really enjoyed that book. And I feel like the character's mother was a total force and presence, but I go back through and I count and she only appeared on the page four times. That's amazing. So I can do that. And sometimes if I'm stuck. I'll go and find the book where I know that an author has done something that I'm trying to do really, really well and either just reread it for inspiration or actually tear it apart. What do they do? What did they do here? What did they do there? Yes, dissection, our favorite thing. So I totally read in my genre when I'm writing. Regardless of what I'm writing.Sarina Bowen 14:56 I tend not to, but also I work in a very tight corner of genre fiction. And so even though I might be reading a romance while I'm writing a romance, I like to work out of genre in my reading because I feel like I find the parallels more available to me there.Jess Lahey 15:18 But you're still reading. I mean, a lot of people say, 'Well, when I'm writing fiction, I'm not reading fiction.' And I'm like, Whoa, that's big. And I've actually heard people say that, like that's a really big chunk to let go of.Sarina Bowen 15:35 Right. Sometimes when I do read really tightly in my own genre, when I'm writing it makes the possibilities feel smaller, not larger, because I can see all the ways that we're all fishing in the same pond. Like they become more obvious to me even if the book isn't similar at all.Jess Lahey 15:54 Well, and sometimes I just feel like you know, if I rewrite someone that has really knocked it out of the Sometimes it's just like, oh, that's the only possible way to do that. And now I feel small and lost. And as though I will never come up with anything as brilliant as that particular logline, or plot twist, or whatever. So there's that, but I'm not going to stop reading because of it. I think I've said in the past that for nonfiction when I need a real hit of a voice that if I'm feeling a little bit not on top of my game, or I'm not feeling like an expert, if I go to a book where the expert voice is really, really strong it's kind of like it's like a rah-rah-rah kind of thing. It's like watching you know, a master musician right before you need to go on stage and be a master musician yourself. It's that sort of feeling of Okay, I can emulate that. It's sort of a fake it till you make it kind of thing. If I get this boost, then I can sort of feel like I'm ready and up to the task. So that for me is an important part. It's not that I'm reading the whole book, it's that I'm dipping in for that expert voice, which is good for me.Yeah. And sometimes let's say I'm sitting here thinking, Okay, I've got my person I know who I'm gonna write this next book about, and I kind of know what they want and where it's going to be. But I need to figure out what makes them act, like I need an inciting incident (as I think the story grid people would say) I need a thing, I need what makes them mad, I will think back to like the last four or five books that I read and liked and think well what pushed that roller coaster off onto the ride. And it's not that I am now going to be like, I know, his wife left him, because my character is not a man and isn't married. It's just a way to sort of remind yourself of some of the things that move characters in books that you love. And hopefully help inspire some ideas. Honestly that one I'm still kind of struggling with...Sarina Bowen 18:09 I saw a brilliant tweet that was kind of on this topic. It's a tweet by Rachel Hawkins who is a lovely YA writer and she tweeted this out on July 17. And I loved it so much she says, 'Me writing books, man I hope this is not stupid. Me reading books/watching TV/consuming basically any media. This is so stupid. I love it so much. Oh, I have room in my heart for the stupidest of things. Thank you.' I hope I've done it justice. But she did such a great little play act there of the different ways we hold ourselves accountable of our own work versus reading that thing that you are enjoying so much or that inspires you.Jess Lahey 18:58 Right and sometimes just realizing how goofy the inciting incident, or the resolution, or the reason that someone was doing something was, and yet why you sort of went right along with it happily, that's super helpful.I've said it once and I'll say it again, some of my favorite writing is my favorite because you can tell that the author is really loving the writing. And Sarina, some of my favorite stuff that you have written is stuff where I can just feel that you're having a good time while you're writing it. So I think that's an important part of it. So yeah, I love that idea of not holding ourselves to impossible standards. What else do we have?Well, I know we wanted to talk - today, I set my timer with the idea that I was going to spend 55 minutes noodling around on the plot of what I hope will be the next thing I'm writing and I've got several pages of assorted noodling. But the way that I get myself to the point of noodling is I'll stack up like a couple of plot books near me and maybe even pick one up and read a little of it because as I'm reading it I'm saying, Okay, if you're not really punishing the character, then nobody's gonna stick with you. I'll find my brain going, Okay, how am I going to punish my person? Like how's this gonna go badly once they make this choice and that kind of thing. So they fire me up. How's this for a myth? Plotting books are for amateurs. I don't know that that's a myth, but I think it's a feeling that we have. Like if I can't do it without resorting to looking at Save the Cat Writes a Novel then I shouldn't be doing it at all. In which case I shouldn't be doing it at all.Sarina Bowen 21:07 Yeah, we're able to give that myth a pass, aren't we? Jess Lahey 21:12 I think so. KJ Dell'Antonia 21:12 Yes. I love sitting down with a good book that tears up the hero's journey and tells you exactly what the twisty points are and what what the required elements are. And fine do them, don't do them, whatever. But using that map can be so great. So that's the myth. That if you use a map like that, you're gonna produce formulaic fiction. Jess Lahey 21:41 But you're hitting on something really important, though. Is that if you're talking about hero's journey, what you're talking about then is that some of that's happening anyway on a really subconscious level. So I think one of the things - there's this tension between it should just happen and that vision of Stephen King going down to his mental basement and channeling the magic satellite. And he talks about I don't know where the book's going because if I'm surprised by my own story, then the reader will be surprised. But I know for a fact that I have no mental basement where I'm going to go where the people in the basement are going to allow me to channel a book and that it's going to be well plotted and it's going to be well executed. And that just isn't a thing for me. And I think that comes from a place of yearning, because wouldn't it be a) super fun and b) wouldn't it be just so fantastic to be such a natural at storytelling that you just have to quiet your mind and go to your basement place and suddenly you're able to channel books and not that it's that easy for him, but that there's that myth that it should be that easy. And I think that's what gets us in trouble.Sarina Bowen 22:57 So the premise there is that novelists are born and not made. And that is such a dangerous premise because many of the people who grow up loving books so much and read them incessantly, just have never had a minute to analyze and dissect the manipulation that a good novelist is creating on the page. And, you know, the idea that we wouldn't ever have to read a book about that is dangerous.KJ Dell'Antonia 23:32 Yeah. I mean, personally, if I sit down and just grab a couple of characters and start writing, you know, will it be decent writing? Yes. Will it be entertaining? Yes, for about a page or maybe two. But, you know, without some idea of what their problem is and what they're going to do to fix it and how it's going to go wrong. I'll just write a conversation for a really, really, really embarrassingly long time.Sarina Bowen 24:11 I mentioned earlier that I had listened to this talk by Becca Syme and she had hit all these myths. And one of the ones that she gave really spoke to me because on the face of it, it's not a myth at all. And this was the one she said, You can't edit a blank page. And at first, I was like, hang on, you really actually can't. But what she meant was that not everybody assembles their plot in the same way. You know, some people really need to think for a nice long time before they're ready to write. And I think I am one of those people. Jess Lahey 25:03 I'm one of those people definitely.KJ Dell'Antonia 25:05 We were talking about that when we were walking the other day that, you know, you and I are both trying to develop a new plot. Basically, we're both noodling around. And whether that's scribbles and paper or just sort of mental scribbles, we are editing that, in some sense to find who we're going to write about and what's going to happen to them and what they're going to want without having actual words. So, you can't stick commas onto a blank page, or at least not with any degree of productivity, but you can edit your mental vision of where you're going. Or your scribbled notebook vision of where you're going. Jess Lahey 25:51 Isn't that really what I'm doing? I'm still trying to finish my Author Accelerator Inside Outline for this novel idea that I have and isn't that just sort of front loaded editing because I'm saying, oh, this doesn't actually move anything along. And especially since Jennie forces you to be so concise with your Inside Outline, it forces you to say, what is this actually adding to the book. And later on, if I want to have a whole entire chapter about them sitting talking about food for an entire chapter, I can stick that in later if I want, but at least at the beginning, I'm not wasting a lot of time by adding something that I think I need that will end up having no place in the book.KJ Dell'Antonia 26:30 Right. You can write different ways, like some people would rather write it all and sort of figure out where it's going that way. But you can edit your mental page, I guess is what we're arguing here.Jess Lahey 26:50 Well, Sarina has talked extensively about her efficiency and the outlining and how those two things are linked. Sarina Bowen 26:58 I'm starting to figure out that outlining for me isn't quite as simple as I had thought that it was, and that there are productive kinds of outlining for me and non productive ones. So that's what I've been chewing on and why that you can't edit a blank page thing really spoke to me.KJ Dell'Antonia 27:17 I find I do a fair amount of scribbling in the notebook that I never go back to. Jess Lahey 27:23 Yeah, I do that, too. KJ Dell'Antonia 27:34 I write it down now sort of knowing that I will probably never go back and look at it. But there's something about putting it in ink on that piece of paper that I don't know locks it in for me.Sarina Bowen 27:47 I do that too all the time. There's just a certain number of rocks I have to turn over until I find the thing I'm looking for.KJ Dell'Antonia 27:54 That is a good way to put it.Jess Lahey 27:56 I think that gets back to where we were in the beginning, which is I think best in the written word on the page. And it isn't until I sit down and start writing those things that I actually get to the bottom of what's silly, stupid, works, doesn't work. I can think about it all I want, but I'm not going to know if that thing whether that's in an essay, or a nonfiction book, or a fiction book, whether it's going to work in the end until it's actually down on the page and I can look at it.KJ Dell'Antonia 28:22 Yes. So here's the thing. 800 word essay, I think well while I'm writing it. I can do that, because even if I write 1600 words, and then have to figure that out, that's fine. 90,000 word book, not a good plan. For me. I think maybe I could get to a point where it might work because I have written more books. But right now, not an efficient use of my time. Yeah, I was just telling you guys that I have a big feature coming out and the outline at one point was longer than the word count for the feature. But it was a very useful exercise because we had to go through that process to figure out what was going to end up at the end. And we couldn't have done that without outlining first.Jess Lahey 29:14 We've had some really good ones. And I think with all the myth stuff, it's just reassuring to know that there aren't a lot of wrong ways to do this writing thing. I mean, if words are getting down on the page, and it's fulfilling to you and you're feeling good about what's happening, I don't care if some other writer says you're doing it wrong. I very specifically had a writer, look me in the eye and tell me I was doing something absolutely wrong. And it was the most crap advice I've ever gotten on writing, but realizing that was actually really helpful to me because I went, oh. And even the fact that I now look at this author that I really respected and see that she might be wrong about this, that demystifies the process for me a little bit and I think I'm gonna be okay. So I love when we can bust some myths up.Sarina Bowen 30:05 Yeah, we're busting them. I would say just that the overarching theme here is examine your own premise like if you look at your process like it's a changeable, mutable thing, then it's a very productive way to try to examine your process. Everybody wants to go faster. Everybody wants to write better work than they did last week. And looking at your process and what other people think about it from a couple paces back is usually a pretty helpful thing.Jess Lahey 30:40 Absolutely. KJ Dell'Antonia 30:42 You know, and maybe that this has been a huge multi-month endeavor in recognizing that the rituals that we maybe once had and the places that we like to write, and the ways that we like to do things were not available to us anymore, especially if you were in coffee shops, or you like to say to write in a room that did not contain multiple children and partners who were trying to ask you questions about why there is no food in the refrigerator. You know, we don't have that anymore, or maybe we need to find a way to find it. All three of us have lately been sort of wandering around going, oh, I can't, I just can't. And I guess busting the myths is kind of a way to try to find our way to say, okay, I can't do that, but maybe I can spend half an hour trying to figure out what my plotting book is that I would like to read and then actually sit down and read it and hopefully do a little. So now that we're done for the moment with our mythbusting, let's move on to what we're reading after a short break. Listeners, you know we're about to get into what we've been reading. And we've been reading some good stuff. But have you ever thought about how those books get so good? Or maybe thought you could be a part of making an author's novel, memoir, or nonfiction as good as it could possibly be, and get paid for the work? Author Accelerator has a book coach training program that students described as truly life changing. They dig into the mechanics, process, and emotion of coaching, but they don't stop there. Their program also helps you turn coaching into a profitable business that fits into your life. Find out more at authoraccelerator.com.Jess Lahey 32:54 Okay, people what have we been reading? If we haven't been writing as much let's hope some of us have been reading some things, I know I have.Sarina Bowen 33:01 I did I read a memoir like a grown up. And it was the terrific memoir that Jess mentioned on another episode, which is Notes on a Silencing by Lacey Crawford. It was terrific. And I want to shake everyone from her teenage years. And tell them what for. I had my typical reaction to memoir, which is always my frustration that people's early lives don't have a perfect narrative arc, like some of my favorite fiction. She did an amazing job, it's such a good book. And I enjoyed reading it very much, but it's always jarring to me. And also I had another typical memoir thought, which is how do people remember things from when they're 15? And she and I are just about the same age. She's a couple years younger than I am. So I guess we'll go with that. But finally, relating to today's discussion, there were just some things about her experience and the difficult traumatic experience that she had to process that I feel like made me a better fiction writer. And I feel more competent at tackling maybe darker backstories just having Lacey Crawford make me think about that kind of trauma in one's youth. So I enjoyed it very much.Jess Lahey 34:40 Oh, good. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I thought she did a spectacular job. KJ, what have you been reading? KJ Dell'Antonia 34:48 Oh, so I actually was able to go and sit by a pool by a beach last week. It was amazing and miraculous and made me feel as though the world was normal. In the process, I read two books. One of the things I read was total classic, perfect beach read even has the name. It was Jen Weiner's Big Summer. It is extremely fun. It is a taco of a book that is delicious, and fun, and wonderful, and amazing to eat, and yet has some substance to it. It was great. Amusingly, because she is Jen Weiner, it is of course marketed, and covered, and titled as though it is women's commercial fiction. It is absolutely 100% murder mystery. I don't think that's a spoiler because if you read the whole flap copy, you at least figure out that there's something along those lines going on. This is like right down to the set of amateur detectives drawing out clues on a blackboard classic, every I dotted, every t crossed, mystery, super fun, super well done, and with all the wonderful themes of women's fiction that she usually has. And yet it also has this mystery, which is really fun and entertaining. And it's also just amusing that when you've got multiple best selling commercial women's fiction books, you can write whatever you want and call it commercial women's fictions. And I love that and support it. Go Jen. So that was one of them. And the other is The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. So I go on my vacation. I read about the first half of The Vanishing Half, it is amazing is wonderful, but it's also the kind of book that when you are reading it, you do not wish for anyone to poke you and ask for sunscreen. You're deep in it and it's kind of a grumpy book in some ways. And it is really, really good. This one's the story of two twins who started out in 1950's Louisiana. They're black girls, they run away from home. One of them decides to pass as white, the other does not, and it comes forward, not the present, into like the 70's and 80's. But in a really amazing, and fascinating, and wonderful way. I loved it was really good. Excellent one, well worth your hardcover dollars.Jess Lahey 38:12 Excellent. I've been reading some really good stuff too and now I'm excited I have two more books to read. I listened to Unacceptable by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz. Melissa Korn is at the New York Times, Jennifer Levitz is at the Wall Street Journal and this is the story of the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal case. And it is so good. The level of reporting is incredible. They do an incredible job; they read everything, all the details are there. She does all the characterizations really well. So it's not just some extra bits that could have been added on to the articles you've already read. This is a really deep dive into how the whole thing came together and it's beautifully done. I can't recommend it highly enough, especially if you like that sort of thing. You know, procedural, but also juicy, all kinds of stuff. And then I also picked up a book - I follow Sarah Weinman on Twitter and I saw that she was talking about a new collection she has called Unspeakable Acts. And it's a collection of true crime. She writes a lot about true crime. She has a blog about it. It's sort of like that best American Crime Stories that used to be published, but she was the editor of this really lovely collection and there's some really good stuff in there. There's something by Pamela Koloff and a couple of other writers that I just really love. So I happen to really like the true crime genre and these are nice sort of bites of true crime and beautifully written stuff it's a definitely a best of so I'm way into it. So Unspeakable Acts and Unacceptable are my two books, both huge thumbs up. One quick thing, if you are going to have people narrate a book in which (and this has nothing to do with the books I'm recommending) if you're going to have people narrate a book in which there are foreign accents, even just if they're British accents, especially if they're British accents, please get a narrator that can do the accents. I just had to return two books over the past two weeks that I couldn't listen to because the accents are so bad. So that's my rant for the day. KJ Dell'Antonia 41:18 Before we sign off, let me point out that some of the conversation that we talked about today, started with me shouting about not being able to figure out what plotting book I was looking for on our Facebook page, which is, of course, AmWriting on Facebook. And if you're not in our Facebook group, you should absolutely join it. We have a good time. There's a lot of people gathering up writing partners and creating accountability groups and asking questions, and it's friendly and fun, and lovable so you should do it.Jess Lahey 41:51 So that's really fun. In fact, recently we had someone finally admit that they've been lurking but they were inspired by all the people who posted there. And so guess what? They got a book deal. I mean, it's just the coolest, coolest place. I love it.KJ Dell'Antonia 42:05 Yeah, that was awesome. And secondly, if you want to get the show notes for this podcast and every podcast, please sign up to get our emails by going to amwritingpodcast.com. You can sign up for the free show notes or you can sign up to support the show. And if you support the show, then every week you will get either a writer top five, or a mini episode that drops right into your pod player. The mini episode from last week as you listen to this, which for me is still in the future is going to be me talking about great fiction query letters. So if you're interested in that, you'll want to hop over and give us a little support. But even if you're not we'd love to have you on the email list to get the show notes because then you always get the links to the books that we've talked about and everything else.Jess Lahey 42:57 Alright. Perfect. That was Beautiful. Until next week everyone, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game. This episode of #AmWriting with Jess and KJ was produced by Andrew Parilla. Our music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and performed by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their services because everyone, even creatives should be paid. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Hey campers—I hate reading you all a canned intro to our authors every time, so I’m winging it with our guest, Sonali Dev. I’m a fan of hers, so I feel like I know all the things. She’s the author of four straight-up romances, but her last-book-but one is the start of a series written in homage to Jane Austen, as is her latest, both set among the members of a politically ambitious Indian family in California. Why Jane Austen? Because, as Sonali says, “those were the first books I read about women wanting things and getting them. Instead of ending up crazy or dead.”We talk the pros and cons of writing from such revered material, whether readers are “looking for Lydia,” the need to make your heroine “likeable” (pro tip: the female Darcy is hard sledding) and supplying recipes for hungry readers. Links from the pod: Sonali Dev on IGNewsletter with a recipe booklet, recommendations, and a really bad joke.#AmReadingSonali: Boyfriend Material by Alexis HallThe Kingmaker by Kennedy RyanKJ: The Proposal by Jasmine GuilloryPerfect Happiness by Kristyn Kusek LewisSarina: Pale Rider by Laura SpinneyThe Great Influenza by John M. BarryThanks to everyone who supports the podcast financially. To join that team, click the button below:But it’s all good. The pod is free as it always has and always will be. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it every time there’s a new episode.