Rachael Herron

(R.H. Herron)

Archives for May 2021

Ep. 232: Sonya Lalli on Using Romance Beats in Mainstream Fiction

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

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

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

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 232 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron and I am so glad that you’re here with me today, as I am talking to Sonya Lalli. And it was just such a joy to talk to her about her amazingly fun and wonderful book. So, I know that you’re going to enjoy that interview.  What has been going on around here? It has been very busy, very real. We are just getting painting done of the outside of the house. Painting of the inside of the house will be coming, because we, my wife and I, live like college students. We moved into this house, that was a bright post-it yellow when we moved in. It was really the yellow of a post-it, which is just, oh, isn’t it the most gorgeous color you ever saw? And it is now kind of white and we really didn’t even notice. So that has been fun. We’re painting it, and by we, I mean, the person that we hired to do so, is painting it a light gray with white trim, which I think is the most boring thing I have ever seen in my whole entire goddamn life. But my realtor says, it’s the hot color right now. How is light gray with white, a hot color? But I have to admit it, does look sharp. No, you know what? That’s giving it too much credit. It looks clean. 

[00:01:50] So, we’ve got that going on. What else? I feel like everything is really rolling forward. Yesterday, I printed out, and if you’re watching on YouTube, you can see it. I printed out a four-month calendar, that delineates, where we need to be at what time, what we need to do, in order to get on that plane in July to go move our whole lives to New Zealand. And here is the exciting part is that as I record this, it is April 8th, 2021. And I think we need to have basically ourselves out of this house in terms of all of our stuff by the end of April. So, in the next three weeks and one in two days, we need to have everything packed and sorted and put into a pod storage unit, which will then be put into a container ship we’re taking about, I think we’re going to take about, 60 cubic feet of stuff, which is about 40 or 50 boxes of things like books and some clothes and some pots and pans and that’s really all we’re taking. But meanwhile, our house is full. You will notice that I’m still sitting at the same eye level here because I’m still sitting at my beautiful roll top desk. Seriously, if anybody lives in the Bay area, San Francisco Bay area and wants a beautiful roll top desk that I love so much, I’m going to be getting rid of this. There are still these big things that we have to gear it up, our bed, our couch, our chairs, our dining table, the island in the kitchen that we jury rigged by buying old cabinets and putting a Formica table on top and I can tell you, it is very sturdy. It is a sturdy island. We made the Formica table hang over the edge of these cabinets so that we can sit at it with stools, we have been sitting at that thing in our kitchen for years and years and years and years. And it’s sturdy because we didn’t know how to attach it. So, we use duct tape and, what are those rubber band things called? I cannot think of the name for, bungee cords, bungee cords! We can’t give that to anybody. We can’t sell that to anybody. We can’t even give that to anybody, that just needs to go to the dump because those were dumped items in the beginning. So those kinds of things, getting them out of the house in order that we can have the guy put in some new carpet in order so that we could have people paint the inside of the house.

[00:04:27] I painted this when I moved in and I haven’t painted it since 15 years ago. So those kinds of things are rolling, but what I want to say about that is that something I’m looking forward to, is when the house hits the market. It’ll be staged, I think we’ll probably be living in it with the staging, which is going to be really strange. It’ll be nicer furniture than we’ve ever had, but we won’t have anything else to do. We won’t have anything, we don’t, we won’t have stuff. We will have the things that we keep with ourselves. I’m going to keep a couple of knitting projects, deck of cards, so I can play poker with Lala whenever I can talk her into it, and my Kindle and my computer. I will have a lot of time to do work, and that’s going to be great. I’m kind of looking forward to that. I’m not kind of looking forward. I’m really looking forward to that mental clarity where there’s nothing else I can do except wait for the house to sell and then get on the plane. All of our stuff is packed. We’re living out of suitcases. I have been struggling to write, I am writing. I am working on writing, but it is a struggle. Yesterday was supposed to be a writing day in the morning and it turned into hours of dealing with getting our stuff shipped. So that is something I’m really, really looking forward to is having that time and space. 

[00:05:46] Speaking of time and space, I do want to take a moment and thank some new Patreon followers because y’all give me the time and space to write the essays that I love writing. And thank you Patreon followers who really liked that first essay, which is going to be the first part of my memoir on moving to New Zealand. I got so many good suggestions of titles for the New Zealand moving memoir, right now I really love, I think it was the newest Kiwi or the new New Zealanders. I love that. Thanks Mona for that. And so, thank you to the patreons who support me there and who get to read these essays well in advance of the book coming up, which you know, will happen someday. So first of all, thank you to Rebecca Wendt. Thank you, Ken Guidros, I hope I said that right. Miley Topliff, thanks, Miley. Rose Ketchering, thank you, thank you so much. Bill Aprens, Bill is just such a darling dear heart and he’s a student of mine and he’s supporting me in a generous level and thank you, Bill, that just made me happy and grateful. Cassandra Leach and Heather James, who is Bill’s pal. And, thank you all of you. Thank you all of you who do support on the Patreon patreon.com/Rachael or who have supported in the past. Thank you to the people who cancel their Patreon support because they can’t afford to. That’s totally welcome. You can do that at any, any time. I understand, finances come and go. And if a dollar a month is too dear, is too hard, I, and I, that sounds facetious when I say it. I mean it. There have been times in my life where I could not afford that extra buck or two a month. And, when you stop that I never have hard feelings, never, ever, ever my darlings.

[00:07:39] So, thank you, thank you, thank you with all of my heart. Also, something I’m just going to say one more thing that I am excited about is that earlier today, I got an email from somebody who wants to adopt Waylon, who is, you can’t see him. If you’re watching on YouTube, he’s a black cat, sleeping on a black sweatshirt on the chair behind me, the darling of our heart, the brother of Willy who died last week. And, it has been the one thing that has been breaking my heart about this move. Like I’m sad about everything, about leaving my sisters and family and bothering our family and friends and my people and my place in the world. But Waylon has been breaking my heart the way he is so sad not to be around dogs and cats and people. And the people who say that they want to adopt him, have three kids and a cat. And I just can’t imagine a better place for Waylon than being around kids that he can go yell at and then get petted by. So we have an informational interview with that family tonight. So, wish us good things, because if I knew Waylon was well taken care of, oh, my heart would be so happy. So, I’ll keep you posted on that. 

