Archives for June 2021

Ep. 239: Kirsty Capes on Using Tips from Screenwriters to Write Novels

June 25, 2021

Kirsty Capes works in publishing and, as a care leaver, is an advocate for better representation for care-experienced people in the media. She recently completed her PhD which investigates female-centric care narratives in contemporary fiction, under the supervision of 2019 Booker prize-winner, Bernardine Evaristo. Careless is her first 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 # 239 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I am so thrilled that you’re here with me today. If you’re watching on the video, I am in a friend’s house who is out of town, housesitting for her, so that’s why it looks a little bit different. Might sound a little bit different, that might keep happening for a while on the show. As you know, today we are talking to Kirsty Capes, and we are talking about stealing or borrowing tips from screenwriters in order to write novels and she was, as all my guests are, delightful, so, I know that you will enjoy the interview, stick around for that.

[00:00:52] What’s going on around here? Well, moving is continuing a pace. It’s been a very exciting, very incredibly busy week. Probably the busiest we’ve had so far as we completed cleaning up the house, getting the interior painting done, getting the staging done. We, I just realized this morning when I was journaling that we are not homeless because we have a house, but we are without a home. Our home has gone. The staging is ridiculous. It is just ridiculous. If you look at my Twitter, I have linked, or on my Instagram too, I have posted pictures of what the stagers did to our house. It is so fancy. It is mid-century modern; it has clean lines; it has light colors. It’s white carpet. Oh, it’s white carpet. All of that has been done. All of that has been put in and as of yesterday, people are coming through the home and hopefully somebody will want to buy it as soon as possible. I’m here in this friend’s house for another few days, and then we will go back to the house and we will live in the staged furniture, which makes me very nervous, especially when it comes to my wife and her coffee cup on those white carpets so that’ll be interesting. I’m just planning on buying drop cloths, drop cloths and putting them absolutely everywhere because I don’t trust us, I don’t trust myself and I don’t trust her. So, it is a weird feeling. We have everything that is hours that we need for the next, however long with us. We have our clothes, we have our computer setups, everything that is not packed and ready to be put in a shipping container is with us, besides our kitchen stuff, we did leave a minimal amount of kitchen stuff in our kitchen because we are cooks and we will keep cooking and we will pack up the spices and our favorite two pots at the very last minute, right before we leave the country at the end of July.

[00:02:54] So, for the next two months, we are without a home, home. Without our home that we created together and have lived in together for the past 15 years. But what was home? What is home, really? Home is my people, my wife, my family. Home is my writing, home is reading. Home is talking to you all, home is thinking about writing. Home is teaching, home is being with my students, that is all home. That’s all the home that I need. Get back to me in six months and see how I feel about that statement. But it is pretty exciting right now. And I’m feeling, I’m pretty good, I really am. I’m glad that we rehomed our cat Waylon when we did, because he is settled in so beautifully and that makes me so happy. And my little dog dozy is actually going to be living in this home behind us until we can send for her, until we buy a home and can send for her. She’s going to be living with my friend Sophie, and that’s the house we’re in. So, it’s really pretty nice that we’re spending 10 days in this house, with the house with dozy so that she can get to know this as her new home as well. And, when it comes to writing, I can admit that it, except for the two hours, twice a week, where I’m in RachaelSaysWrite, where I’m writing, that’s about the only time I’m writing right now. It’s been, rough and that’s fine because I’m actually not on a deadline right now, I’m just doing different projects, finishing up some revisions of things. And I do get those four hours a week, but on the other days I have been, I’m not a step tracker, but my aura rank that I wear, that tracks my sleep, I am a sleep tracker because I have terrible sleep and this has really helped me to get better sleep. It also tracks my steps and I was really impressed when I started to get 11 and 12 and 13 and 15,000 steps a day as I was, you know, moving around the house, packing, moving, cleaning, doing all this stuff. But over this last weekend, I was getting 23, 24, 25,000 steps a day. Absolutely exhausted. So much to do. And it’s, it’s seemingly never ending. So, I think that now that the whole, the house is open for business and people are coming through, there’s really nothing left to do. There’s nothing left to pack. I would like a nice 5,000 step day where I just walk from the, this desk to the bathroom and back, and maybe out for a coffee.

[00:05:20] So, that, because Sophie lives in a place where there is walkable, I have to tell you, this is one of our dreams, is to someday live, where we can walk to things. For 15 years, we have lived in a place in east Oakland. There is nothing to walk to, even the liquor store is closed. There’s literally nothing to walk to at all. Here, at Sophie’s house, there is a Trader Joe’s, there is a Pete’s, coffee shop. There is a Chipotle, there’s 31 flavors. There’s a comic book shop, like literally two blocks away. So, someday in New Zealand, we would love to move someplace where we can walk to some place. Walking to a cafe, isn’t that amazing? And we’re entering a time where, perhaps, you’re getting closer to being able to write in cafes again. In New Zealand, of course, we’ll be able to write in cafes because they’ve been opened since last June of 2020. But all of us in the United States, too, we’re getting to a place where perhaps the writers are going to be able to go out and write again. And for a lot of us, that’s kind of a big deal. However, we have gotten used to writing at home, haven’t we? So that’s been something that’s one of those silver linings of the pandemic. Perhaps we all had to learn how to write and revise in our homes, which is something that I’ve heard from a lot of writers, is something that we were really bad at, a lot of us were really bad at. So, that’s exciting. I’m just going to jump in to the interview right now. I’ve updated you on all the important things. So please enjoy this. Please get some of your own writing done, whether that’s in your home or in your car, or on one of those car lap desks like I have. And then come find me where I am on the internet and tell me about it. I really, really love hearing from you all about where and what kind of writing you’re doing, what you’re struggling with. Please, let me know. I will be doing a mini episode soon, probably within this next week. So, if you have any questions, I have a couple of questions that are waiting in the queue that I will get out in that mini episode and I really love doing those. So, if you are at patron at the level at which I am your mini coach, which is $5 a month, lay some questions on me. Let’s get some good ones in there. There are already good ones in there. Let’s get some great, a great selection to do a mini episode on and thank you all for listening. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for being writers cause you’re amazing. Okay. Bye.

[00:07:41] 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: [00:08:21] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show today, Kirsty Capes. Hello, Kirsty!

Kristy Capes: [00:08:26] Hi! Thank you so much for having me, so lovely to meet you, Rachael.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:29] It’s a thrill to have you on the show and I’m so happy to talk about writing today. Let me give you a little introduction. Kirsty Capes works in publishing and, as a care leaver, is an advocate for better representation for care-experienced people in the media. She recently completed her PhD, congratulations, which investigates female-centric care narratives in contemporary fiction, under the supervision of 2019 Booker prize-winner, Bernardine Evaristo. Careless is her first novel. And when this releases, it will have just, the book will have just released. So, congratulations on that.