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00 Hello fellow writers, we have an interview for you with Sonali Dev whose Bollywood romances have always reflected her love of all things Jane Austen, and whose latest books are all in on that passion. If you're all in with books, reading, and writing, you might want to check out the latest book from Jennie Nash at our sponsor, Author Accelerator - Read Books All Day and Get Paid For It: The Business of Book Coaching. You can find that and more at authoraccelerator.com. Is it recording?Jess Lahey 0:30 Now it's recording. KJ Dell'Antonia 0:33 This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone and try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. Jess Lahey 0:37 Alright, let's start over. KJ Dell'Antonia 0:38 Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three. Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting the weekly podcast about writing all the things, fiction, nonfiction, short pieces, long pieces, proposals, pitches, you are allowed to start to write things that do not start with P, although I may not list them here. And in short, we are the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done. Sarina Bowen 1:14 I'm Sarina Bowen, I am trying to get the work done this week on romance novel number 36. And you can find more about me at sarinabowen.com.KJ Dell'Antonia 1:25 And I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I'm the author of the novel The Chicken Sisters, and you heard it here first, I don't know when it's coming out. We've just delayed that puppy from this summer into the future. Not the indefinite future, but I don't know what kind of future. So everybody's talking me off the ledge because I'm not super happy about it, but it is what it is and when it comes out, it's gonna be great. It really is. I'm also the author of How to Be a Happier Parent, which did come out in paperback this summer. I'm a former editor of The Motherlode blog at the New York Times and still sometimes a contributor there. And you'll find me bookstagramming on Instagram at kjda. And we have a guest today that I'm really excited about. So I hate reading everybody the canned intro to the authors all the time, where I sort of just suck pieces off of their websites. So I'm sorry, guest Sonali Dev, I'm revealing your identity. I'm just gonna riff, because I am a fan and I feel like I know all the things without having to write them down. So Sonali Dev is our guest today. She is the author of four straight up Bollywood style romances, but her last book (but before this one) was a take on Pride and Prejudice. And this one, the current book, which is called Recipe for Persuasion follows the arc of the Jane Austen book Persuasion. And we're gonna talk about that and all kinds of things. And Sonali, I'm so excited that you're here.Somali Dev 3:14 Thank you so much for having me. And I think what I like to call it is an homage to not even an homage to the novel, but an homage to what I learned personally from the novel as a young girl growing up. So it's inspired by, and it's an homage to, her work.KJ Dell'Antonia 3:33 That completely works and I have not yet finished Persuasion, although I am deep, deep, deep into it. And I absolutely gobbled Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors. And I think you're not someone that sticks tightly to what's been done before in any way and that's what makes them so good.Somali Dev 3:51 Yeah, not even close. I mean, that's not even my intent ever. You know, these are completely my stories. There's no doubt and like I said, what they are to me is not even really so much about the story, but what I learned from that story, and what it made me, and what it makes me want to say. And so they're absolutely my stories, but it very much is paying homage to her original stories.Sarina Bowen 4:22 And how did you decide to do that? Like it's a big, difficult task to nod at this work that you already love so much. So what was the deciding factor for you that this would be your next big series of projects?Somali Dev 4:38 So, it's really strange because you know how we have those childhood dreams that are grand, like the Oscar speeches we give in front of mirrors and things like that. You know, where you dream you're going to do something and Jane Austen was one of my earliest favorites. She was, I think, a very strong influence on me as a young girl, because what I saw in her books was aligned very closely with who I was on the inside, but who I was not being reinforced by the stories in my world. I grew up in India, and the stories we were hearing rarely were about women wanting things and getting them. And so that in Jane Austen's work spoke to me, because you know, her heroines at a time when there was nothing in their world telling them they were worthy of anything considered themselves worthy of getting love, and they didn't end up either crazy or dead, like all the other classics. So from a very early age, and I also dreamed of being a "big fancy author" sitting in my big fancy cottage by the beach and writing, you know, that was my faraway dream as a little girl. And so very early - like I couldn't even tell you where the genesis of that idea was - but very early I knew I wanted to tell her stories my way and then as I started to take the publishing journey seriously and I became a published author, it was always very front and center in my mind. And as that idea had taken taken shape and become real I knew that I wanted to take these four novels, which are my favorite four novels, and tell them under one story umbrella. And I also wanted them to be entirely my stories, while still being very much nods to her. And so all of that was just always in my head. And I think in 2013, I sold my first book and had my first agent. And at the time we had sold the first two Bollywood books and you know how agents and authors who want a career, kind of want to stay a few steps ahead. And when we were having that conversation, I told her about this idea. And her reaction in a very casually dismissive way was that Austen doesn't sell, so we're not going to do that. And even for a second that didn't dissuade me, which kind of tells you how much a part of me this was. So, you know, it was always something I was going to do, no matter who else was on that train or not. So it was just somehow (and I think that has to do with how much of an influence she was for me as a woman and as a person growing up). So I always knew I was going to do this.KJ Dell'Antonia 8:01 Wow. If we read your first four books really carefully knowing this now, would we see hint? I think you see hints of Darcy, for example, in something that I'm writing now. And I'm aware of it. And it's not an homage, it's not anything, it's just some of the ways that he interacted with Elizabeth are reflected in what I'm working in. So would we find them? Would we find little clues?Somali Dev 8:29 I think you would be hard pressed not to find some influence of her in any romance novel. So definitely. In fact, I think when I was selling Bollywood Bride, my hook was (of all things) Wuthering Heights meets Monsoon Wedding. I think the things that we read as children... The other day I was talking to someone and when this person read Bollywood Bride they got a Jane Eyre sense and I think that has to do with the fact that there is a crazy lady in the attic. Like you can't write a bad arrogant, bad proposal without invoking Jane Austen, there's just no way to do it. You can't write an arrogant man without invoking Darcy. And so, yeah for sure, I think you see that in those books. I think how you see it more is in the voice. And there's a little bit of cynicism in all my writing. This need to laugh at the world we live in was something I think again was reinforced by Jane Austen and by PG Woodhouse. And you know, those authors that I read as a child like we live in this world and it's flippin ridiculous and that it's okay to live in it and yet find it completely ridiculous was something (again) that felt okay because I read these books young. And I think if you looked you would find in a lot of the inner dialogue and the narrative of all of my books is the fact that all is not well with our world and it's kind of ridiculous.Sarina Bowen 10:40 Can I ask a question - you just made such a terrific case for the fun and the backbone that you get by writing an homage to something you love, and I just want to think about the risks for a second. Because that's something we do on the podcast a lot is just to think about the pros and cons of various paths. So I read a book a few years ago called The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel by Margot Livesey. And it's a Jane Eyre take, which is super fun. And I went to see this author at my local bookstore and she started to talk about why she wrote this book and my jaw kind of hit the floor because she had a life that began a little bit like a Jane Eyre. So she was just primed to write this thing. So I took this wonderful book, and I read it and I enjoyed every minute of it. But in the back of my head, I was always like, What is she going to do with the crazy woman in the attic? So to me that announced itself as a risk that readers would be looking for certain plot cues to happen. So how do you subvert that?Somali Dev 12:01 So what you're saying is that if you pick up a book that is titled Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors you're going to be looking for...KJ Dell'Antonia 12:12 You're looking for Lydia...Somali Dev 12:14 and you're looking for a story that's kicked off by a misunderstanding and egos being hurt. You're looking for the bad proposal. So again, I think (and this happened fairly naturally, and this might just be a nature and personality thing) is that I really only cared for what I wanted to say. And I really only cared for the story I wanted to tell. And so if at any point I had thought (I never, for a moment and this is with all my books) I rarely think about what it is people want to hear. I feel like I'm doing a disservice to writing, and not to sound obnoxious, but I feel like this in the way I live in everything, if you say things that you think people want to hear, then you have zero credibility. And there's really no authenticity in living like that. And so I try to kind of transfer that to how I write. And so just naturally I don't worry about it. And that explains a lot, possibly about my career.KJ Dell'Antonia 13:28 So you're just kind of like, well, the Lydia is coming and that's okay. Like, if people maybe know that the Lydia is coming (I'm just using Lydia because that's a pretty easy one), but I'm good with that. Like, I'm rolling along and by God, the Lydia train is about to crash into my story.Somali Dev 13:46 No, not even that. I'm thinking if Lydia is not important to the story I'm telling, then she doesn't have to be there. Like I want this story to be about two people who start off on the wrong foot because of how they see the world and themselves, and that's what I want. Only in that much is what I want to do with Pride and Prejudice. You know, I want to explore how when you meet someone who is completely different from you, how you process yourself and the world. And so that is what I want to do. And so that's what I'm going to do. I'm not thinking about people looking for Wickham or for Lydia or any of that. So it's only in that much, that I want to retell that story. Now, if that kickoff point where there is the misunderstanding, comes naturally to my story, and if that proposal comes naturally to my story, only then it has a place in my book. So like with Persuasion, at least with Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors, there are some plottish consistencies, but with Persuasion, you'd be hard pressed to find anything more than a thematic connection.KJ Dell'Antonia 15:23 So Persuasion is my least favorite Jane Austen book, and I want to get to that...Somali Dev 15:28 I want to talk about that because I've been hearing so many people say that.KJ Dell'Antonia 15:34 But I'm watching for who the other girl is, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe she's not even coming. So, but don't tell me, don't tell we're not spoiling in any way. I had guessed, I was like, oh, I'll bet this is the girl who falls off the wall. I forget her name. Yes, Louisa Musgrove. Thank you.Somali Dev 16:00 So I think that for me again, the way I think about the story is that Louisa Musgrove isn't Louisa Musgrove in the story, she is the thing or the device that keeps Ann and Wentworth misunderstandings reinforced. So what she is is them not growing enough to put their past behind them. So, what you will find is other things that keep them from doing that. You might be able to take a character and say, okay, she's kind of Louisa Musgrove, but what she really is, is just that thing standing in their way, which is really in terms of story to me, what I'm trying to get them over.KJ Dell'Antonia 16:52 Right. Oh, you need that, because otherwise it's boring.Somali Dev 16:56 And that's the story, the story is about getting over mistakes. But not by magic, but by growing. So that's the story I'm trying to tell - the story that no mistake is absolute. I'm not trying to tell the story of Captain Wentworth per se, I'm trying to tell the story of this warrior-like man who goes off and makes lemonade when life gives him lemons, but has not let go of his past, and how he's going to process a second chance and this girl who has to grow a spine and you know, was never spineless.KJ Dell'Antonia 17:35 That's why Persuasion is my least favorite Jane Austen. Because I have trouble with the spineless heroine. But yours I can tell has a spine, she's just put it in the closet somewhere.Somali Dev 17:53 Again, with both of them... Now, I don't see Ann as spineless, I see Ann as very much a product of her time. But if she were truly spineless she would have just gone off and married the next Joe who comes along. So Ann is just someone who feels differently from how the world around her feels, and she has to make that journey of being okay with it. I think this is a very universal journey and we all make it. It's just less overt in our day to day, because the world will tell us being x is really what makes you cool or all of that. And if you naturally don't feel x, then you have to make the journey of that being okay. And I think that's her journey. So it's not spinelessness. She never is okay with what doesn't feel okay to her. She just has to find a way to find that power to let that become.KJ Dell'Antonia 18:48 That's probably why Persuasion does work. Even though like you said, you're hearing a lot of people say that they have frustration with the heroine. There's a lot of pleasure in seeing her find a way to be okay with it. And also I think you're right, we all know that we're in that and that it's a really common journey. Maybe it's just one we don't like to think that hard about.Somali Dev 19:13 Yeah. And we don't live in a world with overt taboos or overt divisions in society, but they're all still there, it's just become more silent and it's become less easy to find. But I feel we still relate to those journeys, because it's very much there. And it's our daily struggle, I don't think there is a person in the world who feels completely comfortable in their skin from the day that they were born. Which is why this whole woman against her world or woman against expectations story works for us even today. Now, I will say that if you've watched the films, I think both portrayals of the two BBC films that are most commonly watched, the portrayals of Ann Elliot are terrible, terrible. Yeah, so maybe those filmmakers saw her as that, or those actresses did. But it's terrible, like that's not how I saw Ann Elliot and I found it very violating to have actresses play them like spineless wimps because she's not. KJ Dell'Antonia 20:33 I wanted to ask you if you find that setting the Jane Austen stories - this is probably more true of Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors which you actually set in India. Recipe for Persuasion is set in the United States.Somali Dev 20:49 No, they're both set in the United States. They're are an Indian American family. It's the story of a politically ambitious Indian American family. And Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors is set in the San Francisco Bay area where the older son is running for California Governor. So it's very much set in America.KJ Dell'Antonia 21:08 Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors has got him running for governor?Somali Dev 21:12 So the overall arc for these four novels when I imagined them was that, it was this politically ambitious Indian American family in the Bay Area. And their oldest son is running for California Governor and the stories kick off with the announcement that he's running, and then they will end when the election results happen.KJ Dell'Antonia 21:33 Right. So that's gonna be all four books?Somali Dev 21:35 That's all four books. KJ Dell'Antonia 21:36 I think (and it's been obviously a little while since I read Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors) that the flair of India and the feel must have just sort of soaked into me a little too thoroughly. But what I wanted to ask was, do you think that using your Indian heritage and working within that culture you kind of get the advantage of some of the more strict expectations that Jane Austen's heroines faced? Like it might be harder for people to buy feeling huge pressure from your family from some suburban Chicago kid, whereas if you're looking at a tiger mom or at an Indian parent who has expectations about marrying within the Indian... I don't even know what the words are that I'm looking for. Anyway, do you think that sort of helps to heighten the Austen feeling, is what I really wanted to ask?Somali Dev 22:40 Okay, so first, Trisha (who is the protagonist of Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors) who is a female Mr. Darcy, because the story is gender flipped. She's a neurosurgeon at Stanford. So you know, very much an American story. But I think you're right, and it isn't that simple. Because I think family expectations are pretty ubiquitous and universal. Having said that, Indian families have peculiarities and lack of boundaries, or at least mine does. I was having this conversation with someone else who is not Indian and she said, 'Are their families where they believe in boundaries?' And I don't know families that believe in boundaries. So I think it's naturally a part of being a family, but then as an author always world building. So this could be a white family, they could be a Korean family, they could be a black family, as long as I as an author can make you believe that that's how their relationships and their bonds are. That's all I really need to do. And for me, being an Indian American girl, there is authenticity to my understanding of how Indian families interact. I do feel like it's not that unique, but that just might be because that is my life. And so it is easy for me. I don't know if it's easier for the reader to process. Again, you know, Jane Austen was about family, but I think that it was really more about society. So how rigid the society you lived in was and again in these books, it is very much the modern world, so it's not like rules have suddenly appeared. It's that rules exist in our world, they're just more subtle than they were 200 years ago.KJ Dell'Antonia 25:26 I just wonder if the rules feel easier for a white reader to stomach because they can sort of be like, Oh yes, Indian families are like that, but yet the reason that they're in there and identifying is that all families are like that exactly like you said. It's an interesting way of just thinking about how readers let things into their minds and where they go with it.Somali Dev 25:58 And again, I come across all sorts of readers. I come across the reader who will come to me and say with great amounts of disbelief that they could actually relate to my characters. Like they think they're saying something nice to me and they're like, my gosh, I could totally relate to Milly, who you know has a child. And my reaction to that is always, you can relate to vampires so why are you surprised that you can relate to an Indian girl?KJ Dell'Antonia 26:32 You can relate to Jane Austen's heroines. They're as far from us as anything.Somali Dev 26:38 Exactly. And then there are people who have read one book, and it's a checkmark. Oh, I read an Indian book and now I know everything about the Indian culture, and I'm done with my little walk. And there are readers who inhale all of my books and see them as a story and reading and processing them like they would read and process any story. So I think that there is a good spectrum of readers. And again, I'm essentially writing it as a story. And my hope is that everybody will in the end, we will be a world where everybody will read it as a story, not an Indian story.KJ Dell'Antonia 27:20 It is very much a story, except for the part where it makes you hungry for Indian food. Sarina Bowen 27:49 I just wanted to point out that at the beginning of Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, chapter one actually begins in India with the heroine's childhood. This beautiful rich memory of her visit to a family estate and what happens there. And I just love the way that you get this glimpse of her as a young child and then you snap your fingers and you're in this hospital in Northern California. So I felt like I was being dunked into her sort of mythical past before shown the harsh hospital lighting and that just helped color it that way for me as a reader, that she was just more interesting than if I had seen her in a lab coat for the first moment.Somali Dev 28:41 As writers, all three of us, I'm sure have had to make this struggle. And that is the likability of your female protagonist. So just by virtue of writing a female Darcy, and that was one of the reasons that I wrote this book and also one of the reasons why writing this book was a very personally transformative experience for me. Because I set out to see if arrogance and owning your own power and privilege and your own brilliance and all of that would still be easily palatable. I mean, would be easily palatable in 2019 in a woman as it was in a man 200 years ago, in 1813. And so, it turns out that it isn't, it turns out that it took a lot of iterations to make Trisha consumable. And it was work because a woman being arrogant, and a woman being impatient, and a woman being lacking in empathy is not seen the same way as a man being all those things. And one of those things, I think one of the reasons that I had to show you right up front where she's coming from, it instantly softens her, which is kind of sad that she needed that instant softening and if I was showing you a man in that same situation I may not have had to soften him. You know, we would all have been much more accepting of his arrogance and trusted that he'll come around. Because men are expected to be jerks in fiction and especially romantic fiction when we start out. Sarina Bowen 30:42 That's so true. And you know, if Pride and Prejudice had begun with little Darcy in knee pants like snuggling a swarm of puppies I don't know if I could summon the same outrage during that awful proposal. And I think that we should take a pause right here with Darcy in knee pants with the puppies, before we talk about what we've been reading.KJ Dell'Antonia 31:07 Excellent plan. Writers before we get to what we've been reading, let's talk about what you've been writing or rather, where you've been writing. If you've got a pile of colored index cards that represent scenes, and plot lines, and characters, and keep getting shuffled around on the floor while your dog walks on them, a notebook full of pages with half an outline here and a list of things that belong in another scene there. I get you. And I want to encourage you to take a look at Dabble, the writing software that works the way our writing minds work, or maybe the way we wish they'd work. Capture all those little details and big plot lines in a system designed to help you keep track of where you are and where you're going. We love Dabble and we hope you will, too. Get a free trial at dabblewriter.com and please head over to our Facebook group and tell us what you think. Now it is time, let's talk about what we've been reading that did not involve Darcy and with a swarm of puppies?Somali Dev 32:22 I so now want to read Darcy with a swarm of puppies. And boy shorts. KJ Dell'Antonia 32:29 Alright, so what are we reading? Sarina Bowen 32:55 My books are easy. KJ Dell'Antonia 32:56 Okay. Then you go first, Sarina, while Sonali and I gather our thoughts. Sarina Bowen 33:02 My book club has picked Pale Rider by Laura Spinney, which is a book about the Spanish Flu of 1918. And the structure of Pale Rider is frustrating me, so I have turned to The Great Influenza by John Barry to compare the two and I will let you know.Somali