[00:08:50] None of these things are writing related. So, we will jump into the interview with Sonia, which is writing related, completely relevant to you as the writer that you are. I want to take just a second to remind you that you are in exactly the right place. You are doing exactly the right thing. If you’re not writing, you’re getting ready to write. If you are writing, congratulations, keep it up. We just move onward. We take one foot, put it in front of the other and we do it again tomorrow. We just need to write a little bit at a time to move our books and our stories and our memoirs and our plays forward. And I know that you can do it. I know it’s hard. We talk a lot about that on the show. It’s hard. And you have the power to do it. You don’t have to do a lot, just do a little and you’re moving in the right direction. Thank you, my friends for being here and we’ll talk soon. 

[00:09:43] Hey, is resistance keeping you from writing? Are you looking for an actual writing community in which you can make a calls and be held accountable for them? Join RachaelSaysWrite, like twice weekly, two hour writing session on zoom. You can bop in and out of the writing room as your schedule needs, but for just $39 a month, you can write up to 4 hours a week. With our wonderful little community, in which you’ll actually get to know your writing peers. We write from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM on Tuesdays and 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM on Thursdays and that’s US Pacific Standard Time. Go to RachaelHerron.com/Write to find out more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read more…] about Ep. 232: Sonya Lalli on Using Romance Beats in Mainstream Fiction

Ep. 231: Deanna Raybourn on Why Being a Writing Magpie is a Great Thing

New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist Deanna Raybourn is a 6th-generation native Texan. She graduated with a double major in English and history from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Married to her college sweetheart and the mother of one, Raybourn makes her home in Virginia. Her novels have been nominated for numerous awards including five RITAs, two RT Reviewers’ Choice awards, the Agatha, two Dilys Winns, a Last Laugh, and three du Mauriers. An Unexpected Peril is her most recent novel. 

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

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

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #231 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I’m so pleased that you’re here with me today as we are talking to Deanna Raybourn on why being a magpie of sorts a collector is such a good thing as a writer. I know you will enjoy the interview with her. She’s just one of those people I’ve been meant to meet for a long time and it was a joy to speak to her. So that is coming up. What is going on around here? Oh my God. What isn’t going on around here? Tragically, we lost our cat Willy on Monday morning and I’m not even going to think deeply about it as I talk about it ‘cause I don’t feel like crying any more. But yes, that is two pets in one month that we have lost, our darling Clementine and our darling Willie, one of the two brother cats. But we have been trying to find an amazing rehoming space for, Willy was the one who has had sickness in the past. Wayland is fit as a fiddle, his brother, but Willy had had problems with kidney disease in the past and just got really attacked by a basically renal collapse. And there was no way we could save him and it was awful. It was just awful. I do feel like the hits have just been coming, you know, three months of being very, very sick and losing Clementine and losing Willy and some other stuff that I don’t need to go into or want to go into here and also moving, packing and moving, kind of pre-grieving the loss of leaving America and going to New Zealand, while I’m not really leaving grieving leaving America, honestly. But I am grieving leaving my family and my friends. Doing a little bit of pre-grieving about that. 

[00:002:15] However, I did just write a Patreon essay yesterday that went out as I’m recording this. The March 2021 Patreon essay is how I’m starting the memoir on moving to New Zealand. And it is going to be really fun to write. I think this is exactly up my alley. I love writing about what I’m doing, what I’m feeling, how I’m changing. So, one of those is going to come out every month and I’ve gotten a really great reaction to it so far. So, thank you. If you are a Patreon supporter, thank you for responding and telling me what you think about it. It was really good to put out and it’s gonna to be raw and honest and funny and confused and excited. Just the way that I am right now. Just the way that my wife and I are around this move. So, strangely as we record this, it’s on Thursday and Willy died on Monday. It was awesome. Willy died and then I went home crying on the porch swing and my tooth broke in half and I have a dental phobia and required a crown that day. Luckily, I go to a dentist who number one could get me in and number two actually could make the crown on site and put it on so it was, a two-hour procedure, un-sedated no, I’m so phobic that I’d normally require some kind of medication, Valium or Halcyon even to get to the office. So, the two hours of pain and mental agony actually did distract me from the loss of Willy for a couple of hours, so I was grateful for that.

[00:03:54] But as I was saying, it’s Thursday now and I somehow feel okay today. For Clementine, her sickness was so drawn out for so long, it was very, very difficult. For Willy, it was sudden. Just a sudden complete collapse and we couldn’t save him. And the vet, it’s really comforting when the vet is like, no this cat is ready to go. This cat must go. We must help you with this. They don’t say we must help you with this. But when you say I want to put him down and they say, good, that’s what I hoped you would say, oh, that is- it’s so helpful. And I feel like I’m back on the upswing, I feel healthy and strong. And while I’m still really sad about Willy, I feel more positive than I have in a while. I think it’s because my body is getting just steadily, getting stronger. I’m doing a lot of swimming and it’s so wonderful. I love being in the pool and I feel more positive about everything and that is, that’s been really, really good. 

[00:04:55] So, what I wanted to mention today is just something that really, really amuses me. Really amuses me. I had an interview, which you’ll hear in a few weeks with someone that I was very excited to talk to. Kind of a big name, she does a big podcast. And her name is Katherine Nicola. You can look forward to that. That’s coming up, I don’t need to make a secret of it, but off air, when I interviewed her the other day, she said, you know, I didn’t know who you were. And I looked up your podcast and I saw this review, this terrible review that just made me want to be on your podcast so bad. So I said, yes. And I was like, oh my gosh, yay! I love bad reviews. And I wanted to talk about that for a minute, because it was just talking about it with a friend the other day. Bad reviews for you as a writer will occur. And they will not be reviews that say, oh, you know what? It just wasn’t my style. Oh no! You’ll get so many reviews that will say that they hate your characters, they hate you as a person, they wish they could kill you. I don’t know if maybe more women get those kinds of reviews than men, but boy. And I have to say that learning to love the bad reviews and really leaning into them is kind of a superpower. I honest, hand to God, do not read my reviews. The only time I read my reviews is maybe in the first couple of weeks of a book coming out. I want to see if more people are liking it than are hating it, which has always been the case and I don’t know what I would do if the, if that weren’t the case, but then I let go of reviews altogether.

