Ep. 150: Shamim Sarif on Marrying Characters to Plot, Organically

As an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and film director, Shamim Sarif has built a career on creating powerful female protagonists—and in doing so, has earned legions of fans around the world. Her latest novel, THE ATHENA PROTOCOL, is an all-female contemporary action thriller that will be released by HarperCollins in October 2019 as the first in a YA series. The book is currently being developed as a film franchise. 

An accomplished speaker, Shamim has spoken at TED events worldwide. She and her wife and sons are British/Canadian and spend time between London and Toronto.

The Athena Protocol by Shamim Sarif (October 8/HarperTEEN) is a feminist thriller about an all-female secret agency who works to stop crimes against women and children all over the world. 

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: 00:01  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.

00:16 Well, hello writers. Welcome to episode number 150 – can you believe it? – of How Do You Write. I’m Rachael Herron, I’m so pleased you’re here. Today we are talking to the awesome Shamin Sarif, who I found incredibly delightful and smart and witty, and I just felt a real connection with her. And she talks a little bit about marrying our characters to plot organically, which is something that I think is one of the most important things to do in our books. It is the way to keep our readers with us, to make them believe what we’re telling them, so I know that you’re going to enjoy the interview when we get there. And a little bit of an update, I have a big update, it’s a big one.

01:04 I am pleased to say that I did sell the next book, the next thriller, to Penguin Dutton, and it is not official yet, I have not signed the contract, so I shouldn’t be saying anything about it. But this is a little bit like talking about your pregnancy when you’re in the first trimester, so that actually works because this is my phantom pregnancy slash fetal abduction thriller. So it is tentatively called Hush Little Baby. So yes, I’m telling you about it in the first trimester, hopefully, everything goes well. And I’m really happy, I’m very excited. I can’t tell you how much I sold it for, cause I wasn’t supposed to do that last time. I got in a little bit of trouble for that. So I can’t, but if you listen to my beginning of year money update, which I always do, you’ll be able to figure it out from there.

02:00 Making a little bit less than last time cause Stolen Things is not doing as– you know, it’s not burning up the charts, but apparently it’s still selling well enough for them to want to work with me. So I am very happy about that because I am very excited to write this particular thriller. I can’t wait. I have to tell you also that there’s this other book that’s burning inside me and it’s also kind of burning inside my agent, she really likes it. So I might be about to try to write two books at once. I was just talking to my class, my 90 Days to Done class about it, and they were giving me advice on how to do that, and they were giving me some pretty great advice that I’m going to try.

02:43 I don’t know if I’ll be able to do this. I have tried things like this before and have failed. So there’s always another try to be had though, and the worst I can do is not do it and just write the one book that’s under contract, so that’ll be fine. I will keep you posted on this, because wouldn’t it be great if we were able to switch our brains so that we could write two books at once? A lot of people do it. I have done it in the past when I was working way more than full time plus writing a novel, plus writing a nonfiction collection of essays, and that worked because the genres were so different, so different, nonfiction to fiction. This would be two fiction projects in different genres, so we’ll see how that goes. 

03:30 And other news, first, my new podcast came out yesterday, hope you picked it up. Basically, what that little podcast is, it’s an in-betweener, it’ll come between episodes every once in a while, maybe once a week or every other week, and in it, I’ll just be answering your questions. Basically, it’s like this, if you’re on the $5 level at http://patreon.com/rachael, R-A-C-H-A-E-L, you just get to keep me on retainer to answer all of your questions, and I’ll probably answer between one and three questions per mini-podcast, and I will get to every single one of them. So if you’d like to join, you can go over to http://patreon.com/rachael and do that, it’s already super, super fun. Speaking of that, people who are now having me on retainer include Katrina Turner, thanks Katrina for editing your pledge to $5, Barbara McCullough, dear Barbara, same thing, and same thing for Mel Kleimo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Please lay all your questions on me at any time. They can be in the Patreon post or you can email them to me or tweet me. Basically, I’m here for you to answer anything and everything that you are wondering about. 

05:08 So I’ve told you my mega news. I’m very excited, I get to write that scary, creepy book. I actually wrote the first three chapters to send to my editor as part of the proposal and she had me edit them back a little bit, dial them back cause they were too intense.