Dev 33:23 Can I just say I have so much respect for anyone reading those books right now like in this moment in time.KJ Dell'Antonia 33:40 Alright, Sonali, I'm gonna turn to you because I am looking up a title on Kindle.Somali Dev 33:48 It seems to be a really good time for rom-coms. And just in terms of what's being published, like every book being published is a rom com, but it's also a really good time for some fun and romance. So there's one that comes out in July, it is called Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall who is one of my favorite, favorite romance authors. Sarina Bowen 34:20 I cannot wait to get my hands on that book. Somali Dev 34:22 I have been saying that this is possibly the best rom-com I have ever read. Like it's in that realm, it's that good. So it is this fake relationship, but through the whole book the fake relationship is in quotation marks. Like as you're reading it, these big virtual quotation marks because it is this complete cup of a boy who is the son of a fallen rock star. So he is a papparazzi darling. He's always in the news for the wrong reasons. He's a mess. And to regain his reputation at work, he needs a good solid boyfriend. And so he finds this man who is a human rights lawyer and incredibly straight laced and all the things and it is just delightful. It is laugh out loud funny. I mean, there were times when I was guffawing like a hyena. Don't drink hot beverages - you will choke and you will spit them all over the place. Hilarious, incredibly poignant. Just so connected, it's just a gorgeous book. I mean, it will just leave you so happy. And it's one of those books that also makes you turn a mirror on yourself. So it's all those things and it's just amazing. So that comes out at the end of July, I think.I'm so jealous that you have the arc. Alexis Hall is so talented.Incredibly, I think is one of the greatest talents of the romance genre right now. Glitter Land is also an absolute masterpiece, I think. I didn't think I would love one more than that, but it's just delightful. It's everything a British rom-com should be or can be. So I have also recently discovered Kennedy Ryan and think that her writing is almost like startlingly beautiful. And she wrote The Kingmaker I think that came out in December last year, and it was what she calls a duet, so Kingmaker is the first. I think the second book is called Rebel King, but it has this giant emotional impact of like old style romance. But all of the subject matter is so current and contemporary. So she kind of juxtaposes those two things so well, very emotionally, it's an old style romance, but with all the regressive parts gone and it's this fresh and very contemporary, very socially conscious take. And of course, I'm not a huge fan of the whole alpha label. And Max, her protagonist, is as alpha as they come and so even with a hero, who is someone I would run 10 miles from in real life, I just completely bought it and she just makes it beautiful.KJ Dell'Antonia 37:45 That sounds really good. And I have just written Boyfriend Material down on my list of books to order and I want to check out Kingmaker. I have been reading The Proposal by Jasmine Guillory, and I am only partway into it. And I don't usually talk about books until the author sticks the landing, but she's probably going to and it is really good. And she has a new book coming out this summer too, which is definitely not just on my list of 99% sure, I already ordered it. So there was that and I also read and enjoyed very much Perfect Happiness by Kristyn Kusek Lewis, that one's not rom-com, that's definitely women's fiction. It's woman who is already married, struggling with all kinds of things to do with being already married. And it's pretty fun because she's a happiness expert who is unhappy so that was clearly the hook and it was very hard to put down. So that's fun. And that is what we've been reading because Sarina already told us and we immediately dismissed those because we didn't want to read them.Sarina Bowen 39:19 Sonali, thank you so much for joining us today. Somali Dev 39:22 Thank you so much for having me. That went fast and it was so fun. Thank you.KJ Dell'Antonia 39:28 Should we tell people where to find you, Sonali? Besides sonalidev.com? What's your favorite social media? Where should people follow you?Somali Dev 39:37 I am on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And I'm fairly active on (more active than I should be) on all three. And I do also have a newsletter which I was really bad with but I'm now trying to send out once a month so it's a very low incidence newsletter but what I do that people might have fun with is I do a recipe, a recommendation, and a really bad joke, because my family sends me the most terrible jokes on group chat. And I feel like I shouldn't be suffering alone. And if you sign up for the newsletter, I have a free recipe booklet that you get. And of course, I'm told over and over again that the books make people hungry. And these are recipes that are related to the books. So you get that.KJ Dell'Antonia 41:51 Well, this was super fun. I echo Sarina in saying thank you for coming. And Sarina, do you want to take us out?Sarina Bowen 42:16 Yes ma'am. Until next week, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.Jess Lahey 42:29 This episode of #AmWriting with Jess and KJ was produced by Andrew Parilla. Our music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and performed by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their services because everyone, even creatives should be paid. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

This week, Jess got a message from some family members who’d read the draft of her forthcoming book, The Addiction Innoculation. They had … thoughts. Those thoughts turned out to be nothing drastic—but the emotional roller coaster Jess rode while waiting to hear more was a doozy, and got us all thinking about how much of ourselves is exposed when we write non-fiction with a memoir element, how real memoirists do it, and how often readers—especially those closest to you—read our fiction looking for hidden truths. It’s a fun conversation that also covers pool floats, parents, dream offices we probably wouldn’t use and more. Links from the PodcastYard PodsDon’t Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra BeasleyMrs. Everything by Jen WeinerKJ and Sarina’s Pool Floats#AmReadingKJ: Rodham by Curtis SittenfeldI'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing BrownJess: Notes on a Silencing by Lacy CrawfordSarina: Don’t You Forget About Me by Mhairi McFarlaneThanks to everyone who supports the podcast financially. To join that team, click the button below:But it’s all good. The pod is free as it always has and always will be. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it every time there’s a new episode.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00 Hey there. Before we embark on a new episode, I get to tell you about our new sponsor, Dabble. I wrote my last book in a mad combination of Word and Scrivener and it worked fine. But putting the whole thing together in the end was hard. And I accidentally left a chapter out of a draft, confusing everyone. With Dabble the whole book is always just sitting there, already compiled and together as a unit, but still easy to navigate around in using chapters or scenes. It's magical, and I can't wait to make full use of it this time around. Give it a spin at dabblewriter.com and let us know what you think. Is it recording?Jess Lahey 0:38 Now it's recording. Go ahead. KJ Dell'Antonia 0:41 This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone and try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. Jess Lahey 0:45 Alright, let's start over. KJ Dell'Antonia 0:46 Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting, the podcast about writing all the things - fiction, nonfiction, memoir, essays, proposals, pitches. In short, as I say most nearly every week, this is the podcast about sitting down and getting your writing work done. I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of The Gift of Failure and the forthcoming Addiction Inoculation that'll be out in April 2021. And currently writing some stuff for The Washington Post and Air Mail. And yeah, I guess that's about it.Sarina Bowen 1:31 And I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of 35 romance novels. And I'm currently writing nothing and it is glorious.KJ Dell'Antonia 1:41 I'm KJ Dell'Antonia. I'm the author of How To Be a Happier Parent and the novel The Chicken Sisters, which is coming out this December look for it in bookstores near you if you can be in them and goodness knows I hope you can, but I'm not holding my breath. I am the former editor of The Motherlode Blog at the New York Times where I sometimes still contribute. And I write things for other places. But I am primarily now focused on fiction, kind of, mostly, more about that in a minute maybe. Jess Lahey 2:12 Speaking of being able to go into bookstores, I was able to go into one for the first time recently, they're limiting their customers. I went to the Phoenix Bookstore in Burlington, and I was able to browse and I had just forgotten how much I miss browsing and I found a couple of books and I was so excited to just sort of be able to look at the things and not online. It was very exciting. KJ Dell'Antonia 2:37 I have been really aching to do that and haven't done it since March, but I have a couple of possible abilities to do that in my immediate future I hope.Jess Lahey 2:50 I stayed in like the gardening section and the cooking section and just looked at all these books. I miss it. I miss it so much. Hold on, can we go back to what Sarina said about not working on anything right now like this is monumental because you're always working, Sarina, you're constantly working. Are you taking a break right now between projects?Sarina Bowen 3:15 I am. And it's partly because I'm just burnt out and need a break. And partly because I have a lot of promo and organizational stuff that could really eat an entire month. And I'm ahead for the first time in many months - ahead of publication schedule. KJ Dell'Antonia 3:34 Wow, that sounds glorious. Jess Lahey 3:36 That's really amazing. KJ, what are you doing?KJ Dell'Antonia 3:38 Well, my agent has just given me back some edits on what I hope will be my next novel. So I'm finishing those up and then we'll figure out where we are going from there. But I suspect that I will finish those edits up and then that will be sort of temporarily finished and then it is time to start something new. So I am wandering through the world thinking what's the next novel? Who's it about? And I'm spending a lot of time thinking things like well but wait the last two were about people and their mothers. I apparently can't stop with people and their mothers. And then I was like, Well, lots of authors can't stop with people and their mothers. Sarina Bowen 4:26 Well, we all had one or we missed having one, so that's a big theme. KJ Dell'Antonia 4:34 It is universal, but it's almost feels like it should be its own genre. And then I've been noodling a possible nonfiction thing. Just a little something about writing.Jess Lahey 4:57 That's really exciting. KJ Dell'Antonia 4:58 I've been having fun thinking about it.Jess Lahey 5:00 Yeah, I didn't expect to have many deadlines right now. But then stuff came up and I was asked to write some things. I'm working on two book reviews that will be due in the next couple months, two books that I never would have picked up on my own. So I'm learning a lot from both books and I can't say what they are. And then Tim and I are writing a piece together for a big national publication about going back to school in the age of COVID. And the problem with that it's going to be in print and so the word count has to be pretty on target. And the problem is this is such a big topic that even our outline at one point was longer than our final word count. Well and I just texted you guys about this before we started, but working in the same house together, Tim and I write together pretty well, but we normally do it in separate locations. And you know, no one's going to work, no one's going to school, and we just had the dumbest argument about absolutely nothing. And we just don't argue very much. And so I realized man, it is so time for someone to go work somewhere else because I can't take it anymore. KJ Dell'Antonia 6:26 I was on Instagram and a lovely writer whose name I have now forgotten, was showing her writing shed and it was as cute as anything and she was a New Englander. So it was clearly not only useful for part of the year but I just looked at it I thought that is amazing. Plus, if I had it, somebody else would have taken it over. Jess Lahey 6:46 You know who has a great one is Julie Lythcott-Haims. She does all of her interviews from there and she writes there and it's called like a yard pod. And it's absolutely beautiful. It's just stunning, it's filled with books, and it's bright and sunny, and it's behind her house, and no one goes in there really but her. It's pretty lovely.Sarina Bowen 7:05 That is living the dream.KJ Dell'Antonia 7:08 You'd think so, but I bet I wouldn't even use it. I tend to sit smack in the middle of everything. It's stupid, but I do. I don't use my office anymore because there's someone else in here. I mean I record in here, I don't know, I used to write in here.Jess Lahey 7:27 It does sound like this wonderful thing - I was at a house recently and they have a little glassed in studio overlooking Lake Champlain. And I thought about it and I'm like, it looks so beautiful, but you're right, I think I would just not spend a lot of time out there.Sarina Bowen 7:45 I would - take me!KJ Dell'Antonia 7:51 Alright, yard pod for Sarina. Jess Lahey 7:59 So we do kind of have a topic this week that we were playing around with because I read a book this week and submitted my finished-copy-edited-now-in-galley-form pages form book to some first readers and have been having some anxiety attacks this week. So we wanted to talk a little bit about when you reveal yourself through your writing. And Gift of Failure I revealed some of myself, but there's nothing embarrassing there really, there was nothing like too freaky in there. But this new book is very memoir-based, so much so that we actually talked about the possibility of coding it as a memoir as well. And it's really scary because it's about my substance abuse, my being an alcoholic, and about what I went through. And I read a book this week by Lacey Crawford called Notes On a Silencing and it's about her sexual assault at St. Paul School. And so I've just had on my brain a lot lately the idea of putting yourself out there in your books and how what a challenge that can be, and we want to come at this from a couple of different angles. And for me a lot of this came down to the fact that I handed my book The Addiction Inoculation, over to my parents. And it's right there in the flap copy that I come from a family where there's a lot of substance abuse. And I got one of those phone calls, I was very careful when I wrote it, but I got one of those phone calls from my parents saying, can we talk? And it turned out okay, but I had that like my heart in my stomach. I thought I was gonna throw up, I'm like I was so super careful about what I put in there. And I didn't tell anyone's story, but my own story. But, man, putting more of yourself in a book is extremely anxiety provoking. And we wanted to talk a little bit about that and how that happens, or doesn't happen, or what happens with fiction and that kind of stuff. So I was wondering if you guys had any thoughts on that.Sarina Bowen 10:14 I read a memoir recently-ish called Don't Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley. And the subtitle is Tales From an Allergic Life. So she is super allergic to many things, which is not exactly like a hot button family issue. It's not tales from being beaten in a cupboard, you know? But even the first line of her acknowledgment section says, 'There's no sentence more terrifying to two family members than I'm writing a memoir.' And I loved that. I loved that as the first line of her acknowledgments and, of course, her life experience growing up with this somewhat unique, but unfortunately not unique enough, problem of having anaphylactic shock all the time from being allergic to half the world did bleed into her family a little bit. And her ex boyfriend is in there, she had to deal with it even though it wasn't like a dark topic. So I had never realized that before until I read it in her acknowledgments.Jess Lahey 11:31 I guess I also think a lot about you know, Mary Karr, who wrote Lit about substance abuse in her family. And of course, she's written a whole bunch of stuff, and it's all deeply deeply personal memoir stuff. And she talks about the fact that she lets people read all of this stuff that she writes ahead of time, and that there's some veto power. Her mother apparently, you know, was like, 'Look, you live this, go for it. This is your experience.' But that's definitely not what a lot of relatives do. A lot of relatives, mine included, were worried, really worried and I even let them see my book proposal. And in the book proposal I did say that I was going to talk a little bit about my family, but in pretty general terms. There were some ground rules (or some agreements) that we made early on about how much I reveal that isn't my story to tell. And that's also been interesting. Early on, when I was doing interviews about the fact that I was writing this book and people would ask me about my history and I had to make it really clear that I am not free to tell other people's stories, I'm free to tell my stories. But where those stories overlap and how much my experience of someone else's story am I allowed to tell? I'm always really scared that I'm going to get that wrong. KJ Dell'Antonia 12:55 Sure, I mean, just to give an example that I will intentionally make completely not about any of us. Just say that you want to write about the reason that you're a trapeze artist. And for some reason your father is super, super sensitive about his experiences as a trapeze artist because his dad was a trapeze artist and he found that really a difficult way to grow up. But the fact that he's really upset about the whole trapeze artist thing because of his dad affects how he experiences or how he responds to you being a trapeze artist. And, you know, there you are. You sort of need to include your dad's experience of trapeze artists in your memoir because otherwise his crazy reluctance to permit you to swing wildly from the trapeze just doesn't make sense. I was just, I'll call it coaching. So I had a friend come to me with a couple of essays recently, and by essays, I mean really long, literary things, 15-20 pages and such. And frequently you get a phone call like that, and you sort of opened the document with trepidation, but these were amazing. And this is a friend with a really interesting story. And I said, 'Well, you know, it's just gonna be up to you to figure out how much of this you want to tell because I think you have a memoir here as well as this other stuff.' And she said, 'Oh, both my parents are dead.' And I was like, 'Well, then you're free.' Now, I wouldn't wish this upon anyone, and I do not want that day to come, but when it comes, yeah, you write anything you want. Jess Lahey 14:42 I thought about that a lot. There are certain stories that I would love to talk about, but I do talk specifically in my book about the fact that ignoring things, and hiding truths, and pretending like everything's fine when things aren't fine, was a very big part of my story. And so it's really scary - and for me one of the big things I talk about a lot in the book is that I am very honest about my personal life and my substance abuse because in my childhood no one was allowed to talk about it, in fact, we got in trouble for talking about it. So that was the thing that I was most scared of my parents reading and so once I realized they were okay with that, we were basically on okay ground. But it was also interesting because of the conversation I had with them was very much about my parents perception of a statement I made versus my perception of a statement I made and I was making it very generally and he was reading it very specifically. And once we talked about that, he was okay with it. But when we were disagreeing I'm like, well, crap, because this is now in galley version and have I now blown up a bomb in the middle of my family. And that stuff is so scary and yet it was so important to me to be as honest as possible. Because the very thing I'm trying to say in the book is that secrets and shame are what keep us sick. And so to not go there is counter to what I'm saying - about the need to get over our secrets and our shame. So it was it was a tricky situation, but one I felt was really important to to do justice to.Sarina Bowen 16:21 That's amazing.Jess Lahey 16:23 I want to know, Sarina, one thing - so whenever people talk to fiction authors, they often say you know how much of you is in your characters? And I've always thought about you know, there are certain fiction books I would love to write and I'm always worried someone's gonna think I'm projecting like my own stuff onto my characters and do you get any of that?Sarina Bowen 16:44 Yeah, but of course you have to separate what the people close to you think versus what strangers think. So with memoir, it's really important to your family existence that everybody you know is okay with your memoir. But in fiction, some misunderstanding just doesn't have the same weight. So I have most of a manuscript somewhere for a women's fiction that I haven't finished or published yet. And my mother read an early draft of it. And she said, 'I didn't know that you hated Hanover.' (which is the town where I live) And I said, 'Mom, I don't hate Hanover at all, but my character is not a fan.' And so writing what you know, can mean just using everything you see about a place to look at it from different angles, which is what I had done, and it wasn't my first book because of course, that kind of distance is hard to capture the first time you write a novel, but this one was a very confident view of living in this small town as a 40 something single woman who sees a lot. And I just was fascinated by the fact that she thought that I didn't like my town just from some things that this character observed about it. But a stranger wouldn't grab that and have as strong feelings about it. Probably. So when you're writing fiction, in one sense, you're handing over a chunk of your brain for the analysis of others, which is always a little uncomfortable, because there will be some things that you personally feel that just bleed in there and you can't help it. Like I hate pumpkin spice lattes and none of my characters are a fan either. Jess Lahey 18:48 Or certain kinds of beer, you're very clear on your beer preferences, too. Sarina Bowen 18:57 That's right. Nobody drinks Bud Light in my book or if they do that is not a good character, like that person is going to murder somebody. So if you read all 35 of my books, you can find some things about me that are like my personal preferences and blind spots, which is, of course, important to the national discussion of how people of color are treated in fiction and seen in fiction. But of course, that's true about every author, it's hard to get fully away from all of the things you believe and don't even realize you believe. But with a romance novel, though, you have this shield. So it's like, here's a piece of my brain, but it's also filtered through the expectations of romance readers everywhere, like the genre is expected to behave in a certain way and I follow those rules and so you get parts of me but not all of me because I'm trying to give you the experience that a romance reader is looking for. And so that's just easier than with memoir. It just happens less often. Jess Lahey 20:08 Well, I don't know because KJ likes chicken. KJ is from the Midwest, I'm thinking KJ wrote a memoir and she has a sister we don't know about.KJ Dell'Antonia 20:28 So I have a novel in a drawer. I haven't looked at it in many, many, many, many, many, many years. But I that one I know has much stronger autobiographical elements than The Chicken Sisters. The Chicken Sisters - it's kind of like what Sarina said, there are things in there that I have done, like encourage my children to use the car as an amusement park so that I could have a conversation with someone, both sisters share some thoughts with me, but I'd even be hard put to tell you which one. Yeah, I probably identify with one slightly more than the other. But I could go back to How To Be a Happier Parent and it's kind