Rachael

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

May 17, 2021

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

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read more…]

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

May 17, 2021

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachael Herron: [00:10:49] Yay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ep. 227: Elly Griffiths on Writing in the Garden

May 17, 2021

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ep. 226: What’s a Hybrid Press and What Should I Watch Out For?

May 17, 2021

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

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

Links:

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

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

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #226 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. This is a mini episode and it is about Hybrid Presses. So welcome to this. This is one of those questions that I get asked over and over again by students, they’ll come to me and say, I found this, this publishing house, this small press. Do you think they’re reputable? They call themselves a hybrid press. I love to get this question because I get so angry at predatory practices within publishing. So let’s talk about what you should look out for and how you can test what you are finding out there when you are looking for presses to publish your work, when you are looking for places to submit your work to. So let’s start at the very top. We’re going to start talking about this hierarchically, which is not that easy to say.

[00:01:12] So in publishing, we have traditional publishers and what is a traditional publisher? A traditional publisher is someone who buys your book from you. You signed a contract, giving them certain rights. They then edit, copyedit it, make the cover, do the press, do the marketing as much as they can. We know that traditional publishers struggle with this as much as we do as authors, but with a traditional publisher, there’s never going to be a charge for you. They will only pay you either in advance or in royalties, hopefully both. But there’s never any charge for the author. What is a traditional publisher? A traditional publisher includes anybody in the big five, which are the big five New York traditional publishers left soon to be the big four since Penguin Random House just bought Simon and Schuster. So all of their hundreds of imprints that those four big, the big four have, they have hundreds of imprints and they publish about a hundred thousand books a year in the States total. They are the big, ones. The biggies, you cannot normally there are sometimes a couple of exceptions, but you cannot get a traditional publishing deal without an agent. You must have an agent. They do not accept un-agented manuscripts in the big four or the big five wherever we are when you’re listening to this. Also falling under the umbrella of a traditional publishers are small presses. They are still traditional publishers because you don’t pay them anything. They buy rights to your book and they pay you in advance and royalties. They are like Grey Wolf or 10 House Press or Catapult. You can Google what the best small presses are. It’s a little bit confusing cause words are always changing in and around publishing small presses also used to be known as, or small publishers also used to be known as independent publishers, independent presses.

[00:03:22] However, a lot of the time now, when we say independent publisher, we’re talking about self-publishing. So a more common term for these smaller publishers is either small publisher or small press and they are legit and they do a great job purchasing the rights and then doing the best with those rights to produce beautiful books that are then distributed and marketed in physical format into bookstores. That is what traditional publishing does. It helps your book become its best by using the best people to help you. And then it is distributed into brick and mortar stores, traditional publishing that’s the model. Then we come into some other ideas. We have self-publishing, also known as indie publishing, which is where you do it all yourself. You write the book, you hire an editor, you hire a copy editor, you hire a proofreader, you hire a cover designer. You must hire all of those things out. I mean, you don’t have to. You can do whatever you want, but it’s generally safer. You will get better reviews and better sales. If you make your book the best product it can be. Then there are these confusing places. And these, this is what I’m really talking about today. This is, these are where I get these emails from students or from listeners to the show saying, is this legit? Is this legit? Obviously a vanity press is not legit. In vanity press is anyone who says, you give us your money and we will produce your book for you. There’s- in a vanity press, there’s not even a nod toward quality or editing. There’s no nod toward marketing. It is just a scam to get your money. They are not making money from selling books. They are making money from you, the author paying them. Honestly, if you’re writing one book that you want, your three grandkids to read, perhaps a vanity press would be for you, you get the copies of your books. They can give them to you, three grandkids you’re done, but otherwise they are for no one. They are a scam.

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Ep. 225: What Do You Actually MEAN When You Say to Write Fast and Badly?

May 17, 2021

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

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

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 225 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I am thrilled you are here today. Today is a cool question and answer podcast from the questions that you have left me over at patreon.com/Rachael at the $5 a month level. You get not only all the essays, but the access to ask me any questions you have about anything particularly writing. Mostly we talk about writing, but if you don’t, feel free to ask me anything. So I’ve got a bunch of really good ones here, and I hope that they help you out. Just a quick update since this is the week’s episode, we had a shitty week. Lost our dog Clementine, who was really a dog of our heart. Aren’t all dogs? But this one was really, really special. If you want to see how beautiful she is, you can go to RachaelHerron.com/Clementine