So I’m quite proud of that, they were too intense, that’s enjoyable. And I’ve told you about the Patreon coaching. Oh, the one thing I want to tell you about, and this is important if you want to do it, this is a time-sensitive thing. My Barcelona trip in April begins April 26th, it’s a week until May 2nd. It is open. It is already three quarters full and I predict it will close in the next few days. So if you are interested in it, go to http://rachaelherron.com/barcelona. Usually, I take a group to Venice every year, and I think me and Venice, we need a little break. I still love that city more than any other city in the world, but I’ve been there doing business every year for the last few years, which is fantastic. I have worked myself into the position of being able to go to my favorite city and get paid for it, so that is incredible, but we’re taking a little time out. I’ll go back to her next year. I to need to miss her. She will never miss me, Venice never misses anybody, she’s that one. But I need a little bit of a chance to miss her.

06:15 So we’re going to one of my second favorite cities, which is Barcelona. I absolutely love being there. It’ll be a group of 15 women, I do keep this gender-specific for people who identify as female, and you’re more than invited, we have such a good time. It’s basically five days of working together. We work together in the mornings and we work on all kinds of aspects of craft and writing and mindset and a tiny little bit of business.

And then in the afternoons and evenings, we just play, we go do things in this city that I love. The hotel that we have is incredible, it’s right in the Gothic quarter, but far enough from Las Ramblas that it’s not a pain, and it’s right by the cathedral if you know where that is. So I’m very excited about it and if you’d like to come, please come. I’ll stop talking about it now, http://rachaelherron.com/barcelona. Sign up soon if you are interested in that at all, seats are going remarkably quickly. 

07:15 So with that, let’s jump into the interview with Shamin. I know that you’re going to enjoy it. I hope that your writing is going well, I hope that if you’re nanoing, you are wrangling some really awful, terrible words that count towards word goal, that build up your document, which someday you might want to revise into something beautiful, but in nano time, it is not time to write beautiful words, it’s time to write fast word. So I hope you are speeding right through, and drop me a line anytime, tell me how you’re doing. Thank you so much for listening and please enjoy this interview.

07:53 Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome today to the show Shamin Sarif. How are you, Shamin?

Shamim Sarif: 07:58 I am very, very well. Thank you. And thank you for having me on the show.

Rachael Herron: 08:01 I’m thrilled to talk to you. Let me do a little bit of a bio here. As an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and film director, Shamin Sarif has built a career on creating powerful female protagonists, and in doing so has earned legions of fans around the world. Her latest novel, The Athena Protocol, is an all-female contemporary action thriller that will be released by Harper Collins in 2019, which is now as the first in the YA series. The book is being currently being developed as a film franchise, incredibly exciting. An accomplished speakers, Shamin has spoken at Ted events worldwide.

She and her wife and sons are British Canadian and spend time between London and Toronto, and right now you’re in Toronto. We were just talking off here about what a gorgeous city that is, especially at this time of year, I bet it’s just perfect.

Shamim Sarif: 08:53  It is absolutely lovely. We had a few really worm last full days, but now there’s a bite in the air for sure.

Rachael Herron: 09:03 I love that bite. We’ve got a little bit of the bite over here right now, and I just, it’s my favorite time of year. So I would love to talk to you about how you get this all done, how you get so much done. What is your writing process like? Where and when and how, all of that good stuff.

Shamim Sarif: 09:19 Sure. Well, I’m a morning person, so you know, I always think I must’ve been a farmer in a past life cause I can easily fall asleep at nine o’clock at night and waking up, you know, at five or six is generally not a problem. Winter is tough, but generally, I get up, first thing I do is try to go for a walk if I’m feeling very energetic, or run. And just kind of, I think that for me, you know, writers often talk about that fear of the blank page, or, “What am I going to write next?”, so I think my morning is set up as a set of rituals that kind of help get past that. And walking or running is one of those things because you can listen to music, you can listen to a podcast or something, but it’s something that you’re not thinking about the writing, and yet in the back of your mind, it’s kind of germinating.

Rachael Herron: 10:07  love thinking about those rituals and I really believe we can kind of self-hypnotize our way into the creative process when we enter it that way. Can you tell me more details about your other rituals? We’d love to know.