of like your first book, Jess. It's got things in it that are personal, that are stories, but it took so long to write and also because it's kind of geared towards parents of kids that are younger than mine are now. So I really tried to go back in time for the best stories. And I think actually in the end, my kids were disappointed by how little they were in it. They really expected it, like they opened it thinking now we're gonna find out what mom really thinks of us and it's just not the book that I wrote. But I will say that no matter what I write anywhere under any circumstances, my parents invariably call me up and say that never happened. Jess Lahey 22:24 It's funny because I thought about this recently because I talk with Sarina about the different kinds of romance books there are - like the second chance, and the friends to lovers kind of thing, and recently an ex-boyfriend of mine got divorced and so I started spooling through my head (even though I have no interest in dating this person, I'm very happily married) how a story might go if someone that was like a first love kind of thing got divorced and what if the person was single and was still interested? How would that romance novel go. And then I simultaneously realized, well, I can never write that book because there's no way I could convince my husband that on some level, I wasn't going there just a little bit in my brain. It's what fed the initial idea for a story, but it's not something that I actually want in my life. And that line would be really hard to convince the people close to you of, I think sometimes. The way you did with your mom, Sarina.KJ Dell'Antonia 23:32 I think that it would be okay in your third or fourth book, because I think that by then, the assumption that you were writing fiction would be so established. Like, I don't open up a Jen Weiner book and think, Well, clearly she's unhappy with her husband because this person's unhappy with her husband. Whereas if it were a debut novel, I might, I really probably don't because I don't think about it that way. But I feel like even your family's expectations are probably different at that point. But I too would hesitate to write like somebody struggling in an unhappy marriage. Although one of my characters is struggling in this book, but there are two characters and my husband has read it and he still seems pretty secure. I didn't get complaints. Jess Lahey 24:31 I could see how that would be really problematic, though, for an insecure partner.Sarina Bowen 24:35 Yeah, well, first, I must say it depends on if your partner reads your books, because I could write anything.Jess Lahey 24:44 Has he read any of them?Sarina Bowen 24:45 He read one. And, you know, I guess that was enough for him.KJ Dell'Antonia 24:50 Mine didn't read Happier Parent, but he wanted to read this one.Sarina Bowen 24:53 You mentioned Jennifer Wiener and she had a book called Mrs. Everything that came out last summer that is based on her mother's journey. Jess Lahey 24:53 Oh really?Sarina Bowen 24:53 Yeah. KJ Dell'Antonia 24:53 Is her mother still with us?Sarina Bowen 24:53 Yes. Actually I read this on Twitter. KJ Dell'Antonia 24:55 So you know it's true. If she tweeted it you do, I know, I'm just sorry.Sarina Bowen 25:06 Well she is terrific on Twitter.KJ Dell'Antonia 25:23 She is terrific on Twitter. She a reason to be on Twitter.Sarina Bowen 25:28 She is - seriously, she's a force of good on Twitter. And she told this quick story. The details aren't all there for me still, but that her mother went by herself to a bookstore discussion (like a book club night, and this was the book) and she went and participated and didn't tell anyone that she was that mother.KJ Dell'Antonia 25:48 Oh, that is really funny.Sarina Bowen 25:50 It is priceless. Jess Lahey 25:52 That is a very, very cool story. If you've read (KJ and I have, I'm assuming you have Sarina) there's a nonfiction book that she wrote a couple of years ago, she talks about her story, and her mom, and what they went through with her dad, and all of that. So that would be a really interesting story to explore. Well, the Lacey Crawford book that I was talking about, so much of this story that she tells exposes a lot of other people's stories, and I haven't had a chance to talk to her about it. I was gonna ask her about it, like how many of the names were different names? Did she change all of the names? Did she change some of the names? You know, it's really easy to figure out a lot of the details around some of the people unless she changed all those details and you know what class she graduated from from St. Paul's. I think you have to be really brave to do that. And I had a lot of thoughts after reading Notes On a Silencing. It's a fantastic book. We've DM'd a few times about some of the elements of the book because I was just so blown away by what an incredible job she did with this book, it's really, really good.Sarina Bowen 27:06 Well, I'm reading it this month. Last night I talked to my book club into choosing it.Jess Lahey 27:10 Oh, you did? Oh, good. I think you'll really like it. I think you'll really like it. It's definitely her story and the events of the past couple years with St. Paul's triggered sort of her going back into that story, sort of that idea of I thought I dealt with that, I thought I was okay with it, and then it re-emerged when people started suing St. Paul school recently. So it was another perspective. And because we live near there, it's something that's been in the news a lot for us. And so it was fascinating to read it from the perspective of someone who has gone through this with the school just you know, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever it was. So anyway, I think you'll really like it. She does a delightful job. And she had written a fiction book as well, the admissions book, KJ, I believe you read, right? KJ Dell'Antonia 27:58 Yes, yeah. I'd have to pull up the title of it, I don't remember. But I remember that it was very, very, very funny. And I liked it, it was about college essays. It was about someone who helped with college essays, and it was definitely a good read. So I'm not surprised this would be good. Jess Lahey 28:16 She's a delightful writer, really good writer.KJ Dell'Antonia 28:20 We've been just talking about all kinds of people who hop around genres. Writers worry that you can't, but I don't know, I think it's great. I definitely go to read the nonfiction of novelists that I like and will try the novel of a nonfiction writer that I like, so everyone else should totally do that, if you like my nonfiction. Jess Lahey 28:50 I've been doing this outline of this novel that I'm thinking about writing - a different one from the one that I thought I was going to write and I'm curious to see what my writing looks like in fiction because I just don't do it. So I don't have a sense for what my writing is going to look like when I'm telling a more creative story. It's going to be an adventure for me. And whether or not it ever ends up on a bookshelf anywhere, I'm really interested to see what my writing looks like in a different format, in a different genre, and a different sort of sense.Sarina Bowen 29:22 I can't wait. Jess Lahey 29:24 Yeah, I'm excited.KJ Dell'Antonia 29:25 So we've been talking a lot about what we've been reading. But let's get into the details of what we've really been reading this week after a small break. Listeners, you know we're about to get into what we've been reading, and we've been reading some good stuff. But have you ever thought about how those books get so good? Or maybe thought you could be a part of making an author's novel, memoir, or nonfiction as good as it could possibly be and get paid for the work. Author accelerator has a book coach training program that students describe as truly life changing. They dig into the mechanics, process, and emotion of coaching but they don't stop there. Their program also helps you turn coaching into a profitable business that fits into your life. Find out more at authoraccelerator.com.Jess Lahey 30:32 Well you guys know what I've been reading. I read the Lacey Crawford, I've been having to devour these nonfiction books for some nonfiction book reviews that I am writing. And I'm experiencing that thing when you (I haven't had this happen in a while because I don't belong to a book club) get assigned a book, I'm immediately less interested in it than something that I'm allowed to read just because I want to read it. It's sort of that like high school English class phenomenon that I'm always resisting or trying to push back against as a teacher. So I feel like a student in high school again, it's like, but I don't want to read it. I didn't pick this book. Sarina Bowen 31:26 I feel obligated to point out that you're probably getting paid for this. So you know, suck it up, Buttercup. Jess Lahey 31:31 Exactly. And it's so hard. I'm so grateful to be getting paid for any writing right now that believe me, I am thrilled as I can be about reading these delightful books.KJ Dell'Antonia 31:44 Well speaking of not wanting to read things, I have been reading I think I might have mentioned this, but it's probably in a future podcast because of the weird way that we've been recording lately. Sorry, behind the scenes glimpse everyone. Anyway, I've been reading Rodham By Curtis Sittenfeld, and I picked it up with excitement and read about the first 50 pages. Rodham is the story of what if Hillary never married Bill, basically. And I got really glommed down on is this real, how about this? How about this? Is this real? Did they really eat those donuts? And I just didn't know if I could keep going. But I went on Instagram and I was like, I'm reading this and I didn't really say that because it seemed sort of negative. But I was like, I'm getting really glommed down in the details. And everyone's like, just keep going, just keep going. So I did. And man, I'm glad I did because it is so good. And it is a tour de chutzpah that Curtis Sittenfeld managed to bring this thing off. I can't even imagine writing, I mean we were talking about sort of fictionalizing your own mother, but fictionalizing this totally famous person that we all admire and look up to. I'm just in awe of both the willingness to do that and also the way she pulled it off. Every detail. I mean, just everything drops so perfectly. It's really structured brilliantly. I just can't recommend it enough. Jess Lahey 33:22 I feel like we've gone on this journey with you. Because early on in a text, you're like, Oh, this is just not working for me, and then in another podcast you sort of hinted at the fact that it was turning and so now we're on the other side of that and I feel like we've gone on this journey with you. It's a little bit like I remember hearing Helen Mirren interviewed about playing the Queen or playing someone who's currently alive and how much more of a challenge that is than playing an imaginary person. I can't imagine having just saying yes, this is what I'm going to do next, I'm going to select a person that exists.KJ Dell'Antonia 34:07 Let me just say that if a dude had done this, and it was called McCain, he'd be winning prizes. And she should be. But I haven't seen it in a lot of places. And I think it's really well done. But I have another one, I have something else that I've been reading. I also just finished I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness from Austin Channing Brown. And that one was interesting, both because it's Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness and that is a perspective that I don't get enough of, but also because it was really about her experience in working within Christian church and within Christian centered organizations, which is also a world that I know nothing about. And I guess it also might sort of fall into that category of - I kind of hesitate, because my experience of Christian organizations is just not something I'm super interested in. So sometimes when you're reading along in a memoir and it skews off into a religion that is not something that is yours you kind of feel like, well, this isn't really for me because that stuff's not for me. But I obviously kept going with it because it had all this other great stuff in it. And I was glad, it was really interesting to experience both of those worlds that I am not a part of. If you're looking for something to read along those lines, and especially if you are a part of a lot of Christian organizations, I'll bet it would be really, really juicy from that perspective. I didn't have any real way of knowing like, Oh, is that really true? Do people really you know, behave that way or say those things or sort of pretend to be interested and then sort of step back? But anyway, I recommend. Jess Lahey 36:17 I will definitely put it on my list. I love hearing about books that you guys are loving. I get so many cool recommendations.Sarina Bowen 37:03 Well, yesterday I received via FedEx two pool floats that I bought because they're exactly like KJ's. And I plunked one of them right into the pool and I got in there with my paperback copy of Don't You Forget About Me by Mhairi McFarlane, which is marketed as a romance novel with a really cute illustrated cover but wow, she is terrific. The writing is fabulous. There's a little prologue section from high school that is so perfectly high school that I have chills. I read three chapters in my pool float feeling I figured out the secret to life, basically. And I can't wait to flop myself back in there later today and and keep going.Jess Lahey 37:58 When you put in Don't You Forget About Me of course Simple Minds comes up. I think I got a copy of that book in the mail. So I may just have to go downstairs and find it on my shelf. That's exciting.KJ Dell'Antonia 38:18 I have her first one. You might have her first one. This one's pretty recent. This one's just come out, right?Sarina Bowen 38:27 No, this is an earlier one.KJ Dell'Antonia 38:30 Okay. I don't think this is the one I have. Jess Lahey 38:33 It's funny because you remember when we were talking a bunch of episodes back about cover art and how a lot of you know like rom-coms/women's fiction are all with these drawings of people with ambiguous faces. I have found that I have a bunch of them in a wish list for audiobooks and I can't tell them apart. They are all just primary color people and especially the ones that have a dog, like a couple of them people have dogs and I think the trend for this sort of primary color faceless drawings of people may have gotten to the saturation point I think, because I'm starting to confuse them.Sarina Bowen 39:13 Well, it's not going away anytime soon because stock photography needed a big bad refresh before COVID and certainly hasn't improved from half a year of lockdown. So those illustrators, they have some job security right now, let me tell you.Jess Lahey 39:33 I will say that in terms of stock photography, you provide endless entertainment for some of the things that exist out there as stock photography, and moments when you say like, why would anyone ever need a picture of a man without a shirt on, and a seal holding a basket of apples? Alright, well I'm glad I got to talk about the whole feeling about the memoir stuff, because this makes me feel better. One of my favorite comments about writing memoir, and it comes from Abigail Thomas, and it's the one about you know, dig deep and be honest or don't bother. And I try to remember that as a mantra when I'm writing stuff that's highly personal, like this new book, The Addiction Inoculation. And I don't think I can do justice to that topic without being really personal, but boy it gets scary when it goes out in the world. You know that it's out there in the hands of people, not just like readers I admire, but people whose lives are part of the book as well. It's nerve racking. KJ Dell'Antonia 41:16 I've got a few things to say. If you're not in our Facebook group, come get into our Facebook group and let's have a convo about this one - who's feeling exposed and like what's going on. If you're doing memoir, if you've got fiction that makes people feel like it's about you, I will try to remember to throw up a conversation starter. If I don't somebody else do it and let's get in that #AmWriting Facebook group and do that.Jess Lahey 41:50 That's exactly what I was going to say too, because we actually put out some tax tips just recently. And that came from a question that came up in the #AmWriting Facebook group so it's a good place to be. Well, if you would like to get stuff like the tax tips, you can go ahead and sign up for our list over at Substack at the #AmWriting page.KJ Dell'Antonia 42:27 You can do that at amwritingpodcast.com. Okay, that sounds great. Go there, it'll send you to all the other stuff and I am working on getting all of our great top fives and minisodes into the regular website as opposed to the Substack website. Jess Lahey 42:46 Yep, I'm actually going to be recording as soon as we're done today. I'm going to be recording a new minisode to go out up on the website in a little bit. So there's all kinds of extra content that's up there. But until next week, everyone keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game. This episode of #AmWriting with Jess and KJ was produced by Andrew Parilla. Our music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and performed by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their services because everyone, even creatives should be paid. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Kari Lizer is best known for her work in television, as writer and co-executive producer of Will & Grace and the creator of The New Adventures of Old Christine. When her essays about parenting took the shape of a book, she found that her real life provided more than enough material for a comedic memoir. Aren’t You Forgetting Someone? has it all - chickens, Kate Middleton’s bangs, psychics, and the promise of happy endings. #AmReadingJess: Beach Read by Emily HenrySarina: The Worst Best Man by Mia SosaKari: Olive, Again by Elizabeth StroutSubscription links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the #MinisodeMonday that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, July 20th: How an Editor Considers an Essay. Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #BonusContent with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month. As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode. To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly #WritersTopFive email.This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwriting for details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00 Writers it's KJ here. Before we get to the interview, which is Jess and Sarina talking to the very funny Kari Lizer I wanted to share a little about our new sponsor, Dabble. I wrote my last book in a mad combination of Word and Scrivener and it worked fine. But putting the whole thing together in the end was hard and I accidentally left out a chapter of a draft confusing everyone. With dabble, the whole book is always just sitting there already compiled and together as a unit and easy to navigate around in as chapters or scenes. It is magical and it can't wait to make full use of it this time around. Give it a spin at dabblewriter.com and let us know what you think. Is it recording? Jess Lahey 0:43 Now it's recording. KJ Dell'Antonia 0:45 This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone trying to remember what I'm supposed to be doing.Jess Lahey 0:49 Alright, let's start over. KJ Dell'Antonia 0:51 Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.Jess Lahey 1:02 Hey, this is the #AmWriting podcast with Jess Lahey and Sarina Bowen, KJ is off this week. This is the podcast where we talk about all the things - all the writing things, the researching, the editing. I'm just about to start editing today, actually. So we'll probably slip in and mention of that - writing romance, writing fiction, writing nonfiction, writing all the things we love to talk about. And this is definitely the podcast though, first and foremost, about getting the writing done. I'm Jessica Lahey I'm the author of The Gift of Failure and the forthcoming The Addiction Inoculation that will be out next year, April 2021. And you can find my work at the Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other lovely places like Airmail recently, actually.Sarina Bowen 1:47 And I'm Sarina Bowen I'm the author of 35 romance novels. My most recent USA Today bestseller is called Sure Shot and you can find more about me at sarinabowen.com.Jess Lahey 1:59 So can I just say one thing? I was I was tooling around on Facebook looking for something and all of a sudden, I noticed that you dropped like an additional thing to Sure Shot. And I simply do not understand when you write all the things. I don't understand how you write all the things, you write everything and you write stuff that you don't even tell us about, and launch it out into the world and it makes my head spin.Sarina Bowen 2:22 Well, thank you, I think. Yes, I did have a couple chapter prequel that I put into an anthology that someone was putting together and it really wasn't the world's greatest accomplishment there, Jess, but thanks anyway.Jess Lahey 2:39 Alright, well, we have a guest this week, and I'm really, really excited about this guest because we have found out that number one, we have some things in common that we need to talk about, but also because this book almost made me late for this interview because I was having so much fun reading it, I couldn't put it down. It is so funny. Without further ado, I would like to introduce Kari Lizer. Her new book is called Aren't You Forgetting Someone?: Essays From My Midlife Revenge? And, okay, we've talked before about getting blurbs and this woman, this book, she's got some blurbs on this book. It's a very funny book. She is a former executive producer and writer for Will and Grace. And that's going to figure into a little tiny bit of the conversation today. But Kari, thank you so much for being on the show today.Kari Lizer 3:35 Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.Jess Lahey 3:37 Such a delightful book. And it's not just because a lot of the action happens in Vermont and Sarina has written an entire series that is a romance series based completely on a fictional small town in Vermont. There are chickens, there are lots of animals. And so we've got that angle going on, but we we also have the devotedly introverted sort of thing going on, obviously the writer thing going on as well. So we're just really excited to talk with you today. Kari Lizer 4:17 It's nice to have that in common. It's a specific thing for sure. Vermont people are a certain kind of people, I know that.Jess Lahey 4:27 We're reading this book at a really interesting time because most of the book is about just the thrill people get (people like us) tend to get when someone says something is canceled. And everything's canceled right now. So how are you doing? We're recording this at the beginning of June, on June 11. So we've all been on our own or at least in close proximity to very few other people. How are you doing?Kari Lizer 5:00 Well, I spent the first few months of this lockdown shut-in period in Los Angeles, which was very different than it feels here in Vermont. It was stranger there for sure. I had one of my kids home with me. And it was a little bit harder to navigate there. It wasn't that different lifestyle wise for me than my normal life though, because I do spend a lot of time at home. I'm an introvert, I write at home. I don't venture out unless I absolutely have to. But it did get strange and I did start to feel the walls closing in on me for sure. I mean, just the lack of outdoor space. I mean, because the trails were closed and the parks were closed. I have four dogs. Going outside with them, it just felt like we were just on top of each other a little bit. So made the decision to hop in a car and drive across the country with the four dogs and come to Vermont. Because there's more wide open spaces, so it's feeling a little bit like I've been released from prison a little bit. But, you know, there are other challenges here in terms of of being quarantined and you know, there's the 14 days here in Vermont that I have to isolate myself from other people and so, you know, it's challenging. Listen, I don't have it as bad as a lot of people have it, I have a lot to keep me occupied. And I can do my job here. I'm starting up a new TV show and I can do my writers room on Zoom. And it's just it's not that bad. I've had things to occupy me, so I'm pretty lucky as it goes, honestly.Jess Lahey 7:06 Well, actually the fact that we're in the middle of this. We're in the middle of a country protesting right now over George Floyd's death, there's