[00:06:39] The only ones I read are the one stars, because one stars amuse me so much. This is not, however, the way it always was. My first review, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about it on the show, but my very first review was in a trade magazine, publishers, was it publisher marketplace or publishers weekly? I think it was publishers’ weekly. No, obviously it was publishers’ weekly. Marketplace doesn’t do reviews, I don’t think. And it was for my first book. It was my first review that had come out and it just was so blah. They said I stepped into formula, the writing was good, but nothing special to see here, people. And I went to bed for 24 hours. I called one of my best friends, crying hysterically. She thought someone had died. I lived and died for the reviews that came in when the book came out on Amazon, on Good Reads, on Martin’s Noble, on Coba, I would, on I-books, I would go check reviews like they mattered. Here’s the thing: They don’t matter. I don’t believe the five stars very much because they say, oh my god, I love this book. It’s the best book ever! It’s not the best book ever. It’s a good book. I don’t believe one stars because those are just hilarious. The truth lies for most of us, for I’m going to, I’m going to say for all of us, the truth lies between the four and the two stars.

[00:08:10] A very well thought out, well-articulated, well-argued three-star review of my book that is what can hurt me today, 11 years into this being published game, my first book came out in 2010. So, I really avoid a three-star. I don’t want to read a smart reader thinking critically about my book and talking about it in three-star ‘cause she might be right and her words can get in my head, but no other words can get in my head anymore, they can’t stick. So, I wanted to encourage you to maybe if you don’t have a book out yet, practice. Every book you read and love, like you should be reading pretty much only books that you love and you should be reading a lot of them. We do not have time in this life for finishing books that we don’t love. So you’re reading a book. You’re always reading a book. You’re passionate about it. It’s incredible. When you finish it, always go look at the reviews, read all of them, read the five stars, read the one stars, read the ones in between. See if you can find commonalities that they have, things that they share. If they all say that this hero wasn’t believable, perhaps there’s some truth in that, that kind of thing can be helpful for an author. And in the past, I have used reviews to help me get better as an author, but right now, I’m pretty comfortable with using my editors to tell me if this book is good or not and how to make it better.

[00:09:36] I’m, I really love it when I hear from readers who’ve read lots of my books that say, this is my favorite one, favorite one yet or when I get emails from new readers who love the book, that means a lot to me. So, I’m going to encourage you to practice reading those reviews. Practice imagining that those one-star reviews are yours because it does feel like death at first. And then I promise you, it starts to feel like nothing and indeed it becomes amusing. I have said this often, but a couple of friends of mine, whenever we get a really excellent one-star review, we will send it to the other ones, which then prompts the other ones to remember, to go look for one-star reviews on their, on their newer books. And it’s just this glorious competition that we have with each other who can have the worst. But with that said, I want to share with you, where did I put it on my computer screen? Here it is. The one-star review of a podcast you know well, How Do You Write, unless you’re new to the show, in which case, welcome and listen to a bad review. This is so good, you guys. Check it out. This came from August 30th, 2020. Could have been mildly useful. That’s the title, one-star. I wanted to like this podcast. Herron has a lovely voice, which is rare among female podcasters. But a few minutes into the show, she started talking about something she had said in a previous show. And I think her intention was to make nice with people she had burned, i.e. conservatives or republicans. I already knew Herron was a far-left character, but was willing to put up with that if the content was good enough, but somehow her make-nice-speech morphed into just more bashing. Not only was it hateful, it was based on nothing. She somehow thinks I’m assuming he’s saying. She knows what responsive from the White House would have prevented anyone from getting or dying of the Chinese virus. Nobody can know that because the end of this movie has not played yet. And to claim otherwise, especially with the vitriol that she was spewing is just dishonest and serves no purpose, but to vent against the other, if you can put up with this feeling, good for you, or maybe you agree with it, but I do not too- okay, predict and you guys can speak this line with me, too bad there is no way to award zero stars. 

[00:11:58] Do you know how much I love this review? This review makes my life. I put it on Twitter, I told everybody about it. Just to be clear, I was never making a make-nice-speech, to Trumpians. Trumpians just really don’t belong listening to my show because I am a far-left character. I wasn’t making nice. I probably was bashing them. And if this earns me a few more reviews like that, honestly, that helps me because then people like Catherine Nickel, I will say yes to coming on my show, in a few weeks, you’ll hear that one. And it’s fantastic! This is just, I don’t, if you watch on YouTube, I’m just grinning, this makes me so happy. Also, that I was wondering like, ‘cause I haven’t looked at reviews in months and months and months and months, maybe more, so I brought up the one stars on Stolen Things, my most recent book, there are only four of them. Yay. But this is my favorite one. Here it is: Okay, one star read something else. This, I just do not agree with this first two lines. Audio version was terrible in my opinion. I did not enjoy Exisan’s voice or how she tells this story. Aside from me to you, Exisans is such a brilliant narrator. She works for some of the biggest names because she is incredible and she also happens to have become a friend of mine through an author friend of mine. And she’s incredible and the fact that Penguin allows me to say, I want her, and then they can actually book her, and get her when she’s doing Kristin Hagans and other huge, huge names is incredible. 

[00:13:41] So, this person is just bananas about that. But let’s go back into the more interesting part. I cannot stand how often the author uses the F-bomb. Everything about this book is controversial. It’s just too much. Racial issues, half Caucasian, half ‘cocatiyon’?, half Iranian daughter, rape, sex trafficking, police brutality, prostitution of a minor, LGBT, and probably more, but I probably couldn’t, but I just couldn’t read the whole thing. I literally hated this story and gave up on it halfway through. I will not read this author again. The story was way too far-fetched and I prefer to read stuff that is a little closer to reality. I love it so much. Oh, it just gave me like butterflies of happiness. I don’t know if it is like a reverse in your face reaction that I have, but it is literal delight to read these words. Even if they say something like Rachael Herron couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag, she’s the worst writer I’ve ever read, she can’t put two sentences together. It’s delightful because we know it’s not true. Reviews just aren’t true. They are just opinions that people have. Something that is very fun and I just heard this tip on a podcast and I can’t remember which one it was. But this was posted, the one I just read was posted by LOL doll question mark? So, LOL doll, you go to her reviews, which are always visible on Amazon. You can go to any reviewers, all their other reviews. She particularly hated my books.