Shamim Sarif: 10:22 That’s, you know, there’s not a huge amount to it. So basically, when I get back, I just try not to check emails, not always successfully, because that’s where you can easily get derailed. So my new resolution to myself a few years ago was to really make sure that if it’s a writing day for me and I’m not directing or something, I go out for that run, have my breakfast, take a shower and straight out to what I now have a writing cabin, which is amazing, and get out there and get the, you know 1500 word done, basically.

Rachael Herron: 10:52 Writing cabin. I have not heard those two words together before, and I never heard two more beautiful words together. Is it on your home property? Do you just go outside into your writing cabin?

Shamim Sarif: 11:03 It’s literally like, you know, five steps from the house because we’re in London, it’s not a massive garden in Wimbledon, but it was the best present ever from my wife, and uh– because she was saying, “Why aren’t you writing?”, and I’m like, “Well, you know, people around, there’s a doorbell”, and so suddenly these guys arrived in our backyard with all these planks and I’m like, “This is not going to go well”, but it’s insulated, it’s got a little heater, it’s got light, it’s just beautiful. I love it. And it’s very much a place where people know they can’t come out unless there’s a raging emergency, so it’s great.

Rachael Herron: 11:36 I spent recently a lot of time, just last week I was looking at sheds and costs, and how to get them and who brings them to your house and builds them here, and what can you build, you know, buy and build yourself, and someday it’s going to happen, it really is.

Shamim Sarif: 11:54 It’s so worth the investment, let me tell you.

Rachael Herron: 11:57  That’s good to know. So what I’m really curious about, I mean, there are two such different careers, the writing and the directing. How does directing inform your writing, do you think?

Shamim Sarif: 12:12 That’s a really good question. I think directing has made me more aware of the anatomy of a scene. You know, what it takes to actually communicate the core emotion or the core plot of a scene, in as few images as possible, because you’re always under a time and budget constraint, but as elegantly as possible. And I think that that came at a fortuitous time for me because the next novel I’d written since directing is The Athena Protocol, which is a departure and it’s, in a sense, a thriller, so different from what I wrote before, but it benefits from that kind of a brevity and that kind of intensity, if you like. So where every chapter and every scene has to have a turning point of plot or character. So I think it was helpful in that way, kind of taught me to think of story in a very dynamic, immediate way

Rachael Herron: 13:04 That makes so much sense, because as writers, we are God, and we can do so much on the page. And for me, a lot of times– I’m an overwriter generally, I have to trim when I am in revisions and that’s cause I’m kind of wandering my way to the point. But when you’re directing, I can imagine it’s all about money or a lot of it is about money and saving that money and you just don’t have it to spend.

Shamim Sarif: 13:28 Yup. Yup. But it’s a good discipline in a way, because you know, I think there’s a possibility when you do any kind of crazy work that, if you’re given a completely blank, I mean, you aren’t given a blank count, that’s when you write that, but you know, you can’t really deliver a warm piece when you’re doing [inaudible] and thriller

Rachael Herron: 13:47 And you shouldn’t try.

Shamim Sarif: 13:50 [inaudible] but I haven’t tried it [inaudible] for a movie. So I think those kinds of constraints do force you to think creatively within the restrictions that you’ve got. You know, somebody says, “Write a poem”, you know, you could spend weeks thinking about what that could be, but if they say, “Well, write a sonnet with a rhyming couplet at the end”, you’ve got something to work within. So I look at directing like that, it’s just a way to kind of make the creativity flow within some boundaries.

Rachael Herron: 14:17  This is admittedly a dumb question, but I want to ask it anyway. What do you prefer, writing or directing?

Shamim Sarif: 14:24 It’s not a dumb question at all. 

Rachael Herron: 14:27 I mean, it might be like asking you to choose a favorite child. It’s not fair.

Shamim Sarif: 14:31 It is a little bit. It’s not fair, and it seems that I always prefer what I’m not doing. Cause there are points off that you’ve been directing on a film for a couple of weeks, you’re like, “Okay, if I really want to stay awake anymore, I have to talk to people and explain things, I just want to, you know, kill a character if I want to”.

Rachael Herron: 14:50 Right, right.