so much going on that has rendered... In fact, a couple weeks ago, we recorded a podcast where we just felt like our hearts weren't in it. And one of the things you write really beautifully about in this book is being able to write when other things in your life are not necessarily going the way you would like. In fact, you mentioned in the book that you were writing for Will and Grace at the same time that you had a divorce and you had your sister's death going on. So that sort of stuck out for me because at a time right now when I could be super productive, I'm finding it really, really difficult to put my heart in my work and I would love to know how you worked through some of that?Kari Lizer 8:01 Well, I mean, I think it's easier when you have assignments, a television writer, I think it is a little bit easier under those circumstances because you have to, I mean, you have deadlines and those kind of things, I find it a little bit harder too under these circumstances, when I can write if I want to and I'm a lot less productive now. It was very strange that I left Los Angeles just as things were sort of bubbling up. And by the time I got here, the world had sort of exploded, I mean, I just left when COVID was happening. And then the protests hadn't really started yet. So I feel strangely isolated from all of that and it feels like things are happening so far away from me, so I feel very distracted by that too. I think it's certainly easier for me to write, obviously, when I have people waiting for things to come to them, you know. I mean, I'm a goody two shoes always, so I will always turn things in when people need them, but left to my own devices I can't always get it going either. I mean, sometimes it is hard to motivate myself I mean, I always have this fantasy that all I need is a cabin in the woods and then I'll sit and I'll churn out novels one after the other and I don't write a word. If I've ever rented a beach house or something with this romantic notion that I'm going to write things, not a word comes out of me at those kind of places, I need busy, I need chaos, I need something. The more that's going on the more I can't seem to write so... Jess Lahey 9:28 Yeah, I'm deadline oriented, too. And Sarina, you know, self publishes her work and she does so much of the work herself and she's so good about self imposed deadlines. There was a great quote Shonda Rhimes at one point said, 'Writing for television is like laying tracks while you're actually in the train.' Is that an experience that rings true for you?Kari Lizer 9:51 That's about right, yeah. There is an oncoming train at all times. It just feels like an impossible job and somehow it gets done. And I function really well under those circumstances. You know, the more pressure the better, from the book you can tell I when I had children underfoot, the younger the better, the more children the better. Throw a little cancer in there and then I I thrive. When I have less going on, and I have all the time in the world, and it's sort of leisurely, I can maybe write a chapter or two but I think I was sort of cut out for the television world because it is just writing under the most serious duress that you can imagine.Sarina Bowen 10:39 Can I ask - is Aren't You Forgetting Someone? your first thing that you wrote that was intended to be a book with two covers on it at a bookstore?Kari Lizer 10:49 It is and it didn't really start out that way. I took a little hiatus from television when my third kid went off to college, and I just I wanted to sort of do something different creatively. And I was part of this writers group because as we're talking about, I am deadline oriented and I found that I wasn't writing anything when I was left to my own devices. And so I found what was really helpful for me, was sitting around a table with other writers who were working on novels and essays and various kinds of writing. And I had to show up every week at this table. And it gave me a deadline of sorts that I wanted to show up with something. And so I started writing these essays not knowing what they were or where they were going to belong or just even I thought maybe it was a pilot, maybe it was a movie I just really didn't know I wasn't writing it for for anything except myself, except to have a different sort of creative experience. But I did do it in a group and that really helped me with that sort of accountability piece that I need to to keep myself moving forward. And then it just sort of piled up and and you know became this book but I didn't really know when I started what it was.Jess Lahey 12:12 Well and it wouldn't have been out of the ordinary for you if this had turned into a script because the New Adventures of Old Christine that you also wrote was based on your life, correct?Kari Lizer 12:23 Loosely, yeah. Sort of my fantasy of what my life might have been if I was better at my life, if I were Julia Louis-Dreyfus then yeah my life would look like that, but not quite. But yeah, loosely based on my divorce and those years after my divorce.Jess Lahey 12:42 Our listeners love to hear sort of the the nuts and bolts, like the nitty gritty stuff about the writing, and how the words get on the page. And so you've got this group that's helping you get deadlines done. You're getting some essays out there. What's the point for you where you realize that this is a book and not a movie or a pilot? Kari Lizer 13:01 Well, it was sort of at the encouragement of this group of people that I was with. Which I can't express enough how helpful that was to have feedback from a supportive group of people. For me, it was really valuable. Because I didn't know and I felt a little lost in it and I was insecure about it. It was just not a genre that I was used to writing and I didn't know, it felt embarrassing to me to write such personal stuff. It felt like I was writing my diary a little bit and it felt a little bit like who really cares about this stuff, and is it interesting, is it braggy, what is it exactly? And it was great to have that encouragement of other people saying, just keep writing, don't think about what people think about it, just keep moving forward, and don't stop down to think about the reaction to it. And that was really helpful to me and worry about what it is after the fact. And so when I looked at it, and then I was able to sort of put it together and it's like, oh, there is sort of a narrative here, there is sort of a theme. And I'm a huge fan of David Sedaris, for instance and I read a lot of essays, and I read a lot of comic essays in particular. And so I thought, Oh, well, that's sort of what this is seeming like and I got some outside people to say, 'Well, here's where there are holes in this narrative, and here's where you need to fill it in.' And I really took some advice from people who had some sort of objective eyes on it. And then I started sort of shaping it into a book as opposed to just a pile of what felt like diary entries. You know, I needed to sort of turn it into something that was more than just musings and try to tell a story with it.Jess Lahey 15:05 Alright, so this is a publishing industry, nitty gritty question. So our co-host, KJ Dell'Antonia, she and I have the same agent and our agent represents nonfiction she just doesn't really do fiction. So in order to sell KJ's novel she had to pair up with another agent in the same agency that does fiction. So my question to you is, if you have an agent who you know has been representing you for your work in Hollywood, do you need to go to a new person in order to sell a book or can you use your same agent in order to sell to a traditional publisher?Kari Lizer 15:40 Well, fortunately I had just gone to a new television agent in Los Angeles, but it was a giant conglomerate agency that has a lot of different arms. So I went to them and I sort of brought this pile of essays to them, and it was this conference room of suited men, you know. And basically, I felt like I was bringing them my uterus on a platter. And I was like, here I have this and I'm sure they were expecting me to bring them a television show because that's where I make the money. And that's where they make money. And I said, 'I have this and this is sort of what I'm really on fire about right now. Is there anything you can do with this?' And to their credit, they read it, they loved it. They said, 'Well, this isn't what we do. But our agency in New York, let's give it to the lead agency in New York, if they're interested, and they want to take it on great, and we'll give it our best shot. And so that worked out and the people in New York took it and gave me some advice about it. And when it went out the first time they sent it around and it didn't get picked up by anybody. And so then I took it back, and I worked on it some more, and I filled in what I thought were the sort of holes in it, and I realized it wasn't quite finished. And I kept writing and then I went out again with it same agents to their credit, they didn't give up on it. And then the next time around it found its home. So it was really a process.Jess Lahey 17:10 That's really tough, to send something out that's been out and then you're gonna work on it for a little bit and send it out again, that's kudos to your agents because that's an incredibly difficult thing to do and something that most agents are actually pretty reluctant to do. Kari Lizer 17:24 Yeah, I'm very grateful to them and for their sort of sustained belief in it because it was really a process and it was a business that I didn't know anything about. So I was completely in their hands and I had to trust them and just believe that it was gonna work out the way it was supposed to. So I think I was very lucky. And also in good hands with them that they kept the faith, honestly.Jess Lahey 17:57 So you haven't always identified as a writer, you identified for a long time as an actor and I have to ask about the line in your book about the psychic Teresa who felt the vibrations in your keychain. You say you became a writer because of Teresa feeling the vibration in your keychain. And I have to know more, like where is that story?Kari Lizer 18:24 Well I'll probably write that one someday I just was an actor from when I was a kid. I started when I was 11 going on commercial auditions, I lived pretty close to Los Angeles and my mother would drive me in and I started doing commercials and that was sort of it for me. I didn't go to college because I already knew what I wanted to be when I grew up and I just went directly into Hollywood. And I worked pretty consistently, I did television shows and pilots and I thought well this is worked out great and I made a living as an actress until I was about 30 years old and then it stopped. I mean, it came to a grinding halt in a way that was terrifying and then nothing, I mean just nothing and I slowly sold the house that I bought, the car, I mean just everything dried up, and I had nothing to fall back on. You know, as your parents tell you to have something to fall back on I had nothing, I had no skills. I couldn't even wait tables. I mean, when I lived in New York for two years, I got fired from every waitress job I ever had. I mean, I don't know how to do anything, honestly. And it was really scary. And I went to a psychic that somebody recommended and she said she had to hold on to my keychain. And she said that if I continued to be an actor, I would be moderately successful. But if I was a writer, I would be successful beyond my wildest dreams. I was so upset. First of all, it seemed like so much work, you know, it's just like, no, I don't want to be a writer that sounds horrible. But I thought, oh, okay, so you know, I didn't have any other choices. I mean, there was no other options. I was really in bad shape. I was dead broke. So I wrote, I was earning money at the time. My only skill was I could type, my only good subject in school was typing.Jess Lahey 20:25 That's such a good starting place for the whole writing thing. Kari Lizer 20:30 It is I mean, it's a great skill. And in fact, I was earning my rent at the time typing (because we were typing at the time) scripts for a friend of mine who was a writer. I was getting 50 cents a page to type his scripts up. And so I went home and I wrote a like a spec pilot and then I wrote a play, I just had to write a play. And I gave it to this friend of mine, who I was typing his scripts for, he liked it so much that he said, You know what, I'm going to put this up in a theater, I'm going to produce it and put it up in a theater. And we'll invite all the friends from showbiz that I know and all the ones that you know, and we'll see if we can get you a job I said, but I'm going to star it because what I really want is an acting job. And so I starred it, and he put it in theater, and I got offers to write, an agent came and said, 'I would like to represent you as a writer.' I didn't get a single acting offer, which is all I wanted, and it was devastating, but it started my writing career. Because of this person who believed in me, which is often how it starts, you know, somebody helps you out. And it was just crazy. You know, I had no business doing any of it. I didn't know if I could write I'd never tried to, but it was just pure desperation and then ultimately, just sort of dumb luck. And it just turned out. I think I'd absorbed enough. You know, I had read enough scripts, I acted in enough things, I think I had sort of absorbed structure and those kind of things by osmosis maybe a little bit. I don't know, who knew it could have turned out very differently, but I was very lucky.Sarina Bowen 22:14 Well, that's how most novelists start, right? Like they've read a whole lot of novels. And they've sort of absorbed it. But I have two questions for you. The first one is if you could just slip me that psychic's contact information.Kari Lizer 22:31 Yeah, I don't know what happened to her.Sarina Bowen 22:35 The second one is, so it's well documented in Aren't You Forgetting Someone that your grown children are never going to ask your opinion about anything important, but if they did, if one of your three ungrateful humans came today and said, 'Okay, Mom, I want to be a writer. Should I write a book or should I write for TV?' How would you handle that question? Because a lot of our listeners are thinking about all the different ways they are accomplishing the writing dream and what's your thought about that?Kari Lizer 23:13 Well, I don't think I would say one or the other. I think that writing is writing. And I think I don't think I found a big difference between writing this book and writing for television. I think the main thing that I brought to this book that I try to bring to television writing is telling my true stories, and I think that's when I have found success in both genres. So just trying to be authentic. So I would say, wherever that story seems to find its place. And honestly, I mean, I've had things that have started out as plays and it's like, oh, this isn't sort of finding its way as a play and it turns into a short story or it turns into something else. And I think sometimes not to know what it wants to be is okay, too. I mean, that's certainly my process a lot of times, that not sort of being too sure about what your endgame is, but sort of working your way through the process, and figuring out sort of what story it is you want to tell, and figuring out sort of what form it takes, and where you're going to end up later, like that's a question for later. But figure out what story you want to tell first I mean, for me that that works better. If I get all caught up in Oh, what network is it going to be on? Because I know a lot of people that do that in television, who would star in this or what network would it be on? If I start putting the cart before the horse I get completely blocked, then I can't think about the story or then things don't come to life for me anymore. I'm just not thinking about the right things anymore. I think I have to let the story the story speak first and then figure out those other details after the fact.Sarina Bowen 25:27 AwesomeJess Lahey 25:28 When I first started writing for a bigger audience, I remember my father read something that (you know, I started my writing, especially when I was a teacher on just this blog) and my father read something that was for suddenly for a bigger audience and he called me and he said, 'You know how much I love you. (and that's when you know something big is coming) I don't know who you're writing for all of a sudden, but it is not you.' And it was the best feedback I could have gotten because I suddenly had all these ideal readers clattering around in my head and like, how many comments am I gonna get. And it was one of the best bits of feedback I've ever gotten. Which is basically, just stop thinking about all those other people and continue to do for you. Which I have to say, before we get into the next thing I want to talk about really, really quickly one of the cool things about you and your writing - and I have to say also about Sarina because all three of us are very much people who like a lot of time by ourselves and a lot of quiet time and don't necessarily need to interact with other people all the time - and yet you and Sarina, your real gifts, at least in my opinion with Sarina, I don't want to speak for her obviously have to do with dialogue. And dialogue about connection. I mean, especially with Will and Grace, that entire show really was about the connection between these people and the action that happens and all of these inciting incidents and all that stuff, that's interesting. But what's really interesting about that show, it was the connection between the people and for Sarina, I mean, she writes romance, that's what this comes down to in the end. So I find it very interesting that two people who are perfectly happy spending a lot of time talking only to their animals or to inanimate objects in the room are so good at that interpersonal connection. I thought about the two of you a lot when I was reading this book.Sarina Bowen 27:30 Well, we don't dislike interpersonal connection. We just like it in small doses.Kari Lizer 27:37 Yes.Jess Lahey 27:40 Before we to start talking about what we've been reading, we need to take a quick break, and we will be right back.KJ Dell'Antonia 27:52 Before Jess, Sarina, and Kari tell you what they've been reading, let me ask you, what have you been writing? How's it coming along? We'd always love to hear about it in the #AmWriting Facebook group. But if you're stalled on your memoir, losing direction on your nonfiction project, or keep writing the beginning of your novel over and over again, maybe you should consider working with a book coach, you could get help with an outline, a draft, or the entire drafting process. And it could be just what you need to finally write the words the end, and actually mean them. Find out more at authoraccelerator.com.Jess Lahey 28:37 Alright, we can start talking about what we've been reading. Kari, do you have a book that you would like to talk about that you've been reading recently?Kari Lizer 28:45 Well, I just finished and it's not brand new, but I just finished Olive Again by Elizabeth Strout and I love those Olive Kitteridge books so much. I mean, I think I relate to that woman. I'm speaking of loners and cranky ladies. But yeah, so I just finished Olive Again and I thoroughly enjoyed it.Jess Lahey 29:08 I talk about her a lot as a person that I couldn't believe I was continuing to read because I hated her so much. In fact, we reread Olive Kittredge before we read Olive Again because I just love those books so much. Sarina, what have you been reading?Sarina Bowen 29:28 Well, most recently I've been reading Aren't You Forgetting Someone by Kari Lizer. But the night before I read a book by a romance author named Mia Sosa with the best title ever, ever, ever. And the title of this book is The Worst Best Man. And of course, there's a wedding cake on the cover with the bride pushing the best man off of the top of it and it's just the cutest thing ever.Jess Lahey 30:02 Yeah, I've needed cute lately. I'm still reading Ibram X. Kendi's How To Be An Antiracist and I find that I need to read that in short bits because it's really hard because I have to think about myself and what I can do to be better. And so on the polar opposite side I've been reading a bunch of sort of rom-com type of stuff and we texted quite a bit about (KJ and I especially) because we were reading at the same time about Emily Henry's Beach Read. Kari, I haven't read any other books like this, but it was really cute. It was a rom-com with two writers the romantic interest is by two writers and in two very different genres who sort of have this animosity/rivalry kind of thing and it was just adorable. And those books I've been doing as audio while I'm out tending my garden so I find myself laughing a lot in my garden which is good fun.Kari Lizer 31:16 Oh, that's a good idea. Yes.Jess Lahey 31:19 By the way, before we say goodbye I actually wanted to tell you that when you're reading Kari's wonderful book, Aren't You Forgetting Someone and you get to the part where it says that Martha Stewart taught her about b******s you need to understand that you've misread the word Maria as Martha. Kari Lizer 31:42 Wait, did I say that?Jess Lahey 31:46 I read it twice and I'm like, that can't be true. Oh I wish it was true. That would be a good story.That's the other fun thing about this book is there's so many juicy, there's obviously your psychic story, your John Edwards story and just a lot of really fun juicy stories in here and also as an animal hoarder, I really identify with your animal stuff. Thank you so much for giving us something to read that has been just been a way to retreat a little bit from the hard stuff because I think we need a balance of those things right now even when it's really important for us to face the hard stuff. It's also really important for us to have an escape to a place of laughter and comfort. And so I just I'm really grateful to you for that.Kari Lizer 32:52 Thank you. I am glad that it felt like that and and hope that hard stuff gets a little less hard shortly is my my wish.Jess Lahey 33:16 Alright. Well thank you everyone for joining us this week. And until next week, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game. This episode of #AmWriting with Jess and KJ was produced by Andrew Parilla. Our music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and performed by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their services because everyone, even creatives should be paid. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