[00:01:13] I did a little bit of a remembrance of her as I usually do when we lose our animals. But this one was a really hard, y’all really hard. I feel like my grief around Clementine is bigger than just losing our old sick dog who was on hospice, pet hospice was the best she was on it for about six months. She came off of it a few times. She was doing so well and to have them come to our house and put her down in a slow, gentle manner where she was completely comfortable, it was really everything. But the grief around her, it’s just holding a lot more than grief around just Clementine. I feel like I’m grieving all the old animals that I’ve lost and all the mothers that my wife and I have lost and the people that we have lost and 2020, and also Clementine. And this is going to sound weird, and I don’t know how to explain this. I’ll just say it. We were not making concrete goals, concrete plans to get to New Zealand until Clementine died. And I know that sounds awful, but we weren’t willing to go without her. And she couldn’t make the trip. She’s just too old and she was too precious for us to leave.

[00:02:26] So, on Friday, I think it was Friday or Saturday. It must’ve been Friday. Lala got her visa, so we can go to New Zealand and on this visa, we have to go by August 19th. Which is six months from date of issuance. Oh my God. We were told by immigration that we would have a year to enter after she got her work visa on her way to getting her permanent resident visa. But this has happened a couple of times with immigration in New Zealand, they were fantastic. They answer all your questions, but they don’t always answer them the same way. So that one year was wrong. And we got to get out in six months if we want to hit this visa, which I think we think we do. So that was on Friday. And then Sunday Clementine died. All hindrances are out of the way. And so grieving Clem, Oh, I’m feeling getting choked up. Grieving Clementine is also like this precursor to grieving the loss of our life here in the States, which is normal. I know we’re going to grieve the people that were leaving and the house we’ve lived in for 15 years and our way of life. And we are moving with such excitement into this new world, but, so it’s like I’m saying the loss of combination has just been something for me that has been difficult to handle and I’m moving through it at my own pace and actually letting myself grieve and feel feelings. I’m not good at that, but I am getting better at it. I have to say.

[00:03:52] So that’s what’s been going on around here. A little bit of writing been happening. Not a lot. I took Monday off, which is my fiction writing day, just to cry and I cried all day and it helped. So other than that, everything’s going as well as it can be. I’m swimming again. And that’s amazing. I managed to get, I’ve found a place where the swimming pools open and it’s an Alameda and it’s on the estuary and you can look out into the estuary right across the Bay and actually see the lights of San Francisco. When you swim at night, it is so incredibly beautiful and affordable, and I’ve been swimming three times a week and it is the best thing I can do for my mental health right now is swimming. I can’t believe that I went a year without doing it regularly. I’m a late to swimming swimmer. I only learned really to swim about two and a half, three years ago. When I took lessons as an adult, I always knew how to swim. I could get to shore if I need to do, but I didn’t know how to do it efficiently and gracefully. And I swear to God last night as I was swimming was the very first time that I felt like I got the grace and the efficiency and it was just easy. And I, you know, it’s not because I’m terribly fit, but it’s because I know how to move with ease and grace through the water now because somebody taught me and it just reminds me that as adults, we have this amazing ability to keep learning, to do the things we wanna do, so if there’s something that you’ve been scared of doing, God knows I was terrified of taking swimming lessons, but it has paid off in such a huge way. And now that is my bomb. Being in that place, being in water is where I feel the best. So I just wanted to mention that that’s enough of an update.

[00:05:33] Let’s jump into questions. This is from Michelle. Hi Michelle! I have a new question, it’s process-related. Sometimes when I’m editing, I feel the need to flip to a new screen or look at my email or something while I think about the editor’s comment and how to do what she’s asking, which is what I’m doing right now, and I am I just telling myself that because I want, am I just telling myself that, because I want to distract myself or is this a real need in order to process information? This is an awesome, multi-sided deep question, Michelle, and I’m really glad that you are asking it. We all feel this way and it’s a case of it’s going to be one thing or the other. It is a case of your editor’s comment is telling you to do something that you don’t want to do or that you don’t yet know how to do, and that makes you uncomfortable. And therefore, I’m going to look at my keyboard here, on a Mac, if you hit command tab, you’re toggling, you’re toggling over to your email. You’re toggling to Twitter. You’re toggling to anything that is open on your desktop. I do that as soon as I hit a patch of I don’t even know what this next sentence should be. I tend to hit command tab. I have to look at it every time because I do it so frequently. I have no idea what I’m actually doing, and I can flip flop around all the screens that are open on my computer. I’m sure there’s a way to do that on a PC as well. So I do that in moments of discomfort. Therefore, when I’m really focused on writing, and when I am writing, this is what I do. I close every other window. So I do toggle, I toggle and I can’t get anywhere. There’s nothing else open. And so I’m just left, staring at my computer.

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Ep. 224: Abigail Dean on Writing (Very Deliciously) Dark

March 24, 2021

How do you write dark? Like, REALLY dark? Abigail Dean tells us.

Abigail Dean works as a lawyer for Google, and before that was a bookseller. She lives in London, and is working on her second novel. Girl A is her first novel, just out in the United States after a competitive international auction that saw the book sell in 25 territories. It’s been optioned for TV rights for a limited series with Johan Renck, the Emmy winner from HBO’s critical and commercial hit “Chernobyl,” attached to direct.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #224 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. And I’m so pleased that you are with me here today to talk to Abigail Dean. Y’all, this book rocked my world. This was such a great book and it was so dark and it got me really excited about reading dark again. You know, 2020 kind of took a little bit of a, you know, the glow off of darkness? Is that a thing? I’m not even going to rerecord this because you understand what I mean. Like, I didn’t really want to read that dark in 2020, but I tell you what, 2021 looking a tiny bit brighter, the tiniest and I’m back into reading dark thriller. So, I will speak to, what’s been going on around here for just a second, and then I want to go back to talking about Abigail Dean before we start talking to her.

[00:01:10] So, personal update around here, I’m just chugging along. It feels really, really great, as I have said multiple times, to be well enough to be back in the chair. I am working on, it feels like a million different projects at once, but I am doing it in big chunks, according to my new schedule, which is just brilliant each day that I’m on. For example, today’s Thursday, talking Thursday. Each day that I’m on, I always decide that it’s my favorite until I get to the next day when I decide that that’s my favorite. So I think that’s a really, really great sign as to how things are going around here. I did finish the read for revision of the Quincy book and I’m plunging tomorrow into starting to write a synopsis of it, which I will use to guide our revision eventually. And I did a bunch of work on this nonfiction book yesterday. Things are just going really well. Knock all the wood that is around. 90 day classes are going great and my students are just kicking ass and they’re getting stuff done and I’m really proud about them. Proud about them? Yes. I’m proud of them as well.

[00:02:18] How about you? Are you getting your work done? You are listening to this podcast because you are a writer. I know that. So, if you’re not getting any work done, try to get some done. Just a little bit crappy first drafts are what we make people. That’s what we do. They’re not going to be good. I say this all the time, because it takes a long time for this really, really to sink into people’s brains. It took me, being a professional full-time writer, for years before it sunk into my brain. Oh, that my crappy first drafts, they were never going to be good. I was never going to finally get good enough to make a good first draft. It doesn’t happen. Crappy first drafts are what we do or what 99% of writers do. So, write some crappy first draft words and then tell me about it. Okay. So we’re going to go back to talking about Abigail Dean. This book is called “Girl A” and I talked to her about the prologue, which I thought was fascinating. It’s very short. It’s one page. And I asked her permission to read this to you, and then we’re going to talk about it in the interview and you can see what she does with this, but, oh, it’s good. No spoilers. Again, this is just the first page, prologue of the book.

[00:03:44] You don’t know me, but you’ll have seen my face. In the earlier pictures, they bludgeoned our features with pixels right down to our waists. Even our hair was too distinctive to disclose. But the story and his protectors grew weary. And in the danker corners of the internet, we became easy to find. The favored photograph was taken in front of the house on Moorewoods road, early on a September evening. We had filed out and lined up. Six of us, in height order and Noah in Ethan’s arms while father arranged the composition. Little white wraiths squirming in the sunshine. Behind us, the house rested in the last of the day’s light, shadows spreading from the windows and the door. We were still and looking at the camera. It should have been perfect. But just before father pressed the button, Evie squeezed my hand and turned up her face toward me. In the photograph, she’s just about to speak and my smile is starting to curl. I don’t remember what she said, but I’m quite sure that we paid for it later.

[00:04:53] Oh, okay. And then the next line, that’s the prologue. The next line is I arrived at the prison in the mid afternoon. Tell me that you would not have to keep reading that. That prologue just knocked me out and I wanted to talk to her about how she came up with it, what it meant to her, how she does this. It’s one of those things that, you know, I went back to kind of take apart. There’s a “sweetness” to it, you know, a childlike sweetness at the end when she’s smiling at her sister, but there’s also that foreboding sense of menace and dread that just hangs over it. I just think she is phenomenal. So let’s leap into the podcast now and you’ll be able to hear me talk with Abigail Dean and, I think you all should read Girl A. Right, I also think you all should be doing your own writing, which is why you’re here while you’re listening. And, I know that you can do it. I know it’s hard and I know that you can do it. All right, happy writing.

[00:05:59 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: [00:06:40] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show, Abigail Dean. Hello, Abigail.

Abigail Dean: [00:06:46] Hi, Rachael, thank you so much for having me on as well.

Rachael Herron: [00:06:49] I was, I was just bending your ear with what I thought about your book, but I want to talk about it a lot more today with a little intro here. Abigail Dean. Wow. I’m very excited. Abigail Dean works as a lawyer for Google, and before that was a bookseller. She lives in London, and is working on her second novel. Girl A is her first novel, just out in the United States after a competitive international auction that saw the book sell in 25 territories. It’s been optioned for TV rights for a limited series with Johan Renck, the Emmy winner from HBO’s critical and commercial hit “Chernobyl,” attached to direct. So, first of all, just, wow, flipping wow, I loved your book, couldn’t put it down, at all. How are you feeling about all of this like, sudden critical, big attention, just blowing up in your face? How does that feel?

Abigail Dean: [00:07:42] So I’m probably just going to sound completely, inarticulate. Because I, like, I don’t know really how I feel like I think I’m still in a bit of a state of shock. And you know, I think the shock is like 90% joyful and 10% terrified, I’d say. Like the best thing is, the characters being out there in the world and people getting to know the characters and, you know, as a reader like of my life, I’ve had known, I have so many relationships with so many characters, you know, you feel like I’ve loved them and I have detested them. And I think that hearing from readers that they have felt that way, about the characters, that’s the best feeling in the world. So yeah, kind of, a lot of joy, and then I think, inevitably a tiny bit of terror because there’s some exposure, of course, in terms of, you know, a small piece of your heart being out there. It’s a strange feeling as well.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:48] And Lex, the main character is so perfectly drawn. And without any spoilers, I will say that at the 25% mark, after we have, I was trying to figure it out as a writer, you know, why did we just go from first person into this third person? Why, why am I, why am I here with this male character? And then, Lex communicates with him at the very end of that scene and says, hello. And I burst into tears, at the 25% mark. Like that doesn’t ha, I don’t cry in books anyway. I just thought it was beautiful. It was beautiful. It was such. It was also such a dark book that dragged me through it. And I am a, you know, a psychological thriller junkie, I read them all. I’ve almost been feeling bored lately. I feel like I’ve seen all the angles and yours was fresh and new and beautifully, absolutely beautifully written. The way that you write characters is stunning. But what I wanted to talk about real quickly first is just before in the intro, I will have read the very short prologue to your book. And I wanted to read it because I think it is an absolutely brilliant way of capturing the reader’s attention and giving them just enough information to peak their interest in a way that is, it is absolutely impossible not to turn the next page because we must know more. And this is a very technical question, only the writers will be interested in it, but at what point did that scene arise? Either being written or when you knew it was the start of the book?

Abigail Dean: [00:10:21] It was there from the beginning. It was like the first scene written.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:26] Holy crap.

Abigail Dean: [00:10:26] Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:27] I was sure you would say like, no, that was impossible to come to. That’s amazing.

Abigail Dean: [00:10:33] I think that what the reason, like the reason behind it was, I am a true crime junkie, you know. I’m like, I’ve listened to the podcasts, I’ve watched the TV shows. And I, you know, I think often in these cases there is this defining photograph or this defining image. And that’s how you know, that the people who were involved in that, in that instance, that’s kind of what these human beings, I think, sometimes are almost like reduced to and compacted into like these images that we kind of remember for years after. And I think in a way I wanted it to be like, sometimes that’s the end of the story, and that’s all you, that’s all you get. But in a way for, yeah, so for Girl A, I was, I wanted that to be the beginning of the story and then, everything that comes after the, you know, the rest of the novel is how the Gracie family, you know, who are they really? You know, this photo is such a, it’s defining, but at the same time, it’s completely not defining it. It’s like the tiniest tip of, of this iceberg of them, of what they’ve been through and, and the people they’ve become as well.

Rachael Herron: [00:11:53] So, okay. I love all this. So for a debut novel, did not read as a debut, it read as I, and I feel like I am, you know, covelling and waxing repsotic even too much, but it read like a masterpiece in thriller. Where is your writing history? I know you’re a lawyer, which is all writing and there are so many lawyers who then move into writing or the other way, is that part of it? Or where else do you come from in writing?

Abigail Dean: [00:12:19] So I think it’s, I’ve been writing a lot since I was really little, like really, really little. And my, my mom has recently unearthed like some fantastic line of two pages of a four stapled together, I was like, yeah, this is my serious novel and I’m six.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:36] How cute.

Abigail Dean: [00:12:37] Everyone has to read it. Yeah. It’s like, thanks mum, very much. Just what I, just I always wanted. And you know, I filled notebooks, with various stories and a lot of them were dark as well. I think, you know, in a pretty early age, I was sort of often writing once it was the soft toys. You know, basically someone’s had a bad time and then it was like the Barbies and they had a pretty bad time as well. And as a teenager, I also wrote a lot of fan fiction. Huge amounts of fan fiction.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:12] I don’t do it. That’s such a good training ground. I think.

Abigail Dean: [00:13:17] Yeah. It’s one of those strange, strange things isn’t it? I don’t know if it’s, because it’s something that, you know, teenage girls often do and sometimes people like, well, your teenage girls, what are, what do they know? You know, fan fiction has, seems to somehow have a really bad reputation, but it’s an awesome way of writing and, you know, I can’t think of a, yeah. As a writer as well, they, I can’t think of a greater compliment in a way than people wanting to make your characters their own in a particular way.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:49] What was your favorite fandom that you were writing in? If you don’t mind sharing.

Abigail Dean: [00:13:52] No, that’s okay. I am. So I was a big gamer and I wrote a lot of like final fantasy. Fantasy seven and eight was my, was my light fandom at the time. And I still, they were still great. They are still great stories and incredibly inspiring stories that, yeah, I still like look back and I’m like, incredible inspiration.

Rachael Herron: [00:14:15] I just absolutely love that. Okay. So what, so you’re busy, you’re a lawyer where, where, how do you get the writing done? Where does this fit into your life?

Abigail Dean: [00:14:24] So, for Girl A, I took some time off to start writing. It had been a case that in my twenties, I just, I basically just worked for at least sort of six, seven years, at that time, and I kind of didn’t write at all. You know, I would, I was doing like lawyer writing, so I was writing contracts and writing emails, many emails. But I kind of let writing slip away a little. And I was sort of coming with my 30th birthday and was like, why have you kind of abandoned this thing that you absolutely loved, you know, this long standing ambition and, and yeah. But more than ambition, I think, really just the thing that, you know, was probably for me, the most satisfying thing that I can do. So yeah, I decided to just sort of shake things up a bit and I left my job at a law firm, which we had incredibly demanding hours, lots of travel time, and spent three months, basically just sitting in my local library and, and starting to write Girl A.

Rachael Herron: [00:15:42] So it wasn’t even a, it wasn’t even a sabbatical. You, you quit, to do this?

Abigail Dean: [00:15:48] Yeah, I, I did.

Rachael Herron: [00:15:49] Wow. How did that feel?

Abigail Dean: [00:15:50] I had. So I should, I want to be totally frank. I am a risky, a risk averse, lawyer standard, and I had another job lined up at the end of the three months. So I didn’t, I didn’t kind of quit, without anything, anything waiting, but I did, I, you know, it felt. Even just having a three months where you’re unpaid and you’re like, okay, I’m gonna see how this goes. I sort of made a bit of a deal with myself that if I was going to do it, I had to actually write, you know. Like, I have as much temptation as anyone to lie in bed and read and then watch Netflix. And I was like, okay, you know, you’re taking three months off. You have to actually, show up every day, you know, it doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to write X number of words a day, but you do need to show up and try and that was the deal, for that.

Rachael Herron: [00:16:49] Did you get most of the book done in that three months or was that the start of it?

Abigail Dean: [00:16:54] It was the start. I had really grand ideas, you know, I saw myself like just getting this first draft, just getting it out in three months. And, yeah, that did not happen. I got about, maybe a third to a half of the way back and then it was another nine months of evenings and weekends and just, you know, just finding time, wherever I could. Like, I’m a big, I think a lot of the time I’d been quite precious about how I wrote. And I think one of the reasons I didn’t write in my twenties was I had ideas that I needed to be sitting in silence with like, you know, writing by hand, have like hours of time. And a lot of Girl A was written, you know, I would wrote on the note section of my phone. I wrote, you know, sometimes by hand, sometimes with a laptop, like whatever was easiest. And I think I kind of had to let go of those notions that the muse was going to like, come on, find me in my bedroom because yeah, it didn’t and you know, some scenes were difficult and challenging. I didn’t want to write them, but, yeah, it was, it was a much more mundane exercise than I had allowed myself previously to think.

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