Shamim Sarif: 14:52 But then, you know, there are times when I’m below, in my writing cabin, and I’m like, “Oh, I kind of miss that thrill of being on set and working with a team and getting everybody to collaborate on that vision” because you know, they’re all so talented at what they do, when you hire a director of photography and the costume designer, whatever, that it’s thrilling, and the actors, to see what they’re going to bring to it.

So that was a really elegant non-answer, but basically I love both.

Rachael Herron: 15:18 It seems like you’ve set up a really beautiful ideal life for yourself, and I love– I hope that that is true and that’s gorgeous.

Shamim Sarif: 15:27 I’m touching words along the way, and you know, I started out a long time ago now, so, you know, I feel like it’s been a long process to get there. And there are times when, you know, we’re working in another business or another job while writing and raising two kids, so now our boys are a little older, they’re 16 and 20. And the other interesting thing is, I’ve always written books and films about women of color, often LGBT characters, and just the parts of women in general. None of this has been particularly exciting to Hollywood up until very recently, so it does feel now there’s a bit of a groove and I’m just enjoying the ride, so…

Rachael Herron: 16:06 That is so lovely, I love that. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing?

Shamim Sarif: 16:12 I think now, with the Athena Protocol, with the similar books, I think it’s the plotting, honestly, because I am very character-driven and I wanted to keep that within these novels, which that’s what I think I have. But nevertheless, you’re writing a thriller, so there have to be reversals, a plot, there has to be surprise twists and just getting those right and making sure that logically it all makes sense is probably the part that I do spend time on, but it’s the part that comes the least.

Rachael Herron: 16:46 It’s my least favorite part, I’m really resonating with what you’re saying cause I’ve always written more relationship novels. And the thriller that just came out from Penguin is my first thriller and it was so hard, and now coming up with–

Shamin Sarif: 17:01 [inaudible] reading it, yeah.

Rachael Herron: 17:03 Oh, thanks. So hard, so hard. And I’m such a character-driven writer and just thinking about any kind of plot twist seems so forced, so I like to hear when everybody else says that. What is your biggest joy in writing?

Shamim Sarif: 17:22 The other thing, just to go back, about the plot, is the audiences are so sophisticated now with TV and the [inaudible] of film is that, you know, you feel like people are always a step ahead because they’ve seen so many interesting thoughts.

Rachael Herron: 17:34 And I think they are. I think they just really are more sophisticated now.

Shamim Sarif: 17:38  You have to be raising the bar. But what’s my favorite, sorry–

Rachael Herron: 17:42 What’s your biggest joy in writing?

Shamim Sarif: 17:45  I think it’s the character development.  And so I try to use one to fix the other, but I was saying that I tried to have– I think my favorite scenes in this book are when there’s more than one thing happening, and where plots were also character-driven so that, you know, if Jesse makes a mistake on a mission, I don’t want it to be because it’s convenient that she doesn’t get to the endpoints. I want it to be because she is arrogant and she didn’t take the necessary precautions or she didn’t want to listen to something that somebody told her so that it fits organically with who she is as a person, the fact that things are going wrong or that they’re going well. So when I can marry those two, it’s when it’s completely joyful for me.

Rachael Herron: 18:31  Can you share a craft tip of any sort with us?

Shamim Sarif: 18:35 Well, [inaudible]. I think that was it.

Rachael Herron: 18:42  Let’s dive a little bit deeper into it then. How do you come to character creation? Is it– For me, I will admit that if I just sat down and wrote every day without any thought, I’d always write the same character over and over again, and I don’t do backstories for my character very much. I mean, they have a small backstory, I don’t know what kind of cereal they like and what their favorite color is, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about their wounds and how they’ve healed and formed around those wounds and what those wounds bring with them into the new, into this particular book. How do you do character creation?