We have trouble believing you haven’t already heard of our guest this week, Susan Wiggs, but just in case—she’s the author of many many novels, a multiple #1 New York Times bestseller and an overall amazing storyteller. Her current novel, The Lost and Found Bookshop, is on sale now and her most recent bestseller, The Oysterville Sewing Circle, is just out in paperback.We talk crafting a story, starting from the emotional journey versus the physical plot, building a character, choosing a setting and our collective addiction to writing books, and Susan reveals that she does indeed read fiction while she’s writing fiction—and it’s a good thing, too, because her reading list is long indeed. Links from the PodWriting the Blockbuster Novel by Albert ZuckermanThis American Life, Promised Land (the “I Wish” song episode)#AmReading (all Susan, and you’ll see why)Aging in Place by Aaron D MurphyBeing Mortal by Atul GawandeOn Ocean Boulevard by Mary Alice MonroeHouse Lessons by Erica BauermeisterUntamed by Glennon DoyleThe Splendid and the Vile by Erik LarsonSabrina and Corina by Kali Fajardo-AnstineThe Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins ReidThanks to everyone who supports the podcast financially. To join that team, click the button below:But it’s all good. The pod is free as it always has and always will be. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it every time there’s a new episode.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00 Hey, fellow writers this week we've got an outright amazing conversation with Susan Wiggs. Many, many times bestselling author of many, many novels, who really knows how to construct a story. And when getting the work done doesn't just take talent and dedication, but an understanding of the craft of creating a story. If you'd like to work with someone who understands that craft, head over to Author Accelerator and look into finding the right book coach for your work, or if craft is your jam, learn more about becoming a book coach yourself at authoraccelerator.com. Is it recording? Jess Lahey 0:36 Now it's recording.KJ Dell'Antonia 0:39 This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone and try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. Jess Lahey 0:43 Alright, let's start over. KJ Dell'Antonia 0:44 Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three. Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia. And this is #AmWriting. #AmWriting is the podcast, the weekly podcast, about writing all things, fiction, nonfiction, short things, long things, pitches, proposals, everything you have to write before anybody lets you write anything. And in short, this is the podcast about sitting down and getting that work done.Sarina Bowen 1:16 And this is Sarina Bowen. I'm the author of 35 romance novels. You can always find more about me at sarinabowen.com.KJ Dell'Antonia 1:26 And I am KJ Dell'Antonia, the author of the novel The Chicken Sisters, and also the book How to Be a Happier Parent, former editor of the New York Times' Motherlode blog, and still sometimes a contributor there. And we are so excited to welcome our guest this week. This is the first guest we've ever had that has rivaled Sarina in prolificness. We're so excited to welcome Susan Wiggs. She is the author of (I think I counted 37 but as soon as I let her talk, I'm gonna check) novels, multiple number one New York Times' bestseller and an overall amazing storyteller. When you pick up a Susan Wiggs book, you know that you're getting a fully built world and a story that's going to grab you and hold you tight and that you're going to be sorry when it lets you go. Her current novel is The Lost and Found Bookstore. And she's also got another novel just out in paperback - The Oysterville Sewing Circle. That one's just out right now. Am I right?Susan Wiggs 2:29 That's correct. It's just out in a paperback, the book club edition just came out.KJ Dell'Antonia 2:35 Ooh, cool. I love the whole book club edition and this edition.Susan Wiggs 2:41 I just love book clubs in general. So yeah, thank you so much for having me. This is such a thrill to talk to somebody who's not a fictional character.KJ Dell'Antonia 2:51 Yeah, we don't do much of that right now either. They're either fictional characters or they live in our house, that's all we got. So yeah, we are really excited - so, how many books is it before I even get started? Susan Wiggs 3:02 Oh, I knew you're gonna ask me that. And you know what? To be honest, I don't have a count. But I can tell you my first book was published in 1987. Huntington Zebra books, and I've published a book or two every year since. And so I've stopped doing the math. I just write my next book.KJ Dell'Antonia 3:27 But we will ask, you just because our listeners always want to know. How did you get started? Tell us how that first 1987 book happened, travel back in time with us.Susan Wiggs 3:40 You know what, you always remember your first time and I'll just leave it at that. I'll leave that to your imagination. But honestly, I was a young teacher just out of graduate school. I got myself through graduate school by reading really big, thick, romance novels, you know, the real bodice rippers all through the 80's. And so yeah, I had such a taste for them, and such an affection for them and a love for the form that I just wrote one. And I had no idea what I was doing. I wrote it on a typewriter. I didn't know about any writer's associations. I knew Writer's Digest, I was a subscriber to Writer's Digest, I always knew that I wanted to write and so I wrote a book called Texas Wildflower and I wrote it on a typewriter. It was this huge, unwieldy pile of pages. I was very proud of it, but I didn't know what to do with it. And so somehow, I wormed my way onto an editor's desk at Kensington Books, which had and probably still prints Zebra, Pinnacle, various ones like that and they're still up and going, and the editor's name was Wendy McCurdy, and she's still in the business. I believe she may be back at Kensington now. Anyway, she was delightful. You know, very young, probably as young as I was at the time, editor who called me up in the middle of a very busy life. I had a toddler, and dogs, and a house, and a teaching job. And I was very overwhelmed. And she called me in the middle of all that and said, 'We like your book, and we want to publish it.' And I was just floored. Yes, I was stunned. I didn't have an agent. And so I just said, 'Yes, where do I sign?' And so it's interesting that we would be talking about this right now because one of the things that I did because I didn't have a literary agent, I didn't really know how to negotiate any sort of contract. And one of the biggest blunders that I made that is turning out to be kind of a very funny and happy accident was I gave them the copyright back then. And I think now copyrights revert to the author if the book is out of print and unavailable for, I believe, three to five years. And I think I signed my name to something to say it was out of print and unavailable, but they had 16 years to reprint it. And in those 16 years, my books became rather popular. And so they never wanted to revert the rights to me because I would always say the book's not out, it's very old, don't you want to revert the rights to me? Because that way, the author controls his rights and creative control over that property and you know, you can resell it and things like that, but no, they kept hanging on to it. And so I'm sitting here, it is 2020 and I'm looking at a royalty check dated May 26, 2020 for that book, for Texas Wildflower that was first published in April 1987. Because they keep reissuing it, they still have it in print, they reissued it numerous times in different packaging. And as my books have evolved, the very original cover (you can probably find it on my website susanwiggs.com) was a very, very in your face bodice ripper cover. I just loved it, I thought was really cool. But as my books have become more mainstream and evolved into general fiction, or mainstream fiction, the covers look very upmarket now and rather sophisticated. It's basically the same book - at one point I did go in and do some light editorial work, and, you know, cringing the whole time because obviously after you know, 50 something books, I'm not that same writer that wrote Texas Wildflower - and so I had some rookie moments in that book, many of them, and yet readers still, they're drawn to something about that book. So, you know, it's still in print. So thank you, Kensington Books for keeping me alive on your list.KJ Dell'Antonia 5:40 That's a great story. And I love that it is still out there. And the cover thing is really funny because we have talked to a lot of authors and we've seen that same evolution many times. And I know Sarina and I are both really fascinated by cover art and why publishers and authors pick one style over the other and the new trend towards the sort of drawings instead of actual pictures of people.Susan Wiggs 8:48 All authors are obsessed with cover art. You know, even before I was published, I was designing the cover in my head, and I'm terrible at it, but I'm always gratified when I see the way that my books go out into the market because usually it's spot on, there have been some turkeys in my repertoire - no fault of mine or the publisher, sometimes they just don't turn out well, but the new book, The Lost and Found Bookshop, did you guys get a copy of it? Or the advanced reading copies? KJ Dell'Antonia 9:23 Yes, and I really, really love it. But do you know what, my copy doesn't have a cover. So I haven't seen it.Sarina Bowen 9:32 It's beautiful, though. I love the cover. Susan Wiggs 9:35 Well, the journey - that cover went through so many iterations. And the reason is that they try to build and this is a really great thing about publishers, if they're committed to an author, they really try to build you as a brand. And so you don't want each cover to be so unique that it doesn't even look like it could be by the same author. And so I had a rather good hit with The Oysterville Sewing Circle last year, and one of the big pieces and one reason that that book really struck a chord was it had an incredibly striking cover. It was like stark white with this blood red spool of thread on the front with a sharp pin sticking through it. And they wanted to build on that. But I wrote about a bookshop, so there's no sharp needles or anything. And so we really struggled with what this new book should look like so that it kind of accesses the spirit of the previous book, but also is inviting and beautiful enough to attract new readers as well. So I hope this cover does it. It hasn't hit the shelves yet, so I guess we'll see.Sarina Bowen 10:43 It's very beautiful.KJ Dell'Antonia 10:45 Yeah, I agree. And I can see how it looks with The Oysterville Sewing Circle, I've just pulled it up. Sarina Bowen 10:52 It's a lovely analogy to that other book but I also noticed that your that Oysterville has a new cover, too. Which is also very beautiful, and sometimes publishers do that. If they don't like a cover, but sometimes they do it just to catch the eye of people who didn't grab it the first time.Susan Wiggs 11:12 Yes, there's been three iterations of the Oysterville cover. The first one with a big spool of thread was the hardcover. And then there was a mass market paperback that came out in January. And because of the timer in the pandemic time, it was widely available only in essential markets like Walmart, the places that could stay open during the pandemic. And so it sold like wildfire. In March, it was the number four New York Times' paperback. And so there was this little paperback edition of it and then they decided for this summer to do a premium paperback, they're called trade size paperback, and it's a bigger edition and they add extra content in the back. I think there's a reading group guide, and article, and a recipe, and some other materials back there to give reading groups something to chew on. And then they decided, let's use a new image on this cover and the one that they did on that edition was actually a rejected hardcover look, you know, they they tried several looks, and they knew it was a pretty look, but they wanted to go out in trade paperback with that one. So no effort is ever wasted. That's what I am finding out. Yeah, my agent calls it four bites at the apple because the fourth bite is the audio book. And audio books are quite a big category these days and there was a slump during pandemic but as things are opening and people are going back to work and commuting again, there's an upturn in audio sales.Sarina Bowen 12:12 Mm hmm. Yes, I definitely felt that audio slump in April.KJ Dell'Antonia 13:04 I want to say, You have so many books under your belt and you were talking about how that first one is very, very different from the writer that you are now and we wanted to talk about how you go about now, structuring a new story. Because your stories are so - I've only read your later stuff, so I didn't read the earlier stuff. Your stories now are so tight, and they really don't have a lot of extraneous stuff, and I really would love to hear where you start from and I guess we'll start with that. Where do you start when you're looking to start a new book?Susan Wiggs 13:54 That's one of those things that probably didn't change a lot from the very beginning. What inspires us, you know, something has to grab you, and it's almost visceral. And for example, in The Lost and Found Bookshop, it was a very stark moment that I had. I was speaking with some elderly people that lived at my mother's assisted living place, and I'm in charge of my mom's elder care, she now lives with me. And so I do a lot of speaking with groups like that. And one question that I love to ask older people is, what if you got to have a do over, you know, what if you got to make a different decision in your life? And so, somebody said something like, 'I would have been a meteorologist, but women weren't allowed to do that back then.' And I thought, wow, you know, I want to write about somebody who does get that opportunity. You know, she does get to walk away from her very steady, predictable, corporate job and life. Unfortunately, what drives her to that point is very tragic, but she does get there. And suddenly she gets to make a new blueprint for her life. And so I was very inspired by that. And I realized that with every book, even from that very, very first one, it's a moment of profound change in a character's life, whether it's a decision that she has to make or some situation that's forced on her. And so I'm most fascinated by that. And it's always, you know, my characters, there's a lot of variety. They come from all walks of life, but she's usually the smartest person in the book, but she doesn't know it. That's the one thing I would say they have in common, but from there, the process has become not a routine for me, but definitely a journey that has familiar signposts, you know, I have to know my character and I get to know her in ways that come to me subconsciously or I consciously research her world. I build her world around her, what did she do? What does she fear? What was her family of origin? Like that's huge for me, because I believe that people, as adults are the sum of their family of origin, good, bad, indifferent, or usually a mixture of everything. And I sort of build the character, psychologically and physically, that way. And at that point, I kind of have a sketch. It's usually written down in sketchy notes, and then I figure out what does she want, what is her utmost desire? And I try to figure out what that is and then find ways for her to not be able to have that. I know, it's kind of mean, but that's where the story comes from. Because people read for the struggle, I do, you know, somebody wants something, you know, Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas or Luke Skywalker wants to destroy the Death Star. Whatever, the main character has to want something that is profoundly important to them. Whether it's you know, to revive a failing bookstore and look after her elderly granddad, or to create a women's support group for domestic violence survivors, which is The Oysterville Sewing Circle. There has to be a really powerful want that I believe I relate to and readers might relate to and once I have that, I'm off to the races. I sort of pick the setting, and I populate her world, and I create a plot, and I write an outline. And I say outline, it's really just a 5-10 page present-tense narrative that I then pitch to my literary agent and my editor, sometimes separately, sometimes, simultaneously and they usually have some feedback for me. I have a writing group that I meet with regularly here on the West Coast up in Puget Sound, which is where I'm broadcasting from. And through that process, I get a roadmap for my book and then I kind of disappear with my pen and paper for about six months and I do write with pen and paper it's kind of old school but it keeps the distractions at bay while I'm drafting the story.KJ Dell'Antonia 18:41 Wow, I want to come back to drafting with pen and paper. But Sarina and I often talk about (I'm only on like novel number two in terms of anything I'm going to try to sell) but...Susan Wiggs 18:53 Then you are light years ahead of 99% of everybody else, believe me.KJ Dell'Antonia 18:58 And I don't discount my treatment I'm super excited, my debut is coming out this summer, everything is going great. And I'm just literally, like, painful minutes away from giving the draft of the second book to my agent so we can figure out if maybe we can go out with it before the first one comes out. Susan Wiggs 19:23 You know, every writer is convinced that all the other writers have the answer. And we always want to pick each other's brain.KJ Dell'Antonia 19:29 Yes, it's easier for everyone else. Susan Wiggs 19:30 I want to hear how everybody else does it because I'm doing something wrong because I'm so stuck right now.KJ Dell'Antonia 19:36 Well, we often talk about whether you start from the emotional story or the plot story and it sounds like for you, it's almost always the emotional story.Susan Wiggs 19:46 Yes, because I have to have some sort of connection. Otherwise, I'm just writing a work report. And there's also something that really resonated with me, it was on that one of the very first podcasts of history This American Life, probably familiar with it, with Ira Glass. I don't remember the the specific episode but he talked about something called the wish song that appears in every Disney animated musical. The main character looks out at the landscape whether it's in the little French town for Beauty and the Beast or in the wishing well for Snow White or whatever and they sing a song, and the song expresses their wish. And so I don't give my character a wish song but I look for that deeply held emotional and sentimental desire, you know, the yearning that the characters expresses. And when you build the story around the character, then her emotional journey is really the plot. She has to do something she has to be in a world in a situation but her emotional journey is really where I go to get my deepest pieces of the story.KJ Dell'Antonia 21:39 And then when you're trying to take that emotional journey and marry it to a physical journey. Do you generally know where you're going from the beginning? Is it hard to figure out what physical journey will best tell that emotional story? I'm sure you're really good at by now...Susan Wiggs 22:00 Well i don't know but I do know that it's the fun part for me because I love to explore different settings. There are some writers who go back to the same setting again and again and it really works for them and they get known for being a writer of a certain region or something like that. For me, I love to travel and I'm such a fan of world travel. So I love to find what will bring out the deepest aspects of this character. Is it a city, is it a beach, is a lake, is it somewhere out in the countryside? What time period is it and so I have all these different explorations that I do where I find the perfect pairing. Because some of my stories, like The Oysterville Sewing Circle, it could take place anywhere in the world. It's a woman on a career path, who has a big complicated life situation, and she ends up forming a group for domestic violence survivors, but I ended up setting it in the most remote town in the most remote piece of beach on the Washington coast called Oysterville, because I felt like that was a metaphor for you know, this woman going out on a limb. And on the other hand, The Lost and Found Bookshop, I wanted a bookshop on like the cutest vintage street in San Francisco. Usually my setting is a place that I would love to be, a place I would love to visit. Some of my favorite books are books that make me want to go there, want to be there. So I've got a stack on my desk right now - I've got Ocean Boulevard, and there's a beach picture, and I've got hello summer, and there's another beach. We've got a theme going here. So the setting is something that I hope will play up aspects of the story and character in a metaphorical way. And so that's one of the things and then the other thing that I love playing with is, as a writer, we get to live so many different lives, we get to have so many different jobs. And so every main character I've ever written has a job that I fantasize about. She's a photographer, she's a dancer, she's a writer. Well, I don't fantasize about that, I know the grim reality of that, but I've always wanted to be a bookseller. And so The Lost and Found Bookshop was gratifying for me to write about that. But we're very lucky because we get to experience these things vicariously through our research and through the people that we write about. So it keeps it very exciting and fresh. We don't go back to the same job day in and day out.Sarina Bowen 25:08 Right. And a bookseller is an interesting observer of humanity in terms of who comes in to look at what. That's a really durable archetype, which is amazing.KJ Dell'Antonia 25:24 Hey, listeners, KJ here, before Susan tells you what she's been reading, let me tell you, that's a lot. Let's talk about what you're writing, or rather where you're writing, Sarina and I have been loving our new Dabble Writer software. I've already raved about how intuitive it is, and how much we love the plotting tool. But since this episode is about beach reads, and I hope you're finding a way to indulge in a summer getaway, I want to tell you that another cool feature of dabble is that you can use it anywhere and on any device. Online, offline, PC, Mac, Chromebook, Mobile, they all work and they're always synched up. So the edits you jotted into your phone yesterday are right there on your desktop today. We really think you'll like it and we'd love to hear what you think. So check it out with a free trial at dabblewriter.com and then get in touch.Sarina Bowen 26:25 But I wanted to take you back a second to the Disney wish song because that was really interesting to me. I'm actually not a big Disney watcher, as my kids are a little older now but, I hadn't really realized that before. And I love that you start from the character's wish. I find when I start, and I'm wondering how you get past this, but sometimes does that wish feel a little bit thin to you until you really dig in. It's like the chicken and an egg of character conflict.Susan Wiggs 27:03 Absolutely, totally. And I'm always so envious when I open a book, and the character has this life or death problem or situation, because my books are really personal and they're kind of intimate and they're very much about a woman's desires in her everyday life and she's not out saving the world or vanquishing bad guys or something like that. And so my stories - until I really dig into them - feel a little every day, a little mundane. And so I'm very sensitive about that and it possibly makes me work harder, all the harder on the aspects that are really going to bring the story to life for the reader and really going to get the reader involved and behind the character. And with The Lost and Found Bookshop, one of the things that the publisher did is they sent out a lot of advance reading copies to working booksellers, or actually furloughed booksellers because of the time that we're in, and the feedback that they got was so extraordinary that they ended up making a deck of quote cards with feedback from these booksellers. And it was really extraordinary to see how they experienced this book and what their feedback was. And so even though it was a woman who doesn't consider herself anything special, she was really special to these readers. So I'm really hopeful that when the book goes out into the world and is not my baby anymore, the readers will relate to that.Sarina Bowen 28:51 That's wonderful. And as you point out, those of us who write emotional journeys, you know, some days doesn't it seem super tempting to just kidnap your heroine on the first page?Susan Wiggs 29:02 Yeah, it does really and you know, have her like swept away by pirates or something just to get the action going, when instead she's got to give a presentation at work and it sucks and, you know, something like that. Actually, that's interesting that you brought that up because my original opening scene of The Lost and Found Bookshop was pretty much exactly that. She had a work situation at her corporate job and it does not go well. And it's very important to her. But I was concerned that the readers might not hook right into her because she's a little challenged by the situation and she's not a warm, fuzzy person in that moment. And that's a little risky to do, because you want your reader to like your protagonist right from the start. And so, I was apprehensive about doing that. So what I did is I added and this is something I sometimes do, I sometimes don't, I added a prologue. And the prologue put her in the most emotionally stressful situation I could find for her at that moment, so there's like just a one page prologue, it's really quick, but it's like, everything that I wanted the reader to know about this character, so that when they turn the page, and there she is in her work meeting, and she's sweating and nervous and that sort of thing, they can relate to her in a different way. So that was actually a writing craft moves that I made, you know, a lot of writing is inspiration and it's art and it's talent. But a good other segment of it is just knowing how to manipulate your craft and steer your craft towards the best experience for the reader.Sarina Bowen 30:59 It's been Powerful to realize at some point in your development as an author that you have got the spotlight in two hands and you can point it wherever you want.Susan Wiggs 31:10 It is and hopefully we know what to do with that spotlight. That's generally what revisions are for, right?KJ Dell'Antonia 31:19 Yeah. I sometimes find myself just thinking, I don't know, it felt kind