[00:15:11] She very much prefers romance and I wonder if that’s where she came to me from, I’m not sure. But the book she loves the most, of all of the books she’s ever reviewed, she really loves Curly Girl, The Handbook, which is a handbook for people with curly hair. It’s a manifesto, it’s a curly hair manifesto and, LOL doll loves it the best and that just makes me feel great too, I don’t know. It’s just so fun. So honestly, with this conversation about reviews, I just hope you get some really good one-star reviews and that you get to enjoy them and you get to go dig into the reviewer’s other favorite things on the, I wish I could remember the podcast I was listening to might’ve been Tim Ferris but, the person who had looked at some of his bad reviews and then went to see the other people’s reviews of things, they went too far. They picked a really beautiful five star that someone had left them. And then they went and looked at that reviewer’s profile and they were aghast to find that they had reviewed really stupid products too. So, what did that mean about the five-star? Reviews don’t mean anything, people. They’re nice to have. I just noticed that, still I didn’t, I had no idea that Stolen Things, do I still have it up? I don’t. Stolen Things had maybe like 240 reviews, which is a good number for an expensive trad-published book and I was thrilled about that. I’m thrilled that it has, I didn’t even, I wish I could tell you how many stars it has on average. I want to say it was like 4.4, 4.5, which is fantastic. I love that. Anything above a four on Amazon makes me happy. So, it’s good for that. 

[00:16:54] I do look at that every once in a while, how many reviews does it have and how, what’s the average star rating. So, that’s what I’m gonna encourage you to look forward to those reviews. I promise they will stop hurting after a while. I really, really promise. It is really interesting though how thick the author’s skin becomes over time. And it will happen to you. I know that it will. So I think that’s all that I wanted to tell you about today. Let’s jump into this fantastic interview with Deanna Raybourn, who has amazing reviews and I didn’t actually bother to look at any because she’s such a good writer. I don’t care what other people say. I just love her writing. So please enjoy this and happy writing to you. 

[00:00:16] Hey, you’re a writer. Did you know that I send out a free weekly email of writing encouragement? Go sign up for it at www.rachaelherron.com/write and you’ll also get my Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use today to get some of your own writing done. Okay, now onto the interview.

Rachael Herron: [00:17:57] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show, Deanna Raybourn. Hi, Deanna! 

Deanna Raybourn: [00:18:01] Hi, Rachael, how are you? 

Rachael Herron: [00:18:03] I just had to interrupt our chatter to push the record button because we were just going to chatter for the rest of the afternoon. 

Deanna Raybourn: [00:18:10] It probably would have, it’s like a virtual slumber party around here.

Rachael Herron: [00:18:13] It’s and also, what I love about doing the show and you probably love about doing this podcast as your book is coming out. It’s kind of like the water cooler, you know, we were just gossiping about people that we know and how

Deanna Raybourn: [00:18:24] Exactly!

Rachael Herron: [00:18:26] It is nice. I need that.

Deanna Raybourn: [00:18:27] Exchanging war stories. 

[Read more…] about Ep. 231: Deanna Raybourn on Why Being a Writing Magpie is a Great Thing

Ep. 230: Erika Robuck on the Magic of YouTube Research

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

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

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

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

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

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #230 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So pleased that you are with me today, as I talked to Erika Robuck on the magic of doing research, including some of the more virtual research, like research on YouTube, for example. We had a great chat and I know that you are going to enjoy listening to her, impart some wisdom on us. So before we get to that, what’s going on around here? Moving, moving is going on around here. We are deep in the middle of it. I’m pretty much done with my office. And my office holds everything that I own except for my desk. I’m still sitting at my desk. I have this gorgeous antique roll top desk. Seriously, if any of you in the Bay area, want to roll top desk, hit me up. I’m going to put it on Craigslist soon, but it’s got, it’s must have 25 or 30 little drawers and there’s things in all the drawers. So I need to go through and make myself a desk kit. It’s going to be one box of stuff that I’ll put in the shipping container, the shipping box that we’re shipping to ourselves. So I’ll get that in four or five months after we move and that’ll hold mostly post-its. You know that. I’m not throwing out my post-its. I know I can get them in New Zealand, but I already have them, so I’m shipping them. But then when I’m really excited about is to make a little container of desk now, the things that I use on a daily basis, the things that I reach for which include post-its and pencils and my tarot cards, and you know, my glasses wipes, those kinds of things. I’m going to have to bring, of course my podcasting mic, but then after I get rid of all of the other stuff that I can sell the desk, and that’s really the last big piece of furniture in this room, apart from a very small sofa, which, honestly, just going to get tossed at the end because I’ve been using it for so long and we have pets and it’s scratched up. 

[00:02:22] So other than that, I’m pretty much packed. That is not to say the house is in any way packed. We have both been focusing on our own offices since in our offices, we keep our clothes, we keep all of our things are, our bedroom is just for sleeping. There’s really not much in there, but the rest of the house has things like, you know, the kayaks in the, in that one closet. And, so that’s- oh, the kitchen! Oh my God, the kitchen. That’s going to be fun. But right now, outside, I hope you don’t hear it, but we have somebody fixing stuff up and power washing. We’re going to get house painted outside and in it’s just all really sinking in we’re spending real money now to get things done. So now, it’s just been terrifying. I know I keep talking about how terrifying and scary this is. But it is, it really is. It’s also exhilarating and exciting, and I can’t wait to make this move to New Zealand, but one of my students shared this with us last week and the phrase is just “Do It Scared.” And I have that on a post-it on my desk right now. Where am I going to put my post-its? I don’t know, but Do It Scared is my motto right now. We do it. We do it scared. We do this with our books, with our writing. We don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know how to do it. We don’t know if we will ever succeed. We don’t know if we’re good enough. In fact, we think we’re not, and we do it anyway. We do it with this pit of fear in the bottom place of our soul. And we show up and we take the steps to get these things done. 

[00:04:04] Yeah, writers are brave. Writers are courageous. We have to be, we have to be hopeful and courageous to, in order to do this really wild thing that nobody else wants to do. So if you’re feeling scared about what you’re doing with your writing, good. That means you’re exactly in the right place. There’s this beautiful David Bowie quote that I slaughter every time I try it, I should just memorize it. But he basically says, “Write when you feel like your feet can’t touch the bottom of the swimming pool, that’s when you’re in the right place.” I feel that so often in my own writing, and I know you probably do too, and I definitely feel like that in my life right now. So that’s going on. I had some health stuff crop up over the week that kind of knocked me out for a few days that sucked, but I’m up in better now and I’m still doing fine on the health stuff, no diagnosis. And I believe I’m not going to have a diagnosis. I believe whatever sickness I had for those almost three months, I don’t think they’re ever going to figure it out. And I’m becoming okay with that. The more exploratory tests they do unable to find things really the happier I am. It’s frustrating, but it’s really also very, very awesome. But last week, I did get the shot. I got the vaccine, I got the one dose Johnson & Johnson. My hyperactive immune system really kicked up a storm and I got real sick. And also that was, you know, thank you, immune system, making those antibodies. Yeah, because of one of my medical conditions, I was on the list to get it and I got it. Lala does not have it yet. My wife does not have it. She’ll hopefully get it within the next month or two. And, but it does feel nice to have, it’s anticlimactic. I just want everybody to have it, but that’s all. I just want everybody to have the vaccine and that will be really, really great but that’s, that’s coming.

[00:06:00] What else is going on? I’m gearing up for the launch of Hush Little Baby. I got some artistic assets as they call them today. And they’re just really cute images that you can put on Instagram or Pinterest or whatever of your book. And the nice thing is when you’re with a traditional publisher, if you decide to go that route, that’s one of those things they do for you. They give you the artistic assets and thank God for that, because I like to use Canva for the stuff that I do, myself, my self-published books. But it’s nice to have somebody else send that to you. So they’re doing things like giveaways and so that is starting. I’m trying to be present for that, trying to show up at the desk, even though life is literally in disarray, in several different arenas. I still got to show up at the desk and write. I still have to show up to the desk and think about marketing. I still have to show up. I get to show up at the desk and teach that’s, I love doing that. Life just doesn’t stop spinning because we get busy, we just get busier and that is fine. Do it scared. Do it scared. I’m trying to go a little bit easy on myself. I hope that you are exploring some of that too. I’m thinking a lot about the seasons of writing, and I have more than a few students right now in my classes who are really hitting a wall.

[00:07:25] And I think it has to do, I’m guessing this is my guess. I think it has something to do with his year of the pandemic, it’s really slapping us all in the face that we’ve lost an entire year to this in so many ways. And the smallest thing we could lose from this is a year. So many of us have lost so much more than just a year. And this particular stress as is just accumulated to the point where, for a lot of people, it is hard to write right now. And I want to remind you that there are seasons, there are seasons of writing. I love to teach these 90 day classes because 90 days is a great season. You can go hard, you can work hard. You can bond with this community and work your ass off and have something to show for it at the end, you can’t do 90 days to blast through everything. Every 90 days you have to recuperate. Winter Will Come, my last Patreon essay that I wrote was about the book wintering, which I highly recommend and about my type of wintering and how we have to remember that tree’s like really- a really good hardworking tree outside. I may have said this on the podcast, I apologize if I have, but are very hardworking tree. Your favorite tree out on the sidewalk. If it is a tree that normally loses its leaves in the fall, it doesn’t get to decide just to try really hard and work harder and produce the leaves all through the winter. It doesn’t get that choice. It has to winter. We all have to winter at some points. And right now, even though we’re going into spring in this hemisphere, I feel people are wintering, are needing to winter. If you have been working your ass off, it might be time for a goddamn break. It is what I’m telling you my friends, it’s different than not wanting to write, not wanting to write, hating, writing, hating what you’re writing. That’s just- that’s any day of any season, but hitting a wall and needing to take care of yourself more than needing to get to the page, that’s normal. That’s part of the writer’s life. So if you’re there, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re living this part of the writer’s life and wintering is included in that you must winter sometimes. So, take heart. Take care of yourself. Write when you can and when you do, come find me on the internet and tell me about it. I really love hearing about your writing. Okay. My friends enjoy this interview. I know you will, and we will talk soon. 

[00:10:12] Do you wonder why you’re not getting your creative work done? Do you make a plan to write and then fail to follow through? Again? Well, my sweet friend, maybe you’d get a lot out of my Patreon. Each month, I write an essay on living your creative life as a creative person, which is way different than living as a person who’ve been just Netflix 20 hours a week and I have lived both of those ways, so I know. You can get each essay and access to the whole back catalog of them for just a dollar a month. Which is an amount that really truly helps support me at this here writing desk. If you pledge the $3 level, you’ll get motivating texts for me that you can respond to. And if you pledge at the $5 a month level, you get to ask me questions about your creative life, that I’ll answer in the mini episodes. So basically I’m your mini coach. Go to patreon.com/Rachael (R A C H A E L) to get these perks and more and thank you so much.

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

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

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

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

Rachael Herron: [00:13:04] Yes. 

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

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

Erika Robuck: [00:13:11] Absolutely

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachael Herron: [00:14:57] Yes

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

[Read more…] about Ep. 230: Erika Robuck on the Magic of YouTube Research

Ep. 229: Chang-rae Lee on Slowing Down While Writing

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

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

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

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #229 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So thrilled that you’re here with me today, as I record on March 19th, 2021. And today I’m talking to Chang-rae Lee. Right? How exciting is that I, this interview was awesome, so enjoyable, and it was an honor to speak to him. So, we talked a little bit about slowing down while writing. I know that you’re going to enjoy the interview. Please stay on the edge of your seat for that. Before we get into that, though, what is going on around here? Well, I guess in the biggest news I got my vaccine, which is incredible. I am so happy that I was able to get it. I got the Johnson & Johnson one shot and oh my God, did I get sick. Oh wow! I have one of my body issues is a, an over-reactive immune system and it overreacted. But honestly, it only lasted like 30 hours and it was like having a very, very terrible flu, which is nothing compared to COVID. So it was such an interesting feeling to be that sick and that miserable and that happy and grateful at the same time. I’ve never been thrilled to feel like I have the flu, you know, 102, 103 fever, chills, body aches. And I was like, yes, ride this, this is amazing! Thank you shot. So I’m really, really happy about that. Lala does not have hers yet. Hopefully she will be able to get hers pretty soon. 

[00:02:02] It’d be wonderful if the both of us were and could see some friends who have their vaccines in a few weeks when the inoculation actually takes effect because they don’t, they didn’t tell me this onsite when I got my shot. But you’re not fully protected for a few weeks or so. So do your own research on that. I’m not going to tell you how long it takes per shot, cause I don’t know, and I would not want to get that wrong, but I am very, very happy and grateful about that. It’s, I just want everybody to get it though. Like, it’s awesome that I have it, but I don’t care. Cause I want everybody to get it. That’s the important thing. 

[00:02:37] What else? I am not writing this week. I have not been just well, and that’s not true. I’ve been working on the synopsis of Quincy, which I keep working on and it’s just not right yet. And to take my own advice, I’m just going to have to get it off my plate and send it to my agent, which is where it belongs. And I’m going to try to do that later today. There I set it here. Now I’m going to have to do it. But what is really going on is moving, you can hear the room is more empty now than it was even last week. And that is going a pace. I still don’t know how we’re going to get it all done. We have a moving date now. I don’t think I had this the last time I podcasted, but yeah, we got our managed isolation which is very, very hard to get. And we got it about a month before we actually had to enter on Lala’s visa into New Zealand. So the timeline has moved up yet again and now we’re leaving in approximately four months and our house is still 100% full of everything we have to sell it. We have to get rid of everything all in four months. And so we’re doing that, moving toward that. I actually really enjoy this kind of challenge. I love lists. I love doing things I love working until late at night and falling into bed, happily exhausted from having to do a lot of things. 

[00:04:04] Whereas, my wife is finding it more emotional. She is more of a collector of things and she got rid of, I’m going to say, more than 95% of her books and graphic novels that she has collected for the last 25, 30 years. And that was really hard for her. That was really, really a challenge. So, she’s doing great. And I wish I could make it easier for her and I will because I’m going to pack the kitchen. She won’t have to. So one of the things that I did want to mention on this show, and I haven’t mentioned it over anywhere in social media yet, but if you go to RachaelHerron.com and go to the blog, the most recent post is about our two cats, Waylon and Willie and I am not going to cry on this show. I’m not going to do any of that crap, but they’re too old to go with us. They are 14 years old. Willy has a kidney not infection, kidney problems. He has chronic kidney problems and they, it’s just not safe to travel with them. We just keep reading these terrible stories about how these cats didn’t make it. You can’t drug them on the plane. They don’t let you. So they generally just die of fright on the 17-hour flight at the shortest and then they have to do quarantine. So we cannot safely bring them and it’s breaking our hearts. They are the sweetest boys, sweetest cats that I’ve ever known.

[00:05:36] The sweetest cats I’ve ever known. They were both black. Willy is long haired. Waylon is short haired, and they wrap themselves around each other all day. Every day, they have each other, they love us so much, but they have each other. So they’re just always content and happy and purring. And they’re wonderful. And I talk about them on the blog and what we are hoping is that we find somebody close to us physically. Hopefully in Northern California. So it would just be a car ride away who wants to adopt them. We are going to take care of all their medical bills till the end of their lives. So that would not be a worry. They come with a litter robot three, which is Bluetooth activated and tells you when about once a week or so you have to change the bag. No scooping of the litter. Yeah, we need to find a really good home for them because they are amazing. And Dozy, our young dog she’s five years old, so she can safely do it. She’s in getting all the shots and everything. And we have a place for her to stay while we are getting settled. And then we can send for her to come over, but we can’t take the cats. So if you’d like to, or if you know anybody in Northern California, who would like a pair of brother cats that are beyond wonderful, let me know. If no one steps forward, I do have an offer from a friend who lives in West Virginia. Wait, where does she live? I can’t remember. Maybe Virginia, Virginia. But so we could put them on a plane and get them there, but we’re hoping to avoid the plane. So if you or anyone, you know, in Northern California wants these two boys go read the blog post, it’s all about them, entails every single thing about them. And I thought I would mention it here in case, you know, anybody cause you guys know everyone. 

[00:07:23] And one other update, you know that I love writing my Patreon essays. I love writing them. It’s my favorite thing. I am going to pivot them and I’m going to be talking about moving to another country as an adult permanently. That’s what those essays are going to be about. I think they’re going to be really fun to write. They are going to be how I collect the chapters of a book about this move. A memoir about this move. So if you would like to be in on the ground floor and reading those essays, the first one will go out this month. I’m not sure what it’s going to be about yet, but it’s going to be about freaking out about moving, probably something along those lines. You can always go to patreon.com/Rachael (R A C H A E L). And while I’m mentioning that I wanted to thank new patron Alice Law. Alice, thank you. Thank you so much. Welcome on the ride. There are at least four dozen essays in there that y’all can get for a dollar. You can read them all and then unsubscribe that would be a lot of reading, how many thousands of words is that? I’m going to go 48. You can hear me clicking. They’re usually about 4,000 words each that’s 192,000 words that are not available anywhere else yet, because I’m still collecting them into collections of books. Someday, I will do all of the things, but until then, they’re all over there in Patreon, if you are interested.

[00:08:50] And, just wanted to say a very, very big thank you for all of you who are subscribers and all of you who aren’t subscribers, who can’t be subscribers for whatever reason. I’m so grateful that you’re here and that you enjoy the show and that you leave reviews over it. iTunes that’s super, super helpful or I-podcast or whatever they call it now. I feel like one of, I feel like one of the olds talking about the Facebook, but those are great. You know, what else is great? This interview with Chang-rae Lee, please enjoy. And I wish you all very, very happy writing this week my friends. Bye. 

[00:10:15] Hey, is resistance keeping you from writing? Are you looking for an actual writing community in which you can make a calls and be held accountable for them? Join RachaelSaysWrite, like twice weekly, two hour writing session on zoom. You can bop in and out of the writing room as your schedule needs, but for just $39 a month, you can write up to 4 hours a week. With our wonderful little community, in which you’ll actually get to know your writing peers. We write from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM on Tuesdays and 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM on Thursdays and that’s US Pacific Standard Time. Go to RachaelHerron.com/Write to find out more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read more…] about Ep. 229: Chang-rae Lee on Slowing Down While Writing

Ep. 228: Jasmine Mans on Harnessing Play to Expose the Truth

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

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

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

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #228 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So glad that you’re here with me today, rather emotional. Okay, so here’s how me, filming my podcasts usually goes, I get a guest, we chat and then it goes in the bank. I’m probably a month and ahead, maybe even two months ahead right now in terms of interviews, which is awesome. I love the publicist, send me amazing authors and they get to read their books and then I get to talk to them. But it doesn’t mean that by the time I release the episode, I haven’t talked to them in four or six weeks or more. And I don’t want to do that today. You guys, I just hung up with Jasmine Mans and I cannot remember a guest ever making me cry before on the show. You’re going to love the episode. It’s brilliant. It’s beautiful. Because she is those things and her book is those things and I want you to get it and read it. And I’m so moved that I can’t, I just can’t wait to share it with you. I can’t wait six weeks. So, as jumping the queue, it’s going in front of everybody else and it’s going to go out this week because it’s important to me and the things we talk about in the show about play and love and fear and life and the way we as writers put that on the page. It was an incredible conversation to me. So I hope that you enjoy it too. And I know you will. 

[00:01:52] Well, what’s been going on around here. Well, you may hear it’s a little bit more echo-y on the podcast and for those of you who are audio files and who noticed those kinds of things, I apologize for it, but we are finally starting to pack for the move to New Zealand. It’s really getting real. We, I can’t remember if I mentioned this on the show, but we have to enter a New Zealand by August 19th to honor my wife’s visa. I can go in anytime, but she’s got to be so that we have to enter by August 19th. So that means we have to sell the house. We have to pack everything we own that we want to take, which is almost nothing compared to what we own. We’ve been in this house for 15 years. We don’t have a garage. Thank God we don’t have. And we have very small closets, but we still have managed to pack a bunch of stuff into this 1100 square foot home. And we’re trying to leave most of it behind. So we are jumping into that. I, and my room is just emptier now and it’s feeling nice and it’s also feeling terrifying. What else is going on, while we’re doing that, I’m just trying to figure out some kind of a balance. And I don’t know if I’m going to be able to nail it because my priorities outside people who are always my highest priorities, but my priorities are writing, teaching and then moving, where do podcasts fit? I don’t know. I mean, how do you write we’ll keep going because I’ve got episodes in the bank and it’s an easy show for me to do and produce, but my newer podcast Youre-Already-Ready, I think I’m going to move that to a bi-weekly format because I just can’t keep up with the writing of that podcast and the recording and the release. I love that podcast, but it takes a lot of time finding, I need to squeeze time out of places where I’ve never squeezed time from before. And that’s kind of stressing me out. It’s a good stress, but it is a true stress. 

[00:03:52] Physically, I think I’ve seen one of the last doctors on the list that I needed to see, to try to figure out why I was so sick for those couple of months. And yesterday I was, I saw the specialist of all the specialists and she had no answers. So I remain a medical mystery. Still don’t know what was wrong with me. And I probably will never know. Which is frustrating, but I am just trying to accept it. That is, it’s kind of like these things, we always, I always talk about with writing. We don’t want to write. Writing is hard. Writing is difficult. And we get to accept those thoughts, those feelings, those truths, and still sit down at the desk and do our work. Having those thoughts does not prevent us from doing the work and knowing that I don’t know what my body is doing or has been doing doesn’t prevent me from living my life to its fullest. And hey, you know what? I’m really grateful after all these tests, they didn’t find something really wrong with me. How awesome is that? Like I was literally disappointed that they couldn’t find a diagnosis until, well, I still am a little bit disappointed about that, but then I really did have to snap myself out of it and say they didn’t find a bad diagnosis. Hell yeah. Fantastic. 

[00:05:16] I’m really grateful for that. Also grateful for the fact that I’m going to have to start remembering what Hush Little Baby, the book that comes out in May from Penguin, it’s a thriller, is about because it’s been off my desk long enough that I’ve kind of forgotten. And I have a, the first publicity call with my team this afternoon. I’m going to have to try to be professional. I’m still not putting on a bra. But I’m going to have to try to be professional and remember what I was trying to do with that book and what I would like to share with the world about that book. So that’s super exciting and I love my editor and I love my team genuinely. I’ve worked with this publicity team for the last book and they just are really awesome people, Dutton as an imprint is phenomenal and I’m so happy to be with them. So that’s coming up this afternoon. Other things that I’m grateful for are so many, and I’m just trying to remember them every day. But right now, I just want to say, thank you. I’m grateful for you. For you listening to this show, we have this weird, special connection that you allow my voice into your head. And that means a lot to me. And I appreciate you for doing that. And I hope that I bring you value and God knows this show today is going to bring value to your life. So I’m pretty confident in that. 

[00:06:39] Also, I would like to just quickly say thank you to new patrons. I can’t read her name here. Oh, here it is, Daphne Garrison. Thank you, Daphne. Welcome! And also to Mona McDermid, who is just one of my favorite people. Thank you, Mona, for supporting me. I really appreciate that. And okay. That’s all I got to say. I’m feeling gratitude. I’m feeling emotional. Get ready to hear me panic, because I realized that I’m crying. I must say that, you know, ever since Clementine died, I feel like I really let down some walls and I’m, you know, and I’m sober now and I have feelings and I feel like I allowed so much sadness with Clementine with coming and stuff to fill me that now the sadness is just like, Oh, we got a channel. We know how to get there. We know how to make the tears happen. And, yeah. So, you’ll, you might be able to witness my horror at realizing I’m going to cry on a podcast. But it’s because of what Jasmine reads and, so open your heart, maybe figure out if you have any tears that need to be shed and enjoy this incredible interview with a phenomenal writer. And that’s all I got to say. So I wish you very happy writing and we’ll talk soon my friends. 

[00:08:00] This episode is brought to you by my book Fast Draft Your Memoir. Write your life story in 45 hours, which is, by the way, totally doable. And I’ll tell you how. It’s the same class I teach in the continuing studies program at Stanford each year, and I’ll let you in on a secret. Even if you have no interest in writing a memoir, yet the book has everything I’ve ever learned about the process of writing, and of revision, and of story structure, and of just doing this thing that’s so hard and yet all we want to do. Pick it up today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachael Herron: [00:10:49] Yay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read more…] about Ep. 228: Jasmine Mans on Harnessing Play to Expose the Truth

Ep. 227: Elly Griffiths on Writing in the Garden

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

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

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

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #227 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron, and I am so glad that you’re with me here today. Today, I’m talking to Elly Griffiths on Writing in the Garden. The Postscript Murders is her most recent novel and it just came out and it was really a joy to talk to her. So I know you’re going to enjoy that interview. So hang on for that. What is going on around here in Rachaelandia? That’s a weird thing to say, Rachael-landia. Probably just one L. Oh my gosh. So much stuff, honestly so much stuff. I told you last week that my wife’s visa came in for New Zealand and the dog died which means that we’re moving to New Zealand and we talked to the realtor. So now we are starting to get ready to move. Our realtor is going to come walk through the house tomorrow, which terrifies me because we don’t live like we’re in college, but we live like we graduated from college maybe a couple of years ago. Most of our furniture is inexpensive and, or has been found at a flea market or a thrift store. I’m nervous.

[00:01:37] She’s going to look at her house and say, okay, Rachael, I sold you this house to you 15 years ago. What have you done with it? We have gotten a new electricity and we have gotten the house air conditioning. Other than that, it pretty much is in the same shape. Which you know is fine. Apparently it’s a buyer’s market. No, wait, sorry. It’s a seller’s market in California right now, which is why it’s a good time to sell, but I’m terrified. What other things am I scared of? I just feel scared right now in not- hello, dozy. And not a terrible way, just in a normal human way. Still a bit sick, still finding whatever pain that is that I’ve been finding out for three months. Had my MRI yesterday, haven’t heard anything back. But that was, it was like a four part MRI. So 90 minutes inside the machine, and I must think two things. Number one, my meditation practice, because I was able to meditate through it. Number two, the Valium that they gave me to be in there for 90 minutes, it made the meditation a lot more interesting and easy as I was pretty relaxed, still was not pleasurable. And I’m still kind of feeling the aftereffects of that kind of fear. I’m still feeling plenty of emotions, living with emotions, accepting them, feeling them, crying when I feel like crying, boy, y’all crying is great. I love crying actually is a release valve. It’s-it takes the pressure off, also it sucks. It gives you headaches. I feel like there are times in our lives and I talk about this a lot. You know, there are seasons in our lives, there are seasons to be comfortable or to be digging up the field, not so comfortable. You’re planting there are times to rest and right now our time is to do stuff and to do a lot of stuff and to figure out the order in which to get stuff done.

[00:03:42] Which I love, I am a planner to my teeth. I have realized recently that most of my journaling is just planning. That’s all it is. I’m either planning for the rest of the day or for the rest of my life. But that’s what my journal is. So I do love a good plan. I do love thinking about plans. I love talking to my wife about the plans that we are making and of course, it is also a little bit stressful. So we are dealing with that as well as can be. My darling little dozy dog is going to have to live with somebody for a while when we first go to New Zealand and figure out where to live. And I have- she’s going to stay with my best friend. And that’s amazing. So that is really, really a weight off of our shoulders. We don’t know what we’re doing with the cats yet. They’re both too old to go. They would not safely make the trip they’re geriatric and they do not recommend that geriatric cats spend 24 hours traveling in a plane and then do a quarantine. So, we’re going to have to rehome them. And one of them just got sick. So that is making me stressed out. He’s been sick before. He’s sick again. Can be disease and maybe some other things. So that has got my brain working too, but all this whole time, all the while all of this stuff is going on. Guess what? I’m still writing. And that’s what this podcast is about. This podcast is about getting up and writing anyway, even on the days when I want to lie in bed and make plans, or I need to spend half the day on the phone with a vet, we still show up and do our work. On those days, we write as well as we do on other days on the days that we are completely present emotionally and we’ve gotten a lot of sleep and we feel really heavy, perhaps not, but we’re still showing up and doing our work, even if it is for 10 minutes at a time, 15 minutes at a time we show up because we’re writers.

[00:05:48] And that is what I love reminding you of, that even though there are seasons in our lives as writers, every season is for writing. I truly believe that. I write more a lot of times in my wintery phases and it may be more in my journal. Nobody’s ever going to see these things, but when times are hard, not only do I tend to ramble on my podcasts like I’m doing right now, but I tend to ramble in my journal.  Our writing is an outlet for us and aren’t we lucky? That we have that, there are so many people who have to deal with such enormous difficulty in their lives. How do they process it without writing something or somewhere? I just, I honestly don’t understand how people do it. So I’m just feeling very grateful that I have this, that you have this, that we have this super power. So don’t forget that you have it. You own it. You’re listening to this podcast because you are a writer. Use that super power. 

[00:06:54] Okay, quickly, just a couple of new patrons or a few new patrons to thank, thank you so much, Lucia. Thank you or Lucia. Thank you so much for your patronage. Jenny Darlington edited her pledge up and oh boy, that makes me feel amazing when you do that. Tammy Whitesoul. Hello, Tammy! Welcome, welcome. Lisa Sy, thank you so much. And Christina Colada, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Brian Souders, I hope I said that right. Thank you Brian and Liz Barrett, something has changed in Patreon where when you do get a Patron in a different country now shows in their money form. So Liz Barrett is hers comes in pounds, in, that is pounds. Yes, that’s pounds. And I just love that. I love seeing that in my email that’s a bit of a thrill. So thank you to all of my patrons who allow me to write those essays, hoped that you enjoyed the last one about wintering. It was hard to write. It was hard to send and I’m proud of it. So if you did read it, let me know what you think. Thank you for being there and for supporting me, it means the world.

[00:08:06] Okay. With no further ado, let us jump into the awesome interview with the amazing Elly Griffiths. I know you’re going to enjoy it, and I wish you, my friend very, very happy writing.  

[00:08:17] Hey, you’re a writer. Did you know that I send out a free weekly email of writing encouragement? Go sign up for it at www.rachaelherron.com/write and you’ll also get my Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use today to get some of your own writing done. Okay, now onto the interview.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read more…] about Ep. 227: Elly Griffiths on Writing in the Garden