Shamim Sarif: 19:16  I think, in some of the way, I’m not as concerned with the detail of the breakfast cereal, first off, unless that’s particular, you know, there’s a particular reason they had a traumatic experience with [inaudible] when they’re throwing up or something. That’s fair enough. And again, this is something I’ve learned in my writing as I go because I was, you know, it’s very tempting to write perfect characters who are just wonderful, and they have integrity and all of these things, but I learned to really look early on for my character’s flaws. And I think that’s the key. What are the character traits that are going to trip them up? Is it a bad temper? Is it arrogance? Is it the fact that whenever this person talks to them, they just see red? And just to build up those, because when you have those kinds of flaws, you have immediate tension because you know that someone’s going to go wrong, and there’s going to be some conflict, either between characters or in the story itself. So setting up with that conflict and relating it to the character’s flaws was probably my biggest tip that I can give people rather than, you know, a car accident happens. It happens because the guy wasn’t paying attention or he fell asleep because he stayed up when [inaudible].

Rachael Herron: 20:33 Or he was raging because of his anger or, yeah. I just realized as you were thinking of that, I never write angry characters and– I’m sorry, my kitty just won’t stop meowing, life happens. And it would be fun to write an angry– a character for whom anger is a problem. I think I might give that a shot. What thing in your life as a whole affects your writing in a surprising way?

Shamim Sarif: 21:00 Wine? 

Rachael Herron: 21:03  Good answer, good answer.

Shamim Sarif: 21:07 I think a couple of things. One thing that I think is more surprising than the other is the New York Times, my favorite newspaper, and the reason for that is there’s something about– I love reading that, and I read it backward, so I don’t actually have to read the news much. It’s more the business, the tech, the science, all of that stuff, the cultural stuff. But the way that they write stories is often story-based, so they will– you know, rather than talk about a famine in Africa, they’ll tell you the story of this farmer and this village. And I think whatever I’m writing, it tends to, you know, you’ve got that in the brain, so you’re, it’s like when you find your car and you only see that car on the road.

When I’m reading an interesting magazine or interesting journalistic newspaper, those kinds of things will start to leap out at me, and it’s funny, the connections or the ideas that I’ve gotten from that. And the other thing is music, which is a huge thing for me, but I think it is for a lot of varieties.

Rachael Herron: 22:02 Do you listen to music while you write? And if you do, does it have words? Cause I cannot do that.

Shamim Sarif: 22:08  Well, it does. I did at one point and I realized that when I was actually writing, I was tuning it out entirely. So I was thinking, “Well, one, make it harder for myself, who wants to switch it off?”, but I do listen to it a lot around when I’m writing, when I’m off in the mornings and I often build a playlist, always build a playlist for whatever I’m writing. And that will not be necessarily the soundtrack to the movie, but it’ll just be songs that might evoke a certain emotion at a certain moment for a character or a certain feel of a scene, things that will just trigger me. And then after, when I’m listening to that, even if I’m slightly unsure of what’s coming next, I’ll find something, a line, a look, something that I can start with.

Rachael Herron: 22:51 I’m very similar. I build a playlist, and I stopped using them as much when I realized– I think I was worried I was using them as a crutch for the emotion in the story, like I needed the song to make me feel the emotion so I could write it on the page, which wasn’t going to be strong enough anyway. I can’t lean on a piece of music. So now I’m just all about white noise and thunderstorms or whatever is on my white noise.

And the ear pods go on, and as soon as they’re on, it’s almost the pressure of the headphone, cause sometimes I’ll be writing and I’ll realize 20 or 30 minutes later that I’d never even turned on the white noise. But I started to write when the– not these ones that I wear on the podcast, but a different kind, they feel a certain way. And that’s my writing, ear pods.

Shamim Sarif: 23:39 I think that’s in the rituals again, isn’t it? But thank you for making me deeply insecure about my use of music, [inaudible] and worry about that then.

Rachael Herron: 23:50 Sorry about that. Oh, dear. There’s still one [inaudible] song on one of his older albums that can just make me cry, ’cause that’s when Robin died in one of my books, and it’s just, that’s not fair.

Shamim Sarif: 24:02 [inaudible] that’s for sure.

Rachael Herron: 24:06  What is the best book that you read recently and why did you love it? 

Shamim Sarif: 24:10 That’s a tough one, but you know, I want to say it’s a novel by Elif Shafak, who’s a Turkish writer who lives in Brooklyn and she happens to be a friend, but I’ve since absolutely, honestly, she’s made the book along with this book called 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.

Rachael Herron: 24:28  Can you repeat the title? I’m sorry.

Shamim Sarif: 24:30 Sure. It’s 10 minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.

Rachael Herron: 24:34 Great title.

Shamin Sarif: 24:35 Yeah, it is a great title. And it’s about a prostitute living in Turkey who has just been killed, and it’s literally those dying minutes of her brain activity, which sounds awful, but within that, she draws it out to this complete history of Istanbul. And it’s very, like Elif herself, I think it’s very, compassionate, very humanistic, you know. She’s very big on human rights, on advocating for women, for the LGBT community, and all of that comes through in this book, but without being preachy. It’s such a sensitive, delightful book and full of rich details of life, you know, in that world, which is not– I’ve been there, but it’s not a world I’m terribly familiar with. So, you know, it has all that luxury of falling into a completely different universe.

Rachael Herron: 25:27 Well, that just shot right to the top of my TBR pile, along with The Athena Protocol. And on that note, so something that I found, I think it was on your website I found, The Athena Protocol is a feminist thriller about an all-female secret agency who works to stop crimes against women and children all over the world, and that just had me instantly. Can you tell us a little bit about this book? And what is the actual date it comes out? Because I believe this will come out after the book is out, so it should be out by the time this is live, but what’s the date?

Shamim Sarif:25:59 It comes out on the 8th of October and it’s– I’m sorry, what was the question?

Rachael Herron: 26:06 Oh, tell us more about it. This is just such a fantastic premise

Shamim Sarif: 26:12 Thank you. Well, you know, I came up with it by going to tech conferences, and I think I sat in the audience, I was listening to all these amazing people, you know, the Bill Gates’ of the world, done amazing things, and now they’re looking to solve the problems in the world, you know. So, okay, they didn’t set up private agencies running, you know, crazy female agents, I don’t think, but–

Rachael Herron: 26:33 You never know. Let’s hope so.

Shamim Sarif: 26:37 But it sort of gave me the idea because, you know, what really bothered me that, you know, women and children particularly tend to get left behind, and the poor and refugees and people who are vulnerable to trafficking particularly, which is one of the great scourges of our time, [inaudible] are trafficked. And so I thought, well, how would it be if you had a group of super successful women who decided, “Enough with the charity lunches, we’re gonna deal with this on the trafficker’s terms”. Because of course, then it raises all sorts of moral issues, “Is it right to fight fire with fire? Are they really doing the right thing?”. So there was that element, plus I wanted to see women in action where it wasn’t, you know, you recover, do your hair or carry on, you know what I mean? If you’re dealing with fighting and killing and watching this kind of trauma day in, day out, it takes its toll. And these are young women who have been through a lot already in their younger years. That makes them fit to fight these guys. And the trauma of what they do for it, on a day to day basis, I wanted to bring that out and see how it was, how a group of women would help each other through that, while still running this very aggressive agency by force?

Rachael Herron: 27:48 That sounds absolutely amazing and like the thing that I have been waiting to read. So I cannot wait till it comes out. Can you tell us, Shamin, where we can find you on the internet?

Shamim Sarif: 28:02  Yes, anywhere where you can find my name, which is probably the trickiest thing. If you can spell that word, http://shaminsarif.com, you have me. Because that’s my Twitter handle, it’s my Instagram, I’m also on Facebook, and I have a website,  http://shaminsarif.com. So I’m probably the most active on Twitter and Instagram.

Rachael Herron: 28:25 Perfect. It has been such a treat to talk to you. It has been a delight, and I’m so glad that we connected, and the next time I get to Toronto, if you happen to be in town, I’ll give you a shout because–

Shamim Sarif: 28:36 Great, we’ll share [inaudible], and some coffee or something.

Rachael Herron: 28:39 I would like that a lot. Thank you, Shamin, so much for being on the show and happy writing to you.

Shamim Sarif: 28:49  Thank you. You too. Take care.

Rachael Herron: 28:51 Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of How Do You Write. You can reach me on Twitter, Rachael Herron, or at my website, http://rachaelherron.com. You can also support me on Patreon, and get essays on living your creative life, for as little as a buck an essay, at http://www.patreon.com/rachael, spelled R-A-C-H-A-E-L. And do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers at http://rachaelherron.com/write. Now, go to your desk and create your own process, and get to writing my friends.