of like this last time and it kind of worked last time. So I'm just hoping it's working now.Susan Wiggs 31:32 Yes. And it's hard when you're deep in the weeds of your draft of your novel, it's really, really hard to have the perspective that ultimately the reader is going to have and sometimes you just have to forge ahead on faith. KJ Dell'Antonia 31:48 So when you are lost in those weeds do you find yourself going back to that 5-10 page narrative that you mentioned at the beginning? Susan Wiggs 31:56 Um, no, what I usually do is go pull weeds in my garden or hike with the dogs or something, and try to walk away from it for a bit. And then I also do more research, a lot of times I'm stuck at a spot in the book, and I just need to read more about the situation, you know, whether it's more articles about elder care or more articles about this Spanish American War, which has a very weird, kind of interesting little spotlight in the book. So sometimes I just do more research. There's a very good book, there's so many good writing books, but one of them that was quite instructive to me a million years ago, it was called Writing the Blockbuster Novel by Al Zuckerman. He was (maybe still is) a big agent in New York, and he was Ken Follett's agent and he talks about when you get blocked the first thing you should do is go back and do more research into your setting, and your situation, and into the character's job. And I don't know that that resolves it every time for me, but it's very helpful.KJ Dell'Antonia 33:11 I love books like that. I love books that at least just tell me something to do when I'm stuck, anything, just just give me something I can get my fingers into.Susan Wiggs 33:24 Yeah, I'm a writing book junkie. I have probably 16 linear feet of books on writing and I have my favorites but there's always something that I can glean from most of these. I don't always work through them cover to cover but I love browsing through them, that's always inspiring to me as well.KJ Dell'Antonia 33:48 I love hearing that because I am so there. I love stuff like Save the Cat Writes a Novel and Write Your novel in 90 days and it doesn't have to be great. I don't know, I like dipping out and finding a roadmap from time to time, I think.Susan Wiggs 34:06 Yeah. It goes back to writers being convinced that every other writer has a secret and they're hiding it from us. KJ Dell'Antonia 34:14 I do have the secrets to how other people can write them that turn out to be the problem. Well, this is a great time to shift into talking about what we have been reading. In every episode, we like to just shout out something that we've been enjoying lately. And so I hope you've had some time to read and have something in mind that's been keeping you entertained when you're not writing right now?Susan Wiggs 34:46 Absolutely. I'm always reading and I've always got a couple of books going - one on the nightstand and one in the living room and one wherever I happen to be. And right now some of my books reflect where I am in my life. I think I mentioned that my mom has moved here, she's 90, she's a bit high maintenance right now. So I'm reading. Let's see, I've got a stack here. I'm reading Aging in Place by Aaron D. Murphy. Not very interesting, except when you need it. But the other one that I just love, and I've read it before, but I'm rereading Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. Medicine and What Matters in the End. And then for light hearted reading, I have the new Mary Kay Andrews, Hello, Summer, was just published. And a good friend of mine, Mary Alice Monroe has a new book out called On Ocean Boulevard. And it's like the ultimate summer read. It looks like I haven't started it yet, but I'm looking forward to that one. I have a book here that is a memoir. Because one of the things that my husband does, he does a lot of things, he's a designer, but one thing that he's been doing is he's been renovating old houses. And he's not really a flipper because he renovates them beautifully and then sells them or rents them. But anyway, I'm very preoccupied with old houses these days. So I found this book House Lessons by Erica Baumeister, who's written some of my favorite books. She wrote a book called The School of Essential Ingredients that I loved. And this is a memoir of restoring an old house called House Lessons: Renovating a Life.Sarina Bowen 36:58 And then for my birthday my husband got me Untamed by Glennon Doyle, amazing, amazing memoir about a woman's very extraordinary journey.KJ Dell'Antonia 37:15 I'm in the middle of that one might now myself.Sarina Bowen 37:18 She's a wonderful writer and then I bought well because Father's Day is coming up and and Jerry is not my father, but his sons are probably going to forget. So I bought him the new Eric Larsen, The Splendid and the Vile, which is a history of Churchill during World War Two. And I just love Eric's books and Eric's a good friend of mine and so I tease him I say that he's everybody's father's favorite writer. You could always count on somebody's dad liking an Eric Larson book, just like you can always count on somebody's mom liking a Susan Wiggs book. And then two more on my nightstand. This one is a collection of stories called Sabrina and Kareena, there was a there's a lot of controversy about a big book that was out earlier this year called American Dirt. And it focused some attention on Latino writers or Latin ex-writers. And so I decided that I did not have enough on my shelf and so a bookseller recommended Sabrina and Kareena by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. But it won the National Book Award and the stories are just lovely. I love them. And then finally, I just started this morning over coffee The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid and If you haven't heard of her, you will soon because her book, which was called Daisy Jones and The Six is about to be a very big series on, I think Amazon Prime, or maybe Netflix, and quite, quite the big hit. And I adored that book as well. So I know I'm gonna like this new one. And you wonder with all these books that I'm reading, do I have time to write? No, I don't. Do I have a deadline? Yes, I do.KJ Dell'Antonia 39:26 We fully understand.Sarina Bowen 39:29 But you know what, reading books keeps the craft alive. As a writer, you read a book differently than just a reader. And I say just a reader with a lot of respect, but it's kind of like my husband's an apparel designer. And he can look at any garment and see what it took to make that garment and he knows a lot of technical things about it that the casual person wouldn't even know and I think the same can be said, of writing and it is a little harder for me and probably you guys to, to really get into a book. Just because we're also noticing things that are not supposed to be noticeable.KJ Dell'Antonia 40:14 Every so often I'll be like, Oh, I bet that was a major subplot at some point, there's a reason that that dog is a German Shepherd or whatever, you know, and but now there's not and you can go in and out of that mode, right? Well, so it I think rather than say anything that I'm reading, just because we have a great list here, I'm gonna just ask you one last question, which is - do you read fiction while you're writing it?Susan Wiggs 40:49 Always? Yes, I do.KJ Dell'Antonia 40:52 We do, too! So many people don't - or say they don't. Susan Wiggs 40:56 Um, I would probably go through withdrawal symptoms if I couldn't read fiction, and so for some reason, it's not a problem for me personally to distinguish what I'm writing from what I'm reading. And you know that I don't know if that's true for everybody. But it doesn't seem to be a problem for me. Maybe it's telling that one of my first things that I remember writing for publication was when I was in seventh grade, they decided to publish a book report that I had written in the newspaper because I was supposed to do a book report on Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. And I was so destroyed by the ending of that book that I rewrote the whole ending of the book, and that was my book report. So my seventh grade teacher thought that it was interesting enough that you know, she published it in the newspaper. So that was one of my first publishing credits. I was rewriting John Steinbeck. So, I don't know maybe you need maybe you need that level of arrogance to kind of push your way into publishing.KJ Dell'Antonia 42:06 I think that you predicted your own future. Well, we have to respect your time but we are so grateful that you came and did this. I think this was a fantastic conversation about writing. I enjoyed it so much. Thank you.Susan Wiggs 42:21 Thank you so much. I'd love talking shop with you guys. You're amazing.KJ Dell'Antonia 42:25 It's great. So for our listeners, you're definitely going to want to look for The Lost and Found Bookshop and also maybe take a look at The Oysterville Sewing Circle. So, Sarina you want to take us out with our with our always final saying?Sarina Bowen 42:56 Until next week everyone, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game. This episode of #AmWriting with Jess and KJ was produced by Andrew Parilla. Our music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and performed by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their services because everyone, even creatives should be paid. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

This episode springs from a question asked in the #AmWriting Facebook group (if you’re not in it, you should be): Sarina has talked about her decision to be independently published, but we’ve never heard from Jess and KJ about why they go the traditional route.We discuss the three things you should think about when making the Indie/Traditional call, why you need to think hard about airport bookstores and finding the print ratio—and the good and bad reasons for making this choice.#AmReading Sarina: Boyfriend Material by Alexis HallKJ: The Exit Strategy by Lainey CameronJess: The Mountains Wild by Sarah Stewart Taylor(listen to the #AmWriting episode with Sarah here)As we say every week—we’re so proud to be sponsored by Author Accelerator and Dabble. If you’re wondering—why Dabble and not Scrivener? For us, it’s that plotting tool and the intuitive way it works, but others have weighed in—check that out here with a little Dabble v. Scrivener scoop.And if listening to all of our conversations about book coaching has made you think, hey—that’s the career for me—then you’ll want to head to Author Accelerator’s BookCoaches.com to see how you can make that happen. Here’s what we don’t always say: Man we love recording the podcast. But every hour spent on it is an hour not writing! Our production costs are now covered by our lovely (and carefully chosen) sponsors, but our time in pulling it all together is supported by you, our listeners. We’d love it if you joined that team (if you’re not already on it!) Supporters get weekly #WriterTopFives like The Top Five (Free) Ways to Get Your Shiny New Book Cover in Front of People’s Eyeballs or #Minisodes like Don't Make the Same Mistakes Twice—and thanks to the magic of substack, those minisodes drop right into your pod-player once you’re set up. Want in? Click the button. KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00 Writers, it's KJ. The #AmWriting podcast is excited to tell you about our new sponsor, Dabble Writing software. We invited Dabble to join the #AmWriting team because we are in love with the plotting tools and intuitive interface. And I want to tell you something else I love about it, what they call the focus fade. I barely even noticed when it first started to happen, but any details that are open in the sidebars of your Dabble document fade away automatically as you write, leaving you with nothing but a beautiful clear space to work in until you need them and send your cursor in that direction, then they're back in a flash. It makes for a great distraction-free writing environment. Find out more and do a free trial at dabblewriter.com. Is it recording?Jess Lahey 0:47 Now it's recording.KJ Dell'Antonia 0:50 This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone trying to remember what I'm supposed to be doing.Jess Lahey 0:54 Alright, let's start over.KJ Dell'Antonia 0:55 Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia. And this is #AmWriting. #AmWriting is the podcast about writing all the things, fiction, nonfiction, books, essays, pitches, proposals long form, short form. In short, this is the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done.Jess Lahey 1:25 Hi, I'm Jess Lahey, and I am the author of The Gift of Failure and the upcoming The Addiction Inoculation, which will be out in April of 2021. And you can find my work in lots of places, including the Atlantic, The New York Times, and Washington Post. Sarina Bowen 1:39 And I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of 35 romance novels. You can always find my work at sarinabowen.com or wherever e-books are sold. KJ Dell'Antonia 1:52 I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I'm the author of the novel, The Chicken Sisters, which you heard it here first is now not coming out until December at the earliest. But that's okay. Really, totally fine, whatever. I'm also the author of How to Be a Happier Parent, the former editor of the New York Times' Motherlode blog, still sometimes a contributor there. And I'm just wrapping up a revision of a draft of my next (hopefully) novel. So that's what I'm doing. And I should say that I am not recording where I normally record because, you know, I lost the the officemate battle of of the the work at home universe.Jess Lahey 2:45 I know we have a topic today, but before we get to the topic, I just wanted to say, KJ mentioned that she just finished a draft. And it has struck me that I knew from the beginning from a long time ago that your deadline for that first draft of the next book was June 1. And it has been a crazy, crazy time. This was a self-imposed deadline. No one made you do this by this by this June 1 thing, and yet you hit it and I just I don't know if I'd had a chance to tell you this before but I was just so impressed that given everything that's going on and the fact that it was a self-imposed deadline, that you made itKJ Dell'Antonia 3:52 Well thank you. It probably should be said that it was not the first deadline. I was looking back at my bullet journal and noticing that in April, it had draft to Karen (that's my agent) as a goal. So it took at least an extra month beyond what I was hoping. But, I did get it done. I did get a draft to her. She's made some comments, which were extremely helpful. And I have done the hardest part of the revisions and I expect to have the revisions back to her this weekend. And then we shall see if it's time to try to sell it or time for me to just take another pass. Jess Lahey 4:37 It's exciting. It is super exciting.KJ Dell'Antonia 4:39 It is. I'm feeling really good about it. But you know, ask me tomorrow.Jess Lahey 4:43 Who wants to announce our topic today?KJ Dell'Antonia 5:02 We have an actual topic. This is how people know we're not a scripted podcast, we could be because we could have like this really smooth flow could be like, and Jess will say, and I can tell podcasts that are like that. And it isn't that I don't love them. It's that I'm too lazy, I think.Jess Lahey 5:19 They're very time intensive and I have to say from the beginning we knew what we wanted out of a podcast. This is what we wanted. So welcome to our world. KJ Dell'Antonia 5:29 Well, somebody asked on the Facebook group, I think and if you're not in our Facebook group, you totally should be. Someone said, 'We've heard Sarina discuss her decision to go indie, but we've never heard Jess and KJ, talk about their decision to go traditional.' And also, Sarina has been traditionally published in the past as well. So, we thought we'd just talked about that.Jess Lahey 6:00 There are very specific reasons, but it also challenges sort of the status quo, which, you know, get five years ago even, when Sarina started this, you know why you would choose to go traditional isn't a question anyone asked just because there wasn't the landscape that there is now. And we wouldn't have had our amazing role model of Sarina Bowen to look at at the time. But I mean, you're so good at it. The nice thing about having you as a friend is I don't ever say she makes it look easy, you do make it look easy, but I know how much work you put into this. And it's a mind boggling amount of work to do self publishing well, and to do it the way you do it. So that's part of the equation for me, but I love the fact that we can even ask this question now of, you know, why do you go traditional versus self publishing because a couple of years ago it would have been a really clear cut decision.Sarina Bowen 7:02 That's true. I mean, I knew people in 2014, 2013, who were turning down traditional contracts for self publishing. But that was a super rare thing to do. And those people, you know, had extraordinary circumstances and extraordinary insight that, you know, most of us didn't have. And if you go back 10 years, the traditional route was always the right choice. And now the landscape has changed so much that it is sometimes the right choice. But now there's a more interesting decision matrix associated with with who goes traditional and who does not.Jess Lahey 7:51 Well, and I remember, about 10 years ago, there was some story of a woman who had a I can't remember what her name is now, but she had, I think, a fantasy series that she had self published. And the big success story was that she was able to get a three book deal with traditional publishing so she no longer had to slum it over in self publishing. And that was seen as a huge success story. But that's not the case these days. I mean, there are a lot (especially in fantasy or romance) that would look at that and say, 'Well, why would I go over to traditional publishing if I have the platform, and she was very successful, which was the reason she got the deal in traditional publishing.Sarina Bowen 8:33 I do remember that story. And honestly, the reason that it was such a big story is because the numbers attached to it, I believe she had a seven figure deal on that book.Jess Lahey 8:47 Yeah. Well, I brought up the fantasy and romance thing. And Sarina, could you address why I brought those two categories up?Sarina Bowen 8:55 Absolutely. So I have identified sort of three major ways of thinking about an author's approach to self versus traditional. And I feel like the one that you're referencing has to do with gatekeeper's audiences. So romance and fantasy readers tend to select their books right on their phones from the Amazon store or from the Apple books app. And they're not really using gatekeepers for book recommendations. Maybe they're even using Goodreads for this or some sort of crowd-sourced decision making process about how to pick their next genre fiction read. And so it's those places where readers have stopped looking at who the publisher of a book is, where independently published books have been so successful. So one of the first questions you're going to ask yourself when you think about this question is, am I in a gatekeeper genre or niche. So if school librarians would be primary in spreading the word about your book, then you know maybe self-publishing is not for you. If you are in an area of publishing where trade reviews are going to really matter, then traditional publishing is the way to go if you want that starred review from Publishers Weekly because you have an informed decision about how that is going to help your book get seen then yes. So also, if you want to be in a big box store, if your book really is perfect for the end cap at Target, and you know you fit right there. Well, the only way to get into that big box store on the end cap at Target is to be published by a pretty big publisher. So that's a tricky bargain, as it turns out, because I had a traditionally published book with Penguin more than 10 years ago. And it did not get picked up by Target. They told me it was seen as too East Coast. So, I missed the end cap at Target based on the topic in a way that I couldn't really have foreseen. But you have to be fairly far along in your decision making before you'll learn if if that was gonna work out for you. So you know that's difficult. But and the last bit of this is award dominated sectors. Like if you write poetry, or short stories are your mode of expression, then awards and shiny stickers on covers are going to matter to who and how many people see your book. And so that's another gatekeeper audience.Jess Lahey 12:13 Well, and then there's this in between space too, that's really interesting. Like, I still write in education. And there's an in between space of these sort of independent publishers within education. So there's sort of traditional publishing and then there are these like smaller independent publishing, which are kind of self-pub, but not really. Or started out as self-pub and then they became something bigger. And then there's self-pub, self-pub, which is what you have been doing. And I think that that's a really good point that understanding who your audience is going to be, who your intended audience is, really will help you determine if self-pub or traditional pub is the right place for you. And for me, I was writing a book that was really meant for a sort of general audience, it was nonfiction. To do nonfiction in the self-pub world is really hard. I haven't seen a ton of examples that have done really well. And I get sent a lot of self-published books in the education. KJ Dell'Antonia 13:16 I think it's extremely platform dependent. Jess Lahey 13:20 Yeah, that's true. KJ Dell'Antonia 13:21 So if you are Marie Forleo, you've got this massive audience. And I would say that if you had been wanting to self publish your second book, you would have approached the first book.... You would have had to really intensify your email address gathering and your speaking to that audience directly. Like you could probably have set yourself up better to do that. But you would have needed to think about it like from the minute that your book took off, which of course it totally did. You will have needed to be going okay, I mean, how am I gonna collect these people? How am I gonna put them into a pie that is my pie and not the publisher's pie.Sarina Bowen 14:06 You know, there's one kind of nonfiction that actually does really well with self-pub, but it's probably invisible to you. And that is highly prescriptive books.Jess Lahey 14:22 I thought you were gonna say highly prescriptive business books because I was gonna say, those I have seen and that have been very, very successful self-pub.KJ Dell'Antonia 14:33 I was gonna guess that, because if it's like How to Raise Sheep on a New Zealand Sheepholder's Farm When You Are Actually from Norway, you know ten people might buy it, but you're gonna find those ten people.Sarina Bowen 14:49 Yeah, and I'm sure there's people just raking in the money on highly prescriptive nonfiction that is very trend based. But as a writer, that's not really interesting to me. But let's just say you were a CrossFit guy, like at the moment when CrossFit got really big, and all you wanted to do was write about this niche, new little method for working out to like minded individuals, that could have been an amazing self-pub project just based on finding those people in a place where a traditional publisher might have looked at you and said, cross what?Jess Lahey 15:36 Yeah, but then you need people in that field, in that industry, in that hobby, interest, whatever, talking about your book a lot and recommending it to other people within that. Sarina Bowen 15:49 Because I think if it's a very prescriptive thing that people are searching for on Google, then you don't, but if you wanted to write a book about the guy who started CrossFit, then that's different.Jess Lahey 16:07 That's a good point.Sarina Bowen 16:08 Yeah. So one way to look at this decision is to think about an airport bookstore. And everything in an airport bookstore is in a print-centric market, basically. And a lot of people haven't stared quite as hard at airport bookstores as I have, but there's very specific stuff in there.Jess Lahey 16:31 Oh, I stare really hard. And I've wondered a lot about that rack that sits at the edge of the store halfway out in the terminal aisle, that's very prescriptive, either books about faith or books about business. Like I've never heard of any of these books. And they're like, over a quarter of a million copies sold. I've always wondered about those.Sarina Bowen 16:55 They're prescriptive about your mind, but not about like how to rebuild your car. You know what I mean? Like they're practical in