Kristy Capes: [00:09:05] Thank you.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:07] Have you, we don’t have a term that I can think of, and it may be a blind spot in my vocabulary. And I shouldn’t even say the word blind spot, but using more sensitive language, but we don’t have, we don’t use the term care leaver here in the states, as far as I know. Can you explain what a care leaver is?

Kristy Capes: [00:09:25] So a care leaver is anyone who has spent time in the care system at any time in their life. I think generally, from like a policy governmental perspective, it’s six months in the care system. Although I might be wrong on that, it might be three months. And they have left the care system. So, you know, they’ve either aged out or they’ve left whatever care situation they were in.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:59] I feel like here, at least there, people, I hear conversation, people talking about there should be a term. We should have a term. Instead, we just have foster kids who’ve aged out and that’s, I mean, there might be a better phrase for that, but I love that you are an advocate for this and talk to me a little bit about how your first novel is about this subject. Did you always want to do this or is this just kind of what came out of your body as a care leaver yourself?

Kristy Capes: [00:10:25] Yeah, so I think there was definitely a part of it that it just came out of my body as you say. So, I grew up in foster care myself and I always wanted to write. I always wanted to be a writer. I was a really big reader as a kid and I had, I went to university and I did creative writing at university. And a lot of the creative writing that I was doing, were kind of short stories and poems and things like that, that were kind of influenced by my own experience growing up in care. So, I had all of these kinds of bits and pieces of writing, where I was kind of looking at the care experience, dealing with my own care experience, kind of working through some of that. And I got to the point where, I was, I felt as though I was ready to start writing a book and it seemed very natural for me to write something about care because I’d been through it myself. I had so much firsthand experience of it. I had a lot of writing already on the care experience and it felt like it was something that I needed to do for myself to kind of have some sort of catharsis maybe to, you know, kind of deal with some of the sort of unresolved bits of my own experience. And also, you know, I was very, very aware that when I was growing up in care, there were very few representations of people like me in the books that I was reading. And as such a big reader, especially as a child, it was so it felt very important to me to write something that felt very true to my own experience, but also felt more of a positive and hopeful representation, of someone who’s been in foster care. And that’s kind of where Careless came from it.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:28] It, I’m not done with it yet, cause I just started it the other day a little bit late, but it is beautiful.

Kristy Capes: [00:12:34] Oh, thank you.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:35] Your writing is just sublime and it deserves all of the accolades that you are getting. I’m so excited to read more of it. Let’s talk a little bit about what your writing process is like. How do you get it done? Do you have a full-time day job? Are you working around that? Are you working on the next book? Tell us all about that.

Kristy Capes: [00:12:56] Well it’s interesting that this podcast has fallen when it has, because I just sent my second book to my editor yesterday, first draft.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:08] Like, and as we’re recording this, I think your book comes out in about a month. Is that right?

Kristy Capes: [00:13:13] Yeah. About three weeks. Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:15] That’s exactly the timeframe I had for my first two books. And I hated turning in my second book before the first one had come out. It was also,

Kristy Capes: [00:13:22] Yeah, it was really insane. So, yeah, I mean, it’s all at the front of my head at the moment, so I can tell you all about it. But, I had, I do have a full-time job. I have a nine to five. I work for HarperCollins, funnily enough. For mills and boon, which I think in the states is called Harlequin. So, lots of lovely romance.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:46] I’m also a romance writer, so

Kristy Capes: [00:13:49] Oh, amazing! So yeah, I do my nine to five there. And,

Rachael Herron: [00:13:55] What do you do there?

Kristy Capes: [00:13:56] I do marketing, which is loads of fun. I love working there. It’s just the best. So yeah, so it’s been, it was quite intense. And I think originally when I got my book deal, back last year, in February last year, they kind of asked me when I would be able to deliver book two. And originally, they wanted January, 2021. And I was also doing a PhD at the time last year as well. So,

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Ep. 238: Meghan Scott Molin on How To Write When Life is Just Too Busy

June 25, 2021

Meghan Scott Molin comes to writing by way of a Masters in Architecture, a minor in Opera, a professional career as a barn manager, and five years crash course as a mother. She currently resides in Colorado with her fellow zookeeper (husband), sons, horse, adopted stray cats, and corgi. She is an avid lover of everything nerdy from Wars to Trek, Hobbits, Who, and beyond. When she’s not writing, she’s cooking, dreaming of travel, coveting more corgis, and listening to audiobooks while hanging out at the barn.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, hello writers, welcome to episode number, I have no idea. And this is going to be the shortest intro ever, because I’ve only got a few minutes and it has been an enormous week. I am not even sure who you’re going to hear in the interview next. I honestly am not, usually I look it up, but I’m, you know, usually several months ahead of time. So, I need to look it up and remind myself about what we talked about. I don’t even have time to do that. So, I’m sure you’re going to enjoy it. I’m sure it’s going to be fabulous. So please stick around and enjoy that. What is going on around here? Literally everything. Hush Little Baby came out. Yay! I have a book launch party today as a sub, so it drops on May 14th. So, if you get those in time, you can come to Murder by the Book, to my book launch. And if you’re a writer, you may want to kind of see what an online book launch looks like. You can find the info for that at murderbooks.com/herron. My last name H E R R O N.

[00:01:17] Also, the house is torn apart, empty. Vacant as of today, if you’re looking at me on the podcast, on the YouTube, I am wearing overalls because it’s that kind of day. I am so grubby. I should not be allowed in my coworking space honestly, if they knew what I had done today. It’s been pretty insane. Like there’s, now we have no furniture as of right now, but last night, you know, we’re sleeping on the floor on a blow-up air mattress. Tonight, we’ve got a couple of nights at a hotel because we have nothing in the house and then it’ll get staged. But basically, everything that needs to happen, has been happening at the very last minute. Quite an intense experience. And, you know, then we moved to New Zealand in 10 weeks. But the go time, the actual go-time has been this week, and just before I drove to the coworking space today, I drove with my wife, with our cars full of the final boxes to put in our teeny tiny pod, which we will then repack and send on a pallet or two overseas. But it’s doing that kind of thing and I’m freaking out a little bit. I’m also really happy and excited, kind of to step into this brand-new adventure and also be launching a book at the same time is super, super awesome and super exhausting. I don’t think I’ve had more than five hours sleep for the last four or five days. So, tonight I’m hoping to sleep. I have done zero writing for it, for about seven days, not even, I think I have journaled twice and I normally do my morning pages. If you have never done morning pages, I encourage you to try if you have never done The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which is where the morning pages idea comes from. I always encourage people to try that. It is, three pages, handwritten first thing in the morning, and honestly, it is a life-changing exercise. And I basically do my morning pages every day, and I have now for several years. I kind of go in and out of the morning pages, but I’ve been deeply in them. And the fact that I haven’t even been doing that is very strange and feels very odd in my body. So, I’m hoping to get back to that tomorrow, because tomorrow they’re just going to be laying floor, flooring and carpet, and I can’t help with that. I can just unlock the house and let them do that. So, that’s where I am.

[00:04:00] I feel silly and giddy and excited and very glad and honored that you are here with me listening to the show even on a day when I’m giddy and excited and weird. And, I have no idea who you’re about to listen to. Please enjoy. Please come find me on the socials, and tell me how your writing is going. I really, really care. I really love to hear this from you. So, that is all. Next week, I’ll have more information on everything about the podcast, but this week we don’t have it. So, and that is just goes to show. We can have a shitty first draft and move forward with our writing lives. I don’t think this metaphor is working, but, normally, you know, my metaphors are a little bit better. They’ll be better in the future. This does feel like a first draft podcast. Here we go. Enjoy the interview. Happy writing, my friends.

Rachael Herron: [00:04:53] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show today, Meghan Scott Molin. Hello, Meghan!

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:04:58] Hi. How are you?

Rachael Herron: [00:05:00] I’m good. I, we were just talking for a second before the show. I know you just ran in from the barn where the horse is sick.

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:05:05] Yes.

Rachael Herron: [00:05:06] Is the horse going to be okay?

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:05:08] Horse is going to be okay. Kids are over the norovirus. This is my life.

Rachael Herron: [00:05:14] And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:05:15] It’s chaos! Pure chaos.

Rachael Herron: [00:05:18] Writing it around the chaos. Awesome. Let me give you a little bio for you. Meghan Scott Molin comes to writing by way of a Masters in Architecture, a minor in Opera, a professional career as a barn manager, and, barn, I sounded like I said bar there. Different. And five years crash course as a mother. She currently resides in Colorado with her fellow zookeeper (husband), sons, horse, adopted stray cats, and corgi. She is an avid lover of everything nerdy from Wars to Trek, Hobbits, Who, and beyond. When she’s not writing, she’s cooking, dreaming of travel, coveting more corgis, and listening to audiobooks while hanging out at the barn. Welcome!

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:05:54] Thank you so much for having me. I absolutely love your podcast. It keeps me going.

Rachael Herron: [00:05:59] Oh, thank you so much. That means a lot to me. Doing the podcast and speaking to people like you is what keeps me going. So, I want to talk to you about your process because how the hell do you do it all? That’s what I would like to know. Cause you are, how old are your kids?

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:06:16] Two and five. So, in theory this year, I would have had kindergarten to help me out, but not so much. Now I’m a kindergarten teacher.

Rachael Herron: [00:06:28] That should also go on your amazing bio. Unofficial kindergarten teacher. What a fricking year. So, let’s talk about your writing process. How do you get it done? I want to know like how and where, when, all of it.

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:06:45] Well, I wish I could say that I had some sort of process that looked great on Instagram and that I was elated about. But I think the reason I reached out to you is that I’m operating in a land of middle grounds and a land of not ideals and I don’t think that I’m the only one. And I think so many of us do look at social media and do listen to interviews and think that everybody has it all together. I wanted to offer a realistic view of how someone is getting writing done, even though, it does not look great on Insta.

Rachael Herron: [00:07:21] I love that. I absolutely love that. So, because it’s so it’s such an easy fallacy to fall into believing. So, what does writing look like to you on a day-to-day basis?

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:07:33] So I, because of this last year, I had to find something that was sustainable. And in my head, I had this picture of what being at home with little kids would look like, with writing and, my corgi is coming to say, hi, sorry. Hopefully he doesn’t get in the shot.

Rachael Herron: [00:07:48] Great. My dog’s probably going to bark in a second. So yeah.

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:07:51] So I, I just think that, rather than that, that clip art of the mom with the computer and her kid, I really had to be realistic about what my life looked like, what my kids were. And my kids are very light sleepers, very early morning risers and working in the mornings is really tricky for me. So, I write in my closet on a floor chair, and I have pictures on my Instagram if anybody ever wants to take a look at my, really not illustrious setup. But I ninja out of bed about 30 to 45 minutes before my kids get up and I have to do it like super silently. I can’t get tea. I can’t go look out the window. I can’t work at my desk. I take my laptop and I sit literally in a dark corner where I can’t wake up my husband and I turn off the internet and I do write. And it’s,

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Ep. 237: Kristin Beck on How to Shut Up Your Inner Editor

June 25, 2021

Kristin Beck first learned about World War II from her grandmother, who served as a Canadian army nurse, fell in love with an American soldier in Belgium, and married him shortly after VE Day. Kristin thus grew up hearing stories about the war, and has been captivated by the often unsung roles of women in history ever since. A former teacher, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Washington and a Master’s in Teaching from Western Washington University. Kristin lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children. This is her first novel.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #237 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So thrilled that you’re here with me today, as we are talking to Kristin Beck, who was a delight. And she is talking about that perennial question that we all have on quietening or quieting, depending on whether you are using American or British pronunciation, spelling, quieting that inner editor. We all need to work on doing that. We all have to learn how to do it. It is something that never goes away. So, I know you’re going to enjoy this delightful interview. All right. What is going on around here? As I was preparing to record, I was like, there’s just nothing going on around here, writing wise. I remember coming from a migraine, so this will be quick. That’s why the podcast is late. Yesterday, when I normally would have done it, I just had to cancel everything and go to bed and I felt very grateful to be self-employed that I could do that. Although if I was, if I put you out in any way, I apologize for that. I had to do that to a few people as I, as the migraine knocked me out.

[00:01:24] However, the migraine is also making my brain slow and I forgot that I have a book coming out this week as you listen to this episode. It comes out on Tuesday, May 11th. It is called “Hush Little Baby” and I think it’s my best book yet. It is scary. It is intense. I was just texting with a book seller who loved it and we happen to be friends, so we were texting and he said it was incredibly tense and really stressed them out in a good way. It’s so fun! It’s so fun. And I’m very proud of this book. It has a little tiny bit of sobriety in it, which I am pleased with, but it’s just about a character who happens to be sober. It’s also about a character who happens to be queer. This is definitely not me in this book, but we always put pieces of ourselves in our books. And I’m proud of this book. I hope that you like it. Also, I would like to invite you to something. Yes, you. You, wherever you’re sitting, wherever you’re listening. If you hear this in time, I would love you to come to the virtual launch party. I’m so excited about the launch party because, for all of the books in my career that I have written, my launch parties are in person, and they are in the bay area, and friends come, fans come. It’s fantastic. But it’s the bay area. I am restricted geographically. This time for the first time, we are not restricted geographically. And my launch party, which is on Friday night, Friday, May 14th. If you’re listening to this, 2021, I will be in conversation with Sarah Shepherd of Pretty Little Liars at Murder by the Book, which is just the most wonderful thriller, murder, mystery, crime fiction bookstore in Houston, Texas. And it’s really one of my top two bookstores in the world. And, the other one that I love is, Diesel Books or East Bay Booksellers, and that’s because it happens to be my local bookseller, but otherwise it would be Murder by the Book for sure. And, I’m so pleased to be doing my launch with them. So, if you want to come, I would love it.

[00:03:44] We’re just going to be chatting about books. We’re going to be talking about writing. We are going to be talking about this particular book and it is at 5:00 PM Pacific time, on Friday, May 14th. And the link that you can go to, to go, to watch for free is murderbooks.com/herron. Murderbooks.com/H E R R O N. All the information is there. I would really love it if you came, plus I’m really nervous that nobody will show up and then Murder by the Book will be unhappy with me. But I hope that doesn’t happen. Also, if you buy your book from them, pre-order it, or order it that day, I will send you a signed book plate, signed, made out to whoever you want, and it’s an awesome book plate Dutton designed it for me and it’s covered with blood spatter. You can actually see it in my Instagram stories or on my TikTok, if you want to go find me there. But it is the best book plate that I’ve ever seen and you want it, even if you get the book in, e-version send me proof of receipt in whatever way you want to Rachael @RachaelHerron.com and I will send you a book plate. So, but I’d really love to have you come, hear me talk to John at Murder Books and Sarah Shepherd, who is an amazing writer, and it’s going to be fun. Friday, May 14th, 7:00 PM Central, 5:00 PM Pacific, 8:00 PM Eastern. You should come, murderbooks.com/herron.

[00:05:10] All right, that’s my, push for that. Also, this week, I- my Fast Draft Your Memoir came out in German. So, if you’re a German speaker and you’d like to read that, please go do that, that’s available. And that was exciting, also working on Fast Draft Your Memoir workbook questions or I’m doing, a brand-new workbook that goes along with that book, we’re kind of optimizing what we can, I’m doing that with my assistant ed who is wonderful. But the thing that’s really exciting this week is the release of Hush Little Baby. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you, oh, if you’re looking at it, at me on the YouTube, if you’re one of the few people who do that, most people do consume this with their ears, not their eyes, but the posters behind me and it’s such a good cover, I love it. So, that is all the news that I have for you today. Let us jump into the interview with Kristin Beck. I know you’re going to enjoy it. I hope that your writing is going well. I hope that you do not have a migraine and that there is no migraine in your future. And I believe in you, I believe in your writing in your book. So please get a little writing done and come find me on the internet and tell me how it went. Okay, my friends. Bye.

[00:06:30] 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: [00:06:49] All right. Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show today, Kristin Beck. Hi Kristin!

Kristin Beck: [00:06:53] Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Rachael Herron: [00:06:55] I am delighted to have you, let me give you a little bit of an intro before we get started. Kristin Beck first learned about World War II from her grandmother, who served as a Canadian army nurse, fell in love with an American soldier in Belgium, and married him shortly after VE Day. Kristin thus grew up hearing stories about the war, and has been captivated by the often unsung roles of women in history ever since. A former teacher, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Washington and a Master’s in Teaching from Western Washington University. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children. So welcome to the show! We are talking about writing and its process. Your first novel just came out, right?

Kristin Beck: [00:07:38] No, it’s coming out actually in a few weeks. It’s April 13th is the update.

Rachael Herron: [00:07:42] So by the time this show goes live, it will be out. Will you tell us the title and just a little bit about your book?

Kristin Beck: [00:07:49] Sure. So, the book is called Courage, My Love, and it is about, two women in the Italian resistance who led very different lives. And, when the German occupation takes over in Rome, they’re both pulled into the resistance and decided that they need to fight back.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:06] I am in love with all things Italian. So, when I was asked about this, but I’m only about halfway done with the book right now, but I am loving it. And it’s just so fun and beautiful. Where did this idea come to you from, for these women?

Kristin Beck: [00:08:22] Well, so when I was in my twenties, I lived in Italy two different times.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:27] Where?

Kristin Beck: [00:08:29] Once in Sienna.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:29] Oh, I love Sienna.

Kristin Beck: [00:08:31] And then just outside of Venice as a teacher for a semester. So yeah, so it was, it was pretty dreamy. So, I’ve always loved all things Italian as well. And I was looking, I was actually just sort of looking into women and the resistance in general during the war. Not totally searching for ideas for books, just sort of interested. And I came across a newspaper article of the staffette, which were women couriers during the war in Italy. And I was just sort of, captivated by that. I hadn’t heard much about them. And so, I started reading, and kind of delved in the way historical nerds do. And, after a few weeks of reading about them, I just thought I would really like to write a book about these women

Rachael Herron: [00:09:16] And you did.

Kristin Beck: [00:09:18] And yes, and then I did, and here we are.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:21] And how does this, so this, this is a podcast about process and how we get the work done. How did you fit this into your life and around your life? Where does, where does writing fit?

Kristin Beck: [00:09:32] So my writing schedule tends to revolve around school schedules, because I,

Rachael Herron: [00:09:36] How, how old are the kids?

Kristin Beck: [00:09:38] They are nearly 9 and 11.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:40] Okay.

Kristin Beck: [00:09:41] So, not super young anymore. But I tend to write when they are at school, so I kind of get everyone packed off for the day. And then I sit down and I work for as many hours as I can, which on the good days is until it’s pickup time. And then other days I have other business things to do for writing.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:02] So what are you doing now? Are you working on the next book?

Kristin Beck: [00:10:05] I’m actually working on the third book. I, so I had a two-book contract when I sold Courage and wrote that second book last year, during well, it’s still the pandemic, but really during the pandemic and so that one is in editing right now and I am working on number three.

[Read more…]

Ep. 236: Kathleen West On Deliberately Writing Scenes You Won’t Use

June 25, 2021

Kathleen West’s novels, Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes and Are We There Yet?, have been best books picks by Real Simple, Newsweek, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Good Morning America, Pop Sugar, and the New York Post. A teacher for 20 years before she published her first novel, Kathleen is particularly interested in the topics of motherhood, ambition, competitive parenting, and the elusiveness of work-life balance. She is a life-long Minnesotan and lives in Minneapolis with her family.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 236 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I am so thrilled that you’re here with me today. As I talked to Kathleen West, who was an absolute delight. She was one of those people that I just wanted to adopt into my life immediately. We had a great chat and she has this great craft tip on deliberately writing scenes you’re not going to use. And I loved it and I’m trying it actually at the moment. So I know you’re going to get a lot out of the interview, stick around for that. What’s going on around here? Well, if you watch on YouTube, you can see that I’m in a completely different space. I am in a co-working space because my office is blown apart. So I apologize if the sound quality isn’t quite up to what you’re used to. I won’t be able to bring my big boom mic and I mean, I could, it would look really weird getting it here on Bart. But for the next few months I will probably be recording quite a bit in here. I will definitely be teaching in here. Because it is not comfortable to be at my house when people are inside the house, working on it, doing things, painting, and I needed a place to escape. And it just kind of wanted to mention it because this is me taking my job seriously. This is me giving myself a place to work that is quiet. That is mine. That is not in the middle of chaos.

[00:01:52] So, it was exciting. This is my very first time being in here. I took Bart and took the train to get here, which was incredibly nerve wracking. I did not know my nerves would be so wrecked to be on Bart for the first time in more than a year, I am vaccinated, fully vaccinated. You know, it’s been more than a month, but still on the train, you can’t get more than six feet away from people. Even, I, you know, I came over at like two o’clock and not rush hour and still you’re right next to people. So that was a little weird and I didn’t feel comfortable also getting here was a little weird. I just want to say and honor the fact that anytime we do something for the first time or doing something for the first time and it’s hard and it’s nerve-wracking, you can just walk in here, you know, figuring out the path to get to this building. I’m up on the sixth floor, I’m looking at the Oakland federal building, the double towers, there’s a pale blue sky and light blue clouds. And I’m looking at the Skyway walk over. This is downtown Oakland. It’s really a place that I love. And I love that this is the view I have right now, in this co-working space, I can ‘rent’ or ‘borrow’ privately offices whenever I want, which is actually what I’m going to be doing the whole time I’m here because I still don’t want to be sitting out in the co-working space. So I’m going to just be grabbing these private offices to be in. I’m feeling very grateful, very lucky, and also pretty darn sensible for taking myself and my job seriously. This is what I’m going to be doing when we get to New Zealand after we get out of quarantine. I was super stressed trying to find Airbnbs cause we don’t know where we’re going to be living. We don’t know what city we’re going to be in. You know, trying to find rentals that had three bedrooms because my wife needs an office. I need an office and I realized, oh, or will you just do co-working spaces? And that’s such a relief and it’s just a business expense. And yeah, honestly, I’m pretty stoked about it. I’m supposed to be sitting on the other side of the desk with my back to the window, but why would I do that? Because what an incredible view. So also it’s very bright, so you can see me in all the full glory on YouTube. I usually- there is no ring light needed in this office. I must tell you that.

[00:04:17] What else is going on? Yeah. Waylon our cat, who we rehomed is settling in beautifully. He loves the kids. He’s getting petted all the time and he’s getting a lot of love so that, does our hearts very, very good. We needed to hear that. The move itself is coming along. However, I will say that we are entering a couple of weeks of the hardest stuff, you know, moving all of the boxes that we have filled out into the pod and then from the pod into organizing it onto the pallet, which will go onto the container ship, which will take our stuff. We’re only taking one pallets worth of goods, unless we take two because it just seems like not enough space for the boxes that we have. They assure us it’s all going to fit on one pallet, there are people who are shipping it on the container ship, so we shall see, we can always order another pallet. It’s not very expensive. Thank goodness. So, but that’s the kind of thing we’re doing. We’re doing pretty big and ups-upsetting. I’m using the word upsetting deliberately because it is upsetting the status quo, the normal every day. And I just wanted to mention that yesterday, I had a meeting with my mastermind’s group and this is a group of writers. We’ve been meeting probably off and on for a year or so maybe more. Most of them are urban fantasy writers. All of them- no, we kind of, we kind of run the gamut, but there are a couple of urban fantasy writers and these are all people who have been in the business as long as I have. We all entered around 2009, 2010, and they are so important to me.

[00:06:00] We don’t meet that often, maybe once a month, once every two months. But when I sat down yesterday, we do a hot seat row, you know, just, we rotate through all the way through all five of us. Everybody gets a turn to talk about what they’re struggling with, and what I said I was struggling with was trying to figure out what to write, how to write working on how many books are in process right now, something like five or six plus re-releases of at least six. I know I had the numbers. I think the last time I was on the podcast, but the numbers are high. How do I focus? How do I get things done? I did finish the faster after memoir workbook. The German edition will be coming out soon. So things are getting completed because I am choosing to focus on one thing at a time and getting them off of my desk. But what my mastermind group said was Rachael, for the love of God, why don’t you cut yourself some slack and just move. I love that advice. I can’t take that advice because I’m Rachael. But I can take a little bit of that advice. I can take it for in the spirit, with which it was meant, which means I can understand that I am not going to get as much done as I usually do when I have a home office. And I go there in the morning and I leave at night. Everything is up in the air and it’s okay if I’m up in the air too, I need to remember to treat myself with gentleness, understand that I’m still and always will be a writer. I could do a little bit less. And this is what I tell my students when they are in the throws of the hard stuff in life. And we’re talking the hard stuff we’re talking, moving divorce, loss, death, grief, a pandemic. I’m not being lazy.

[00:07:47] I’m always worried that I’m being lazy, which is something you might identify with in this work-obsessed productivity, obsessed culture. And I freely admit that I am just as obsessed with productivity as the next person, if not more, but we have to remember to give ourselves a break when stuff is hard. And stuff is a little bit hard for me right now. It’s good. It’s all chosen stuff. So that makes it feel good, better but I still have to go gentle. So I just thought, I would say that in case you’re dealing with some hard stuff or some big life changes, if you’re beating yourself up in any way, I want you to knock it off. No, beating yourself up, do a little bit of writing, do what you can, and then pat yourself on the back really hard. Give yourself that California granola hug, like literally put your arms around your shoulders and give yourself a squeeze because you’re amazing. You’re amazing. And look, you’re here. You’re thinking about writing. You want to think about writing. I thank you for spending this time with me. It really means a lot to me. And I’m so glad that you’re here. I just want to take a second to thank new Patreon members. I don’t think I thank them last week. Helen Conway and Rita Zelos, thank you so, so, so much. If anyone is ever interested in supporting me over on Patreon it eally makes a huge difference in my life. It allows me to write these essays on right now, I’m writing chapters of the book about moving to New Zealand. You can always look at that @patreon.com/Rachael R A C H A E L. And a new essay will be coming out tomorrow on the day that this podcast goes live. So if you’d like to read about moving to New Zealand, that’s the place to do it. All right. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. And I know you’re going to enjoy this interview with Kathleen West. Please keep doing your writing. You’re the only, I know it sounds like a cliché. It sounds trite, but I really, really mean it. If you don’t write your book, no one will write your book and we will lose your book or your books. And we need those. We need those in the round. So, do you writing friends. Do a little bit, come find me on the internet and then tell me all about it. I’d love to hear that and happy writing.

[00:10:00] 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: [00:10:18] Well, I could not be more pleased to have on the show today, Kathleen West. Welcome, Kathleen!

Kathleen West: [00:10:22] Thank you so much, Rachael, I’m so happy to be here.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:25] I am thrilled to talk to you. I’m loving your book. I’m right smack dab in the middle of it. So I’m not sure what’s going to happen yet. So it’s kind of the sweet spot of being in a book. Anyway, let me give you a little introduction. Kathleen West novels, Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes and Are We There Yet? have been best book picks by Real Simple, Newsweek, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Good Morning, America, Pop Sugar, and the New York Post. A teacher for 20 years before she published her first novel, Kathleen is particularly interested in the topics of motherhood, ambition, competitive parenting, Ooh that’s all in this book. And the elusiveness of work-life balance. She’s a life-long, Minnesotan and lives in Minneapolis with her family. So welcome. This show is for writers and we talk about writing, but I would love to know, are you still teaching or are you full-time writing now?

Kathleen West: [00:11:16] Well, I was full-time writing last school year, 2019-2020. And this fall, I taught third grade full-time in the fall. So just, I really found myself missing teaching during the pandemic, which sounds crazy, but I really

Rachael Herron: [00:11:35] It does.

Kathleen West: [00:11:36] I realized that teaching is really a coping mechanism for me. Like if I have to be like the adult in charge in front of a classroom of kids, like that helps me deal with our realities. So I, it was a perfect opportunity, the woman who replaced me had a baby this fall, so same classroom, same colleagues. I just dashed back in for a semester. I felt like I was doing a great thing for myself and for the kids. And then I was back to writing full-time in December.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:05] Wow. So were you doing on zoom or were you in the classroom at that point?

Kathleen West: [00:12:08] I was in person with them, I had half the kids every day. So 10 were with me and then 10 were with my assistant and then we would alternate day by day and then in November, when everything peaked, we were online for between like the week before Thanksgiving and then until winter break.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:26] Wow! And it seems like, I mean, you have such a cheerful aspect about doing that. It seems like you enjoyed it.

Kathleen West: [00:12:31] I did, you know, I really loved my students this year. They were like a lovely group of kids, really adaptable and flexible. And I love the other third grade teacher that I worked with at school. So really nice to be back with her and to kind of engage in that friendship again and then I also knew I was going to be done. So,

Rachael Herron: [00:12:53] I love that. Yeah. And it had a timeline on it. Yeah. So, when you- now, and so now you’re back full time writing. Can you tell us a little bit about your process? How do you get work done? Are you a morning writer? Are you a binge writer? What, how does that work for you?

Kathleen West: [00:13:08] Yeah, when I first started writing seriously, not that long ago, like 2015. I worked really early in the morning before school, so I’d get up at like 5 o’clock, 4:45 when I was working on a project work until 6:15, and that was that like, that was the time of day that I was I’m awake and free to do my stuff. So, that’s what I did. And now that I am more flexible with writing as more of a bigger, bigger part of my real career, I don’t tend to get up that early anymore. I don’t, you know, I get up at 6 or whatever, you know, between

Rachael Herron: [00:13:43] That’s still damn early

Kathleen West: [00:13:45] I start writing usually until everybody settled, you know, like I might do email or other tasks and then in terms of like binge writing, et cetera, when I’m in the drafting phase, it’s very painful. Like first draft I can- it’s I can hardly do it. It hurts my body,

Rachael Herron: [00:14:02] Me too

Kathleen West: [00:14:03] Put the words down on the way. So I have to just make very small goals, like 200 words, and you can have a coffee. 200 more words, and you can go on Twitter. If you hit 800, you can walk the dog, you know, like, so just like little chunks and now, like I have a book due next week. I know like the convergence of the launch of my new book and this due date is really my own fault. It’s because of the teaching this fall. And then I didn’t finish by March 1st when I said I was going to so

Rachael Herron: [00:14:31] That’s so difficult though.

Kathleen West: [00:14:33] Yes. But this feels like the last revision, like I can really disappear into that work for hours and hours. But other than that, I really can’t. I don’t know. I’m very distractible.

[Read more…]

Ep. 235: Nancy Stohlman on Why Writing Short is So Exciting

June 25, 2021

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 235 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron, and I am thrilled that you’re here with me today as I speak to Nancy Stohlman on why writing short, and I mean, short, short, short is so exciting. I found this conversation completely fascinating, and I hope that you do too. So she was a delight, please stick around for that. What’s going on around here? Well, the move continues a pace, we did a pretty- not pretty, a very difficult thing. This last weekend, when we gave our kitty Waylon to someone who’s adopting him and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And I know that sounds over-reactive if you are not an animal person, but if you are, you understand. Waylon is too old to make the trip safely. Cats just die. His age, either during the flight or during the quarantine, and we can’t do that to him. Waylon is also the one that lost his dog this, you know, a couple of months ago, also lost his twin brother about a month ago. So, rehoming him was so much harder than it normally would have been because we felt like we were stripping everything from him, which we were, and it was awful, but, we took him to a home with three incredible, adorable, smart kids who just want to love him. And Waylon is just made of love and apparently he’s just been loving everybody in the house and fitting in and we’re crossing our fingers. But it works out really well and that he stays there and, that’s why we did it early.

[00:01:59] So they have some time to take him for a test run although I don’t think they have any interest in taking him for a test run. I think they have adopted him wholeheartedly and that makes me feel good and it makes me sad, but we are one- I think that was honestly the hardest thing we’re going to have to do in this move. I could just say goodbye to my sisters and my people, because I can talk to them. I can continue talking to them on zoom. I can come back and see them. You can’t explain this kind of thing to a little old man cat. So, yeah, I’m glad that’s done because it was excruciating. What else is going on around here? Well, I just finished doing our taxes and this was the best year ever since I talked about that in my money show at the beginning of the year, but it’s always a little bit different in April when my tax person says, oh, and don’t forget, you made this here, and you made that. And here’s your, what you made- net and she just pointed out to me couple hours ago, the year that I went full time, 2016, I netted $20,000 from my writing business. And in 2020, 4 years later, I netted $160,000. That’s after expenses. So that’s amazing! That’s so awesome. And I am proud of myself and I am happy and grateful. And I wanted to take this moment to talk to you a little bit about money. And I’ve said this before on the show, and I will say it again, but this is for you, if you want to be a full-time writer. And by that, I mean, if you want to be a person who sustains financially half or more, of a household.

[00:03:46] I needed to continue to bring in my half of the mortgage and our half of the bills. And we live in the bay area and it’s expensive. And honestly that first year of 2016, that net did not cover what I needed, we had to go a little bit in the savings then I believe if I’m remembering correctly, I know that I needed to bring in $36,000 a year, when I left the job in order to cover those things. And here is what that looks like: If you want to be full-time, if this is something that you must bring in money to support your family or yourself, there’s one thing that you have to do. There’s a few things, but the most important thing you have to do is get out of debt. And I know that we don’t talk about that enough in America or, you know, anywhere really, but debt is one of those things that so many people carry around. And they don’t talk about it because it’s shameful. And by carrying it around and being ashamed of it and not talking about it, it gets worse and worse and worse. And I have a set on the show and I’ll say it again. I think our deepest in debt moment was not including our house. We were $125,000 worth of dollars in debt. That included an IRS bill, my student loan, 40 or $45,000 worth of credit card debt and something else. Now, maybe it was just those three things. We have never carried any money on the cars because we drive hoopies, and that’s okay. That’s what we like. But that was a lot of debt and that is why I worked a full-time job. And I wrote for the first, for six or seven years after I was first published. Yeah. Six years. My first book came out in 2010. So I’d been getting paid for writing since about 2008 when I sold my first book and I continued to work double full-time jobs until 2016 in order to get out of that debt. And I just wanted to put a plug in for a tool that is how we got out of debt. I’m not affiliated, I’m not getting any kickbacks for this, but YouNeedaBudget.com YNAB, Y-N-A-B. YouNeedaBudget.com is life-changing, I didn’t start using it until I was late thirties and I only started using it because best friend Sophie Littlefield was also really struggling with money after being divorced and winding up broke with nothing to show and no way of understanding how money works and how to take care of ourselves.

[00:06:34] And somehow I got into our late thirties and I’ve always been the one who does the bills, but I just didn’t understand how money worked. And I didn’t understand how much I needed to save and put away and not spend every month because of the bills that were going to be coming. Like I’m a smart, intelligent person. I thought I always knew what was coming and yet, we were always clap caught flat-footed we were always needing to use the credit cards because we just weren’t gonna make it through that at the end of that month and this is nothing to be ashamed of. This is normal. I’m going to look up a stat. I found it. It is from a study by the federal reserve. This came out last year. Almost half of American adults would not be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash from savings. That’s almost half of Americans don’t have enough to cover $400 worth of emergency anything. So if you’re in that camp, don’t feel embarrassed. I mean, I know it’s normal to feel shame, but the more we talk about it, the more we look at it, the more we gaze upon it, the more we understand that we’ve all been in that boat, the easier it gets. So why YNAB, YouNeedaBudget, is kind of like mint or, you know, other budgeting software, but in another way, it isn’t at all. It is nothing like those things. I can’t explain it to you. They will have to explain it to you. They have a million awesome, cute cartoon, lank little videos that teach you how to use the software, but basically, you give every dollar that you own at this moment, a job, and that’s the magic of it. So even if you have $10,000 in your checking account right now, in your head, when you look at YNAB, it might show you that you have maybe, you know, $700 left for the rest of the month, because every other dollar in there is being held for something.

[00:08:33] And that, I was thinking about it today, because that is why we stopped getting pets. This is true when Lala and I moved in together 15 years ago, we just adopted animals and they are all dying out. Because animals, dogs and cats typically live around 15 years. And that is why we have lost three of five this year to old age. And then a fourth too. Adopting away. And then we’ll loan my dog Dozy to my friend, Sophie, while we’re looking for housing in New Zealand, and then we’ll bring Dozy over. But we’ve lost three out of five because we all, we adopted them. We filled up the house with animals and then using YNAB, I came to learn over the course of months of using it, that amortized over the year, every single animal cost us about a hundred dollars a month, in pet supplies and in veterinary care. So if we had five animals, we were spending on average $500 a month on something pet related and we were broke, broke, broke, broke, and we were drowning in debt. And I realized, oh my God, if I keep the kitten that I just found, cause I’m always finding animals. That’s another a hundred dollars a month. We can’t afford it. And that’s when I started being really, getting really good at finding alternate homes for pets. And that’s kind of what I did for a while because I find animals. And, so it taught as things like that. And you save up for things so that when things arise, or fall in your lap, you have the money just to write the check, just to spend the money because it’s in his own little bucket and I cannot explain how it works so well, but it does.

[00:10:09] And I’ve told so many friends and family about this app and they get out of debt and they tell me that it has changed their lives and retell YNAB. YNAB has testimonials on their site about how people’s lives have been changed by this. I owed money to the IRS, today, after I met with my tax person, but I knew what I owe, and it was in a savings account and I just get to write a check and it’s covered. I have the money right there waiting to be paid. And it is a monthly fee nowadays. It used to be that you could just buy the program once, but of course they’ve moved over to a monthly thing. I can’t actually remember how much it is. Maybe $10? I’m guessing. It is worth it. If you are struggling with your finances in any way at all, and if you want to be a full-time writer someday, get you the YNAB. I’m really, I couldn’t push this more, this is right up there with, in order to be a writer, you have to sit down and do some crappy, terrible wordsmithing. Sometimes, if you want to support yourself by writing, you need to be out of debt. Debt is an emergency. I don’t include mortgage debt. Personally, I do include student loan debt because that is your sorriest. I can never say that word. You should. You know the word I’m talking about. I read it. I can’t say it. You serious. They are so predatory. I took out a loan for $40,000 for my master’s degree after paying it for I’ve written all these stats down, now I forgot them, after paying it for 12 or 13 years, I owed them $50,000 and I’d paid them $26,000 over those years. So I owed them more than I had taken out after paying them $26,000. And believe me, once I finally did that math and they do not make it easy, then we started funneling all our money at that last debt that we had because everyone says student loan, that is okay. I don’t think it’s okay. So treat your debt like an emergency, if you want to be a full-time writer and if you have to bring in money for your household, and that’s probably the best thing you can do for your writing self apart from doing the writing.

[00:12:18] So, that’s my little pep talk today and I want you all to be able to be that full-time writer, if you want to. Do that, it is absolutely possible. Yeah it’s and it’s awesome. And now we’re moving to New Zealand and that’s, we can afford to do that because we don’t have debt behind me, if you’re watching on the YouTube video, I’ve got the Hush Little Baby poster just went up over my shoulder that comes out in about three weeks. I really should be doing more for that. And I’m not. So I need to get on that. I’ve got a couple of articles to write. But I’m getting excited about that. I will let you guys know about the launch party, which will be online at a Murder by The Book in Houston with my friend John, who runs the bookstore. So that’s going to be fun. I believe let’s look that up right now. If you want to mark your calendar, it’s free to come. I would love to have you. It is on May 14th. I think it’s free to come. They may want you to buy a book. I haven’t actually looked into the details, but it is Murder by The Book on May 14th, please come. I would love to see you. I’m also going to be sending out signed book plates for anybody who buys a book from Murder by The Book. So if you want a signed book plate to put in your Hush Little Baby, I would love to do that for you and there. My plug is done for that, and we can go into the interview with Nancy Stohlman. Please enjoy it. Please enjoy your own writing. And I’m really, really glad that you’re here.

[00:13:43] Do you wonder why you’re not getting your creative work done? Do you make a plan to write and then fail to follow through? Again? Well, my sweet friend, maybe you’d get a lot out of my Patreon. Each month, I write an essay on living your creative life as a creative person, which is way different than living as a person who’ve been just Netflix 20 hours a week and I have lived both of those ways, so I know. You can get each essay and access to the whole back catalog of them for just a dollar a month. Which is an amount that really truly helps support me at this here writing desk. If you pledge the $3 level, you’ll get motivating texts from me that you can respond to. And if you pledge at the $5 a month level, you get to ask me questions about your creative life, that I’ll answer in the mini episodes. So basically I’m your mini coach. Go to patreon.com/Rachael (R A C H A E L) to get these perks and more and thank you so much.

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

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

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

Nancy Stohlman: [00:15:00] Yes.

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

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

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Ep: 234: Should I Write a Book Proposal?

June 25, 2021

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

Books mentioned:

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

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

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

For revision:

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #234 of “How do you Write?” This as a bonus mini episode brought to you by my patrons at the $5 and up level, you get to ask me any question that you want and I’ll answer it here on the podcast. I usually collect them until I have a couple or three or four. And then I do a mini podcast. So here is the collection of what I’ve gotten so far. And these are some good questions. The first one comes from Thomas Langer. Hi, Rachael, here’s a mini coaching question. Is there such a thing as memoir fiction, analogous to what we call historical fiction? And what is your opinion of this approach? As I write a memoir, I have created some hybrid scenes and characters and some of them are so hybrid that I think it is straying into fiction. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks. So I’m so glad that you asked there is a category it’s not easily shelvable. People do have problems shelving it, but it is called fictionalized memoir or less frequently I see the term auto fiction kind of like autobiography fiction. The important thing is, if you’re straying into something that feels like fiction and our guts always know, our guts know the difference between conflating time periods and pushing characters into one amalgam of a character and recreating dialogue, as best as we think the dialogue went on that day when the car crashed, that’s all acceptable in memoir, you get to do that. It’s just common practice. We know that memoirists are writing. They’re basically writing.

[00:01:59] A novel, like thing, bringing us into their world in a way that really no human can- most humans cannot remember things that well. So there’s a contract with the reader that says the memoirist gets to stretch what they believe the truth to be into things like dialogue action really concrete scenes. Writers do struggle with, is this fiction if I’m making it up, it is not fiction. If you follow Rachael’s 80% rule, which is if you’re 80% sure that it really happened this way, because you know these people involved and they probably said something like this, then you get to use it. If you just heard something in the background, that was my wife yelling at people on TikToK. So she’s not going to do that anymore. Real life. So you get to as a memoirist, do that. But when you start making up scenes that, you know didn’t happen, making up people that are not a composite amalgam of characters of people that you knew, but actually somebody new and fresh on the page. Then you do have to say that it’s fiction of some sort and you can call it fictionalized memoir. You can call it auto fiction. You can call it what you want, but naming it, I think is important. And it is kind of having a moment for maybe the last four or five years, people know what it is. They understand it. Michael Chabon’s book Moonglow did some historical stuff within what he imagined in his family that I thought was really well done. You may want to take a look at that also, Sheila Heti wrote, How Should A Person Be, which is obviously about her. And it is obviously also a novel at the same time.

[00:03:46] The Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill, I thought was a remarkable, remarkable book and it reads like a memoir and in some ways it is about the dissolution of her marriage, and in other ways, it isn’t. So check out some auto fiction, see what you think about it, see how you feel about it. And then you do, at some point, you don’t have to do this on a first draft. You have to make a decision on what it’s going to be. And now that I’ve said that it might be a good thing to decide while you’re doing a first draft, which is really a rare thing for me to say, but before you do make up a lot of stuff, if you’re later going to decide, you want to write a memoir, then you’re going to have to take all of that out. So I would say, decide. Do you want to write a novel? Do you run and write a memoir or do you want to write something that you will say to people this is fictionalized memoir and it’s really kind of a nice place to be because your readers cannot decide what is real and what is true is another business anyway, it also allows you to add things that you wish happened. Add things that you wish you had done or said, or that you imagine the people around you did and said in rooms where you weren’t. So if you choose that way, excuse me, I think it can be really, really fun and really interesting. So great question. Yes. Follow your gut on this one. All right.

[00:05:06] And this one is from Michelle. I’m just going to read the end of her question, but she was basically, she was asked to write a book proposal for a memoir for a competition that she did not enter. My question is, would it be helpful for me to do a book proposal for the competition and then use it in the future? I’ve never heard you talk about this before so I feel like it’s not necessary and would be a waste of money, but proposal seemed to be more geared towards non-fiction. Plus, I don’t want to do it. I have zero platform. I have zero plans as to how I will make money, et cetera, et cetera. I can make stuff up, but it feels fake. Thoughts? Oh, Michelle, I love this question. So yes, you’re right. Book proposals are more geared toward non-fiction and we kind of had these, we have these three buckets that we talk a lot about on the show. We have novels fictional, we have memoir and we have nonfiction. And this dovetails beautifully with Thomas’ question. Memoir is true, but memoir really fits in the novel category in terms of story, there is a story and it’s structured like a novel. So most people, most agents are not going to ask you for a book proposal for a memoir. It does happen. We do see it, especially nowadays when it’s competitive out there and agents want to know, can you pull together book proposal if I asked for one, but I’ve had people success, I’ve had students successfully get agents by only targeting the agents who didn’t want a book proposal for memoir. That is, it’s not a normal thing to request, although it is getting a little bit more seen. And your agent should be able to sell your memoir to a publisher without a book proposal, too. Memoirs are like novels they sell because of the story underneath it.

[00:06:58] Nonfiction, when we’re talking about like, you know, how to build your platform or how to create excellent house design. I don’t know. I’m spit balling here, but non-fiction is nonfiction. Memoir is a story and novels are a story. So therefore you shouldn’t need a book proposal. If you do need to write a book proposal, any of you, Google, you know how I feel about Reedsy, Google Reedsy, nonfiction book proposal, and they have an excellent guide to doing it step by step. But Michelle, you don’t need one unless the agent of your dreams requires one, and then in which case you may want to write one. But don’t bother with it now. Great question. Okay and then let’s see. Okay, May asks, so I’m going to start querying my book soonish. Yay! I remember somewhere that you mentioned that agents will spy around and look at your website. I don’t have one. I don’t have social media under my pen name either. I have been thinking of starting a Bookstagram for it, but I haven’t yet. How important is it to have those things when querying for an agent? I feel like as a millennial, I have kind of failed by not having them, but I always thought it was important to finish the book first. Yes. Finishing the book, finishing a great book, revising it, editing it, which I know that you’ve been doing is the most important thing of all. And here’s what I think about this. You could start a Bookstagram, attached to your pen name or, and this is something I don’t know what your answer is going to be.

[00:08:36] Are you going to query under your pen name or under your real name? A lot of people query under their real name so that they can be real with the agent. The agent knows who you are, and then with your agent, after you have accepted them, or, you know, you’re working together, then you could talk about your pen name, what they think about it whether you should do it under this pen name and you may already really, really be clear on the fact that you are going to write under this pen name and that’s fine, but your agent will need to know your real name. So do you have a social media presence under your real name? Which they will know. They will have to know, and then they will spy on you there. So think about that. Do you have social media? I know you’re on Twitter, but I think you’re under your pen name on Twitter, that’s true. So my answer is, look good on the internet to whatever availability, to whatever place you’re already occupying. Like under your real name, I know you’re not a dick, but you wouldn’t want to be a dick. Like you wouldn’t want them when they find out your real name to go look you up and find out that you’ve been trolling terribly, doing things or writing caustic messages on your blog about the terrible publishers who’ve done this to you. You’re in no danger of that May, I know you, but for everybody else, that’s something to keep in mind.

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