like a meta sense, like the big expansive thoughts you want to think about when you're sitting on that plane. And sometimes the decision of who should publish your book is complicated by the author not allowing herself to be honest about whether her book would fit on that shelf. And that's where all the difficulty comes from.Jess Lahey 17:36 Well, the airport bookstore is frustrating to me simply because when you look at what's for sale in many of the smaller ones, it's really only the books that are on bestseller lists in the top, you know, 10 positions.Sarina Bowen 17:48 Yeah, and there's no genre fiction in an airport bookstore, even though people read genre fiction on planes and the reason for that is that you have to think about like how print-centric is your market. So, if you are writing in a very print-centric niche, then traditional publishing will always be a better deal for you but there are different reasons to be print-centric. Like if your desired reader is 12 years old. That's a very print-centric reader in any genre. If you're writing a cookbook, or a workbook, or something where it's actually useful to have this thing on the counter in front of you, again, print-centric. Older readers, like mysteries with older characters in a demographic that has been slower to adopt e-books, also print-centric. And sometimes the only way to find this information is to ask an author who writes in a genre like yours - what is your print ratio. And I'm always surprised that authors don't know their print ratio. Like, the Penguin Random House portal makes this very easy to see. If you log in and look at your numbers. I can tell you that Rookie Move in its first year of publication was 84% e-books and 16% print. And when I saw those numbers, I said, Oh, geez, I should have self-published these books. Because the math just works out that way. But if I had been writing in market women's fiction for Penguin, instead, it might have said 55% print, 45% e-book, and then that would have been a totally different decision matrix. KJ Dell'Antonia 19:41 I want to talk for a minute about a couple of author reasons for doing both, for example, Gretchen Rubin, obviously, a hugely popular traditionally author of books about how people find happiness. She self-published a book that was basically all of her emails (I could get I could be getting what it is wrong, but essentially everything she had emailed to her subscriber list every year because people kept asking her for it. And very few of us have that kind of audience, but I thought that was sort of an interesting one. And then there's another author and I'm looking for her name. So she's a romance writer, and she's British, and her romances are traditionally published, but her books about riding horses, which fall into that sort of sporty, prescriptive category that Sarina was talking about, are self published. So I think that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, they're really fun, but you know, I've read them for a very specific reason, which is that I have an interest, it's exactly what you're talking about. If you're passionate about training your horse in a non-aggressive way, then you're tend towards wanting to read everything you can by people who have already done that, and you don't care how it was published.Sarina Bowen 21:27 Well, if you think about, if I were to write a book about horse training, and I could say to myself, you know, that's not an airport bookstore book.KJ Dell'Antonia 21:44 Tanya Kindersley and her horse books are in KU, you but I don't think her romances are. Yeah, that's not a book for an airport bookstore because that's just not what you're thinking about when you're getting on a plane.Sarina Bowen 22:00 So I also, I tried to make a list of good reasons to go traditional and bad reasons to go traditional and good reasons to go independent and bad reasons. And of course, the way this works is that the bad reasons are much more fun. Okay, so let's start with bad reasons to self publish your book. Bad Reason number one - I'm tired of querying agents, and I'm feeling very impatient.KJ Dell'Antonia 22:34 Oh, yeah, that's a very bad reason. Jess Lahey 22:39 Well, the impatient one is a big one, like, Oh, this would go so much faster if I could just push it out there now, I wouldn't have to wait for a year and a half or whatever to get my book out. That's a biggie.Sarina Bowen 22:49 It's true. And we are all impatient. I mean, I'm just as impatient as the next guy. So that's, that's a bad reason. Another bad reason is I haven't been honest with myself about the quality of this piece or its market readiness. And when people look down on self published books, they're really looking at that. Jess Lahey 23:12 Like I said, I get sent a lot of them and they just needed an editor. They just needed to go through another editing process. They needed a better spell check. You know, that kind of thing. And then that's what leads people to say, oh, self published books stink. I'm not going to read them. And that's simply because there are a lot out there from people who were impatient just pushed them out early.Sarina Bowen 23:37 And even the people that say I'm never reading a self published book have probably read one and didn't know it? Because if it's done right, you know it you don't even notice. KJ Dell'Antonia 23:49 Yeah, if I find myself going, Oh, who published this? That's a bad sign. I never ask that about something that's really good.Sarina Bowen 23:59 Sure. Well, my last bad reason to independently publish was I have unreasonable expectations about the discoverability of my book. So, sometimes people just want to write that book that's half horse training, half memoir. And the reason they haven't found a place for it with a traditional publisher is that they keep getting rejections that sounds like this. 'Well, this is fascinating. We're not sure how to sell it.' It's so tempting to write your story and then say, oh, anyone would read this. Anyone could enjoy it. But the truth is, that same person is super picky about their own reading, right? And so it's it's so hard to really be tough on yourself and say, 'Well, actually, not everyone is going to want to read this.' And it belongs to a highly specific audience. And so if you end up with a beautiful book that you're proud of, but it's really hard to define that audience, well then your next trick is you have to get busy defining it, whether that helps your traditional publisher or your eventual self publishing.Jess Lahey 25:22 And sometimes that can happen by looking at other books (if you can find them) other books that are out there that have sold within that audience, because occasionally what will happen is in a proposal, like in both of my proposals, I've put competing titles in there and my agent Laurie has come back and said, yeah, we need to explain why you included this book because it only sold 800 copies. And so if you're trying to say that there's room in this market, because, look, there's this other book, but it did really poorly. You need to differentiate your book and explain why more people would want to buy it than that book. Sarina Bowen 26:04 So bad reasons to go traditional. Are you ready? Oh, okay, well, bad reason number one. My agent will be upset with me if I don't accept this deal. Bad reason number two, I'm afraid to ask my publisher or my agent to break out the math for is this a good deal for me. Bad Reason number three, there's a stigma attached to self publishing.Jess Lahey 26:54 But don't you also think you have to say there's a stigma attached to self publishing in this category. Sarina Bowen 27:03 I actually have the asterisk and I was about to say that, unless you're trying to reach an audience that is sensitive to that stigma. Bad reason number four, this deal stinks but they'll pay me more next time. And that one's tricky, of course. Because if you're offered no advance, which happens a lot lately, then your publisher has no skin in the game. And that's a really tough decision.Jess Lahey 27:34 Yeah, not good for when it comes to marketing, because there's no impetus to invest in the marketing and publicity for that book.Sarina Bowen 27:43 Yep. And the last bad reason to go traditional is I need a publisher's validation. Who doesn't want to be wanted?Jess Lahey 27:55 Well, and it's tough because, you know, when writers get together and talk, they ask who each other's publisher is and you know, it's still a loaded conversation.KJ Dell'Antonia 28:05 In our genres they do. In Sarina's genre I think they probably don't. You're probably already kind of vaguely aware, right.Sarina Bowen 28:14 Yeah, but in romance, where it's we're like the canary in the coal mine market for independent publishing. And when I meet an author who has a long string of traditionally published titles, what I think about that author is, she must be awesome at writing. Because if you're not, you're going to be dropped on your head by your publisher pretty fast, right? But when I meet somebody who is very successful at self publishing, I think she must be a great writer, and she definitely knows a lot about the market because self publishing your work forces you to learn a ton about what readers want and how they make decisions. Whereas in traditional publishing, it might suit your life better to be published by someone who isn't you, but you will not learn as much. You just simply can't. Because a lot of those decisions are made out of your viewpoint.Jess Lahey 29:16 Yeah, and it's a lot of work to do all that stuff and to learn all that stuff. I mean, it's a lot of work. I guess the other thing you have to think about along those lines is you have to do a lot of work that does take away from your writing time. And if you hate it, I mean, that's the other thing. You really like the business stuff and you like analyzing markets and you like figuring those things out. I don't know that I want to do any of that. And so that's another part of the decision, too. Is is what do you like doing about this and what do you hate doing about this and is it going to drive you crazy and make you sad to have to do that work? You know, the background stuff, the marketing, and the business, and all of that stuff.Sarina Bowen 30:04 Definitely. And with regard to romance, because we've already established that that's a perfectly good market to independently publish in. After I started doing it myself, I flipped quickly to well, everyone should do this, because I saw the ways in which that it allowed me to cut the line and build a readership faster than traditionally published romance authors were able to do because their publisher held on to all the information, like who's reading the book, and what's their email address. So I was able to more quickly build a readership that really belong to me. But then as the the work of self publishing ate my life in an increasingly aggressive way, I softened on my stance of you know, what might work for me might really not work for someone else. If I had a day job at the Pentagon, like one of my colleagues does, then self publishing would just be like having a third job. Everybody has to make her own decision.Jess Lahey 31:13 Yeah, like I love the PR and marketing stuff, but some of the things that you do and are so good at and love because that's the money stuff and the numbers, you love that stuff. And it's just not my not my bag. KJ Dell'Antonia 31:30 I definitely did not think about self publishing the novel that I sold exactly because I didn't really, I always intended to go out with it. Because my position was just so good for going out as a traditionally published author and getting a decent advance. But what I sort of always had in the back of my mind was if this career as a traditionally public hopefully book a year, author of women's fiction doesn't work out the way that I want it to, I have your model of doing it. But what you do is different and I know that. Like I would have to be able to write books more quickly and develop the audience. If I wanted to do it like that, I would do it like that. I don't know if that makes any sense. I mean, because, because I love what you do. But I didn't think it was quite what I wanted to do right now. And I don't know that I could either. Your success is pretty astonishing. Sarina Bowen 33:04 I know what you mean. And the word astonishing comes to me sometimes too, when I do consider the luck involved, and timing, and all kinds of things like that.Jess Lahey 33:16 Well, the word astonishing comes into it for me, mostly because from when I first started looking at whether I was going to get traditionally published, I could put my arms around that, I knew what that looked like. And we call it traditional publishing because it's traditional, but until Sarina started doing it, I had no idea what that looked like. It wasn't something I could even envision because I didn't know what was involved and when you can't envision something, it seems completely overwhelming. But now that I've been watching Sarina do this, it is something I can get my arms around and it's much more of an option to me mentally if there isn't all of this sort of mystery out there about what's involved. So I think very few writers have someone to look to that have done this and can break it down for you and show you exactly what it is and exactly how it works. And I think that's part of why people tend to think about traditional publishing first is simply because it's traditional, and you can look and there are a million books out there on how to do it. But I have to assume there are a lot of self-pub books about how to do self publishing. And if you start googling them, you will find them and they are very niche books, as you said about giving very practical advice about how to do a very specific thing.KJ Dell'Antonia 34:41 You know, there are books that if I wrote them, I would totally sell. If I wrote that natural horse training memoir, or a dog training memoir, or something like that, I would totally self publish that. I'd be doing it for a different reason and a different audience. Jess Lahey 35:09 Well, and the other thing is, it has to do with knowing who the people in the landscape are again, too. Like, one of the things that Sarina had to do is figure out who's who in the romance publishing world. And now you know who's who in the natural horsemanship world and knowing those who those people are and who to reach out to and who to advertise to and do your PR with. That's another big hurdle that makes it more comprehensible to you that you would do the self-pub thing.Alright. Sarina, you were the one who had the wonderful list, have we hit everything that you wanted to talk about?Sarina Bowen 36:02 We have pretty much and I would just like to leave it with this idea. And that's that every author who's contemplating publishing at all, should really do their level best to define their own audience. So that could be something like the audience for this book is nursing students, or ComicCon attendees, or fans of James Patterson, just the more granular and precise you can be about defining the audience for your work, the easier it is to convince a publisher to take you on or to just figure out how you're going to sell the darn thing if you publish it yourself. Jess Lahey 36:46 And we've talked about this in book proposal writing, too, that saying, oh, everyone will want to read this book is like the first big mistake. So yeah, that granular look is important for traditional publishing, too. So you're gonna have to think about that no matter what.Sarina Bowen 37:00 That's right, some of these decisions and self honesty exercises are going to be undertaken no matter what decision you make. Jess Lahey 37:11 I love that you called it self honesty decision. That was really good. I like that because that's what it is, you know, that's absolutely what it is getting real about who's gonna read your book.KJ Dell'Antonia 37:23 Fellow writers, before we get into what we've been reading, let me flag for you the big message of this episode. If you're going to indie pub, you better be honest with yourself about what you've written. If you've got some doubts about your ability to do that, and who doesn't, a book coach might be the answer, both to help you assess what you've done, the strengths and the weaknesses, and to figure out what else if anything you might want to do before grabbing one of those self publishing how-to books we talked about and getting out into the market. Author Accelerator book coaches know their stuff when it comes to both traditional and indie publishing to find one that's right for you head to authoraccelerator.com.Jess Lahey 38:07 Speaking about reading books, let's do that part. Let's talk about what we've been reading because oh my gosh, I've been reading such good stuff.Sarina Bowen 38:15 I've got one. I am reading Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall, who is a man. And he is always hilarious and I recommend him wholeheartedly.Jess Lahey 38:31 Ooh, that sounds like fun. What do you got KJ? KJ Dell'Antonia 38:33 I also have a fun one. I have just finished The Exit Strategy by Lainey Cameron. It is a super fast moving story of two really go-getter women in Silicon Valley, which always fascinates me in and of itself, who discover that they are both - one is married to and the other is engaged to the same really, really rotten con artist. So it's got overtones. I mean, it's not like he's having an affair, it's like full on con artist stuff. So they're sort of race to get away from him and out from under him and they have to work together on something, it's just super fast, and entertaining, and kind of a juicy read, and I really enjoyed it. So that's The Exit Strategy from Lainey Cameron, and it just came out last week I think.Jess Lahey 39:32 But speaking of listening to things because that's how I've been doing just about everything lately because I've been outside a lot. I have been listening to Sara Stewart Taylor's The Mountains Wild and it just came out this week, the week we're recording, and actually we'll link to it in the show notes, but we did interview Sara Stewart Taylor early on in the process, we interviewed her about mystery writing, because that's what she does. And she's really good at it. And she has a whole bunch of books that I have read of hers. But this Mountains Wild book is really special. And the reason I want to talk about the audio version is that when you do an audio book and you need to find a narrator that can do other languages, lots of accents, I'm assuming it's a really tough get and the woman who narrates Sara's book is fantastic. She gets the Gaelic, she does the Dublin accent, the Northern Ireland accent, the Long Island accent, and she does male, and female and there's no moment where I'm saying, Oh, this isn't a full cast of characters, this is one person pretending to be lots of people and it's really, really good. Sarah's writing is beautiful. And the audio narration is spectacular. And so congratulations, Sara Stuart Taylor on the release of your book. This is what's fun about this podcast, I think is having this long view like, you know, we interview them early on when they first got their book deal, and then come back to them when the book is actually out. So anyway, I'm proud of Sara. It's really good. Alright. I think that's it for this week.KJ Dell'Antonia 41:28 I think that's it for this week. I want to remind everyone to sign up for our weekly email with the shownotes because that is also how you will get all the book recommendations with their links, as well as links to our fantastic sponsors, and links to our Facebook group and links to everything that we talk about. Plus, it's your little announcement that there's a fat new episode waiting for you in your podcast player. And if you want to go one step further, you can support the podcast financially. And as a result, get weekly mini episodes or writer top fives that are super good and super fun. And those mini episodes also drop right into your podcast player once you support the podcast, which is a fun little trick that our friends at Substack have figured out.Jess Lahey 42:22 In fact, I'm recording one today. I love recording those little mini episodes. They're really fun. And if you want to, actually, we mentioned that today's topic came straight out of our #AmWriting Facebook group and we keep really tight reins on. There's no mean stuff and people are nice and supportive and it's moderated and it's just a bunch of writers supporting each other and it's a really fun place to hang out. And if you ask any questions there who knows it may be a topic on a future show.KJ Dell'Antonia 42:54 This is true and you can find all of those links at amwriting podcast.com. Jess Lahey 43:01 All right, everyone. This is it, until next week, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game. This episode of #AmWriting with Jess and KJ was produced by Andrew Parilla. Our music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and performed by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their services because everyone, even creatives should be paid. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

You listen to podcasts. You love podcasts. (Perhaps we’re assuming here, but after all, we ARE a podcast.) And you’re a writer, with books or articles or ideas or other projects you want to get out into the world. Which just might mean you’ve imagined yourself as a guest on a podcast, sharing your work. (It’s the writer version of the sportscaster doing an imaginary play-by-play while a kid shoots hoops—we imagine ourselves being interviewed by our favorite podcasters.)This week’s guest, Lauren Passell, can help with that. She loves podcasts (she even created a weekly email that’s essentially a love letter to the big, the small, the great and the weird in the podcast world: Podcast, the Newsletter). And she loves writers. And she loves connecting writers with podcasts, so much so that she’s turned it into her business: TINK Media, a PR company specializing in podcasts. We talk about creating a podcast-worthy story, finding the right podcasts to pitch, perfecting those pitches and making your voice a part of the podcast world. It’s an amazing and useful episode. I think you’re gonna love it.Links from the podSubscribe to Podcast the Newsletter and take the quizListenNotes.comPlayer.fmPocketcastStitcher[Castro]Friday Black, a short story collection by Nana Kwame Adjei-BrenyahThe United States of Anxiety: I Did Not Watch the Video#AmReading/#AmListeningJess: Longform CBC Podcasts: Finding Cleo, Someone Knows SomethingKJ: How Do You Write with Rachael HerronLauren: Threshholds, produced by LitHubArticles of Interest, from 99% InvisibleThanks to everyone who supports the podcast financially. To join that team, click the button below:But it’s all good. The pod is free as it always has and always will be. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it every time there’s a new episode.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.Don’t forget to check out our new sponsor, Dabble. We’re in love with its plotting and organizational tools and its write-anywhere availability, and we think you’ll like it too. And if you want to hear more from Jennie Nash, founder of Author Accelerator, she’s been on three great podcasts of late (and KJ has listened to them all, because listening to Jennie makes her want to write): Marginally, How Do You Write and Reading and Writing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk to Maria Konnikova about her new book, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. After a series of devastating health and financial setbacks, Konnikova, a former New Yorker staffer whose other books include Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock and The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It…Every Timeset out to understand how luck, skill and human behavior contribute to the trajectory of our lives. Though she’d never played a hand of poker in her life, she convinced Poker Hall of Fame inductee Erik Seidel to become her coach. Konnikova quit her job at the New Yorker and set aside a year to learn poker as a way to master her luck and her life. One career in professional poker and more than $300,000 later, Konnikova found at least some of the answers she sought. Links from the Podcast:Long Form Storytelling, The Grift PodcastSlate daily podcast, The Gist#AmReadingMaria: Weird by Olga KhazanKJ: The Authenticity Project by Claire PooleyJess: Sunny Days by David KampThanks to everyone who supports the podcast financially. To join that team, click the button below:But it’s all good. The pod is free as it always has and always will be. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it every time there’s a new episode. Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe