Rachael

In this mini-episode, Rachael Herron answers how to write dialogue for characters who aren’t like you at all, as well as how to breathe life into an old, almost-dead book, and what the heck is the difference between a collection of essays and a non-chronological memoir? 

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, and this is a bonus episode brought to you directly by my $5 Patreons. If you’d like me to be your mini coach for less than a large mocha Frappuccino, you can join too at www.patreon.com/rachael

[00:00:14] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #211 of “How do you Write?” Today is a mini episode where I answer the questions that you send me. I am your mini coach and I will answer anything that you want. Just become a member of my Patreon at the $5 a month and up level, and you get access to that. So I would like to say a heartfelt and heady and grateful, thanks to everyone on my Patreon, who are my patrons at every single level. You really make the difference in my life of me being able to sit down and do this podcast and to write these essays. I am about to send one out to this morning on, the bra theory of getting your work done. And it is not just for a sis female folk who might or might not wear bras. So doesn’t that peak your interest on you want to read that essay? You could read it for a dollar a month or pay $5 a month and get me to answer some of your questions, which is what I’m going to do right now.

[00:01:19] So, Allen asks here goes, this is a first question from Allen. Allen, thank you very much. As a fairly laid back and sometimes quite taciturn person, that’s a good combination. I like it. Laid back and taciturn. I just had to think about that. Okay. That’s a fairly laid back and sometimes quite taciturn person, I find it difficult to write dialogue for more gregarious, outgoing characters. How do you write for characters whose instincts differ dramatically from your own and still have them sound natural? So it is a fantastic question and it is something that I think writers on the whole generally struggle with this idea of how to make character voices sound distinct and unique, especially when they are not in our own natural voice. So I have been thinking about voice a lot in the last week or two, just as some students have asked me some questions and it strikes me that, are, as I’ve said often before, our voice is our voice, when it comes to writing, you will never be able to hear it. It is like your accent. Everyone else can hear your accent, but you can’t. You kind of have to be told what your voice in writing is because it’s like the fish who lives in water, but doesn’t know that water exists because they are in the water, our brains are always talking to us in our own particular voice language. So when we put our own words down on the page, when we put dialogue down on the page, it is automatically what is just in our brains all the time. And for that reason, it can read as boring or dull or all the same, and we’re not being different enough.

[00:03:07] And that is worrisome. So I understand that feeling, but I don’t actually think it’s something we need to worry about it too much, because it is so easily fixed in revision. And you probably knew I would say that, but what I do with my books is I write them as the book falls out of my fingers and onto the page. And I make that sound like it is easy. It is not. A book never falls out of my fingers, but books do get typed pretty quickly by me and by a lot of other writers and we type it badly, we type it not well. Our books, no book ever comes out into a first draft without needing significant amounts of revision in order to be a good book in order to be publishable quality.

[00:03:53] So, my answer for this is I don’t worry about it. I, everybody in my first draft sounds the way I sound with my voice because I have- I don’t even know who these characters are a lot of times yet I’m learning about them. I might learn that this one might want to be more chatty than I normally am. This one might be more taciturn than I usually am and I don’t worry about it. Once the first draft is done is when I start thinking about, well, sometimes it’s after the second draft, honestly, I usually make this into a pass of my own work is differentiating dialogue and on a really logical level, and Allen you’ve, you’ve shown this is we were able to ask ourselves logically using the logical, rational, revision brain we were able to ask ourselves, what does this character need to sound like? And what do they sound like now? And we can answer that question because we are good at reading we can say this character sounds just like all the other characters, but I want her to sound more gregarious, more chatter boxy. And then that becomes a pass where you can just go through your book, look just at Gloria’s dialogue and make Gloria’s dialogue more chatty than it came out in that first draft or make Diana’s dialogue more taciturn, more quiet shorter sentences, or give this person longer sentences.

[00:05:21] It is such an easy thing to fix in revision that I never worry about it upfront. So if you are struggling with that, make yourself a note that that’s going to be one of your passes is a dialogue pass to make sure that your characters sound the way that they want, that you want them to. One thing that I find very useful when I’m thinking about characters’ voices, and I’m talking about characters who are not my main point of view character, for the most part, although this does apply to those two, is think about what they do. Think about how they see the world. If she is a baker, she’s going to see the world in terms of flavor and measurements and really using words that apply to her as a baker, same thing with the sailor, same thing with a tax accountant that does inform who our characters are and if you push it a little further, it’s fun to play with those ideas.

[00:06:17] A tax accountant, of course, we would think they’d be buttoned up and tight and very precise and know where all the bodies are buried at all times, but what if this particular tax accountant is different and he loves numbers, he loves what he does. Right, he hates what he does. But in this part of his life over here, he is sloppier or messier or more hands off play with I think I’ve gone from voice into actual building of characters who are not our main characters, our main characters, demand rigorous exploration and rigorous thought about their character arc, the smaller characters that are moving around the board. I really have a good time playing with how they might fit into their own trope or how they might break out of it, how I can play with their language and their dialogue later, after the first draft, every once in a while, I will get a character who comes to me with their own voice. And that is always a gift. And I would say it happens one book in 10 for me. So when it does, I really, really enjoy it. So, I hope that that helped Allen. In other words, don’t worry about it until you’re in revision and then it will be easy to fix. That’s one of those easy to fix things. 

[00:07:34] All right, this is from Maggie. Hello, Maggie, sending you lots of love. Maggie, these are personal questions, but hopefully relatable. Number one, when you’ve ditched a whole novel you finished about a year ago because it has so many problems, but now want to jump in and salvage the basic book characters and about 20% of the writing, what would your approach be?

[00:07:58] Okay. So I have done this and I have seen students do this too. I, I do it exactly the same way I approach a major revision and I believe the revision episode for this, the kind of the way I do revision, I believe it’s episode 108 of “How Do You Write?” You can listen to everything I believe about revision. What it comes down to for me is making that sentence outline of what’s in the book and then I use story structure to kind of re-outline what I want the book to be. And then if it is this big, affects, I kind of just start a brand new document and I bring in very little, I just kind of start rewriting the book. And I know that’s painful to hear that is, but you know, what you have said is that you might want to save 20% of the books. So, 80% of that is first draft. Tell yourself, oh, I know it’s painful. Tell yourself that this is a 100% first draft rewrite of this book. That’s the only thing that worked for me to salvage the book that I salvaged. I just started rewriting it every once in a while. I would go dip into the book because I knew where everything was. I had done my sentence outline I knew what was in that old book. And I could go in and grab out a paragraph or two, I honestly grabbed A lot fewer words than I thought I would, because as I wrote the book was changing all the time, so I couldn’t save all the words I thought I could, but I do treat it like a normal revision. And I go in, start with that first scene. Is it the way I want it to be? If not, write a new first draft of the first scene, keeping in mind that all of these things can change later, not holding on too tight. Sometimes when we do this kind of major, major, major, major revision we do get set in our head that this is a revision. So therefore I should be making things better. I think in this kind of major revision, it is better to have beginner’s mind, first draft mind, where you’re just doing a crappy job. You’re doing a crappy job and you’ll fix it later in revision. And that kind of gives you the freedom, the hands-off, the ability to let go and just kind of lean into this first drafting process of the play and the fun and the weirdness and how nothing fits together yet accepting all that and moving forward, I think might be really, really helpful. 

[00:10:17] Number two question from Maggie, a different book, advice on revising the first 10 to 20 pages when you realize the tone and pace is quite different than the rest of the book, the voice is the same. I wrote it that way to set how oppressive her, her normal life is. So there is market change by the end, but now it feels like a barrier for people to get past those first pages, which can be so important for readers/agents, et cetera. As always thank you, as always Maggie, you are welcome. I think that’s a really good and interesting question. So it is important in our books to set up the status quo. We need to see our characters in their normal life and their status quo for a while. Because we need to establish empathy for them, connection, and understanding the reader needs to understand what they’re in before the inciting incident happens at which point they decide to do something different and enter a new world. So we do need to see them in their old world in order for that to mean something to the reader. Knowing that, they could be in this really awkward, uncomfortable beginning place. There’s a couple of ways to ensure that this doesn’t bog down the reader too much and it both, both methods come down to wedding the readers’ appetite. First off you could have a very quick prologue. I, you know, a page or two, which shows your main character at a critical, interesting point in her future that you’re going to get to in the book, that shows that particular how did you put it a particular tone and pace of the rest of the book to tell it was basically guarantees the reader.

[00:12:04] Look, I’m going to get to this tone and pace. We’ve got to go backwards a few steps, see our character in her status quo life. And then I’m going to get you there. Or, you can do that in a smaller way by showing your character inside that tone and pace of the rest of the book. Just for a little bit maybe as something arises, some kind of situation, which requires action in this hook at the beginning of the book show her acting that way. And again, it’s this tacit unspoken promise that you’re making to the reader. Like I’m going to come back to them and we’re going to get there I think you’re being very smart to think about it, but I also think that’s not a but, I think you’re being very smart to think about it. And I also believe that readers, even when they’re unable to explain this out loud, which is most of the time readers who are readers don’t understand this stuff, they just know what they like they understand that this is status quo and that this person is going to change. So they do, they can kind of lean into, Oh, this sucks, right? This sucks where this character is. I wonder how she’s going to get out of it. So you have a little leeway and some play there, which will allow the reader to keep reading. So, what I’m saying is I’m glad you’re thinking about it and don’t worry about it too, too much so hope about hopes. 

[Read more…] about Ep. 211: How to Write Dialogue for Characters Very Unlike Yourself

Pam Rosenthal has written award-winning sexy historical romance and award-winning brainy BDSM erotica, as well as occasional essays and reviews for Salon.com, the SF Chronicle, Dearauthor.com, and Socialist Review. She stands behind the quality of her product, but confesses that her writing process has been more than a little bit fraught. Currently, she’s looking toward making peace with that process, while she continues to work with her husband and longtime creative partner at their copyediting business — not to speak of working her ass off to elect Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a Democratic Senate.

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 # 210 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. Thrilled you’re here with me today. Today, I’m talking to the fabulous Pam Rosenthal who has a lot of great stuff to say, including on why you shouldn’t let the page know that you’re scared of it. But let me tell you a little bit about my history with Pam. I, it was probably one of my very first national RWA’s: Romance Writers of America conferences, we were in Orlando, I believe it was bloody hot. And she won the Rita. I believe for historical novel. She won the Rita. That is like winning an Oscar and say what you will about the implosion of RWA that has occurred in this last year. I am no longer a member. I’m no longer on the board. I’m all the way out, but RWA was so pivotal and so important for a lot of people in learning the business and craft of writing. And that was, we’re not even gonna get into the RWA stuff. I’ve talked about it before, but I’m at this conference, and this woman walks into our suite holding her Rita and I got to hold it. And she was so modest and self-effacing, and really, I could tell she was surprised that she had won it.

[00:01:42] So, I read her book and it was astonishing. She’s such an incredible writer. If you’re looking for incredibly smart, incredibly sexy, erotic books that have true depth and meaning, and are also joyous and fun. I’m saying, go pick up a Pam Rosenthal. So I was elated to get the chance to interview her for this. So you’re going to enjoy that, now that I’ve built her up as she deserves. What’s going on around here? Well, I am happily NaNo-ing along, I am, I think about 30,000, 32,000 into this new book. And I just kind of want to talk for a moment about what a crappy first draft looks like, because I hear from students a lot that they think they are writing the crappiest first draft that has ever existed. I’m sorry, you can’t, because that is what I do really, truly what my words look like on the page are a gobbledygook mess. The one thing I do not allow myself to do is ever go back and edit or revise anything. The one exception to that is if I need help getting into writing for the day, I’ll go back and look at the previous day’s writing and kind of smooth that a little bit, you know, correct all the misspellings, put things into Italics that I had put into caps because I’m using a program that won’t allow Italics. You know, I’m generally writing on the alpha smart nowadays. So there are no Italics on that, doing that kind of thing, but otherwise, I have a whole books worth of snippets, fragments, sometimes I have a whole scene. Sometimes I have a whole really good scene, but more often I have these fragments of scenes that I don’t know what I’m going to do with. I don’t know if they’re going to fit. I allow myself to stop writing a fragment of a scene at any point. As long as I don’t go back and edit, I can do anything.

[00:03:42] I generally don’t write out of order. And this is just me, when it comes to jumping ahead. But I do write out of order when it comes to jumping back, because as I’m writing forward, I often have a really good idea for something that should have happened before. And I will sketch that out. It’s not, it still counts to me as moving forward because it’s brand new words. And I don’t go back and look where in the book it should go. I just usually write in all caps, fit in somewhere. And then I write the little snippet of the scene that I see that could help me later. And then I write in all caps going back to, and then I go back to where I was. Nothing has to be pretty, nothing has to be smooth. And in fact, you’ve heard me say this a million times and I’m going to argue for it again. I think that nothing should be beautiful or smooth. The more beautiful you make your writing in a first draft, the more impossible it will B to C, that that particular scene or scenes do not fit in the book you actually end up writing. We always think we’re writing one book. It’s never true. We are writing a different book and we will not know that until after two, three, four, five revisions, then we’ll know what the book really wants to be. And if we’ve made the language beautiful, if we’ve made those scenes really strong on their own as a scene, it’s much more painful to lift them out later. 

[00:05:07] And indeed, sometimes it’s impossible to see that you should. It’s much easier for me if I have a bunch of crappy scenes, when I’m in revision to apply my brain to the problem at hand and see, oh yeah, that really doesn’t. That seems not doing anything for me. It’s a bunch of crap. It is very easy to put into the trash pile. So that is why I do this. That is why, why I think this is best practice for most writers, not all writers, but for most writers I’ve ever, ever dealt with this is best practice for them. Don’t make any of them pretty, until you know, it has earned its place in your book and you cannot know what kind of scene, even what kind of character, even what kind of plot belongs in your book until that big first draft is done and until your elbows deep in the second draft and making it make sense for the first time. Your first draft should not make that much sense in a lot of ways. And it is still how we do it and can still be so fun. And I just feel like this book has been kind of gift like to me in the everyday when I sit down, I’m having fun. It’s just still a good time. I have no idea what’s going on. I am headed toward the midpoint. I know what’s going to happen there. I have no idea what’s going to happen to the rest of the book. I haven’t figured it out. I have love interests. Don’t know what to do with her. Not a clue, but she’s sexy. And I’m liking that I’m writing. This is really my first time writing a gay love interest in a mainstream book. So that’s been super fun. It’s not a romance, but it has a romance in it because life has romance in it. So I dunno, I’m having a great time. 

[Read more…] about Ep. 210: Pam Rosenthal on Not Letting the Page Know You’re Afraid

Matt Haig is the author of the internationally bestselling memoir Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet, along with six novels, including How To Stop Time, and several award-winning children’s books. His work has been translated into thirty languages, and his brand new book is The Midnight Library. 

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript

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

[00:16:00] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #209 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron and I am thrilled you are here. Today, I get to talk with the amazing Matt Haig about his new book, The Midnight Library, which I fell head over heels in love with. It is about books and libraries and the multi-verse, it’s got a little bit of everything and he writes with humor and kindness, and I just love his work and it was delightful to talk to him. So that is coming up. You have that to look forward to. 

[00:52:00] What is going on around here? Well, for the first time in many years, I am still ahead in NaNoWriMo national novel writing month. It is the 12th of November as I record this and I’m a couple of thousand head, this doesn’t happen. This doesn’t happen to me. Usually by now, I am three or four days behind and I kind of do the whole giving up thing that I have talked about in the past, saying, well, I can’t get 6,000 words a day. I guess I lost NaNo. This month though, I went into it with the intention of every day is a new day, every day, 1667 words. Again, that’s my goal. I tend to write books quickly, but not usually my books take about two to three months to write not one month and right now, actually I am taking two months to write a book. My goal is to be done by the end of December. However, I’m going to win NaNo on the way that’s one of my goalposts is winning NaNo with 50,000 words. And I, I honestly tried to remember and I meant to pull it up and then I forgot. I can’t remember if I talked about my alpha smart last week. But you know what, if I did, I can talk about it again. An alpha smart, is basically just a keyboard. It is a keystroke emulator. So it’s a, the big plastic keyboard that looks like one of those, you know, TRS eighties that we had in the eighties, I guess, I guess it was eighties, maybe early nineties. I can’t remember. That we would plunk on and it looks like you should be printing it out on dot metric paper. But what it does is you type on it. You can’t do anything else. There’s no internet, there’s no nothing. You can just type and see four lines at once it runs on AA batteries, it lasts forever.

[00:2:38] And then when you’re done typing, whatever it is, you’re typing, you just hook it up to your computer and you hit send, and then it types it for you. Kind of like a player piano. You get to watch your words on roll across the screen. And while it types quickly, it still takes, you know, 5 or 10 minutes to download what you’re doing. So you got to walk away from your work and, and it feels good to walk back and say, how many words did I get? Oh my God, I got 2,400 words in an hour. That’s fantastic. So, the alpha smart has been helping me immensely. I have set up a NaNo routine, which I haven’t done in a long time. And it’s a little bit new to me because the office part is due to me. It’s a Neo too, for those of you curious they don’t make them anymore, but you can get them on eBay.  

[00:3:23] I go to my little desk right here, the desk that is not my work desk that I’m sitting at right now. It’s just a 90 degree turn from where I am, but I get to look out to the street. I light a candle. I put my headphones in. I listened to calm and soothing jazz, do not mock me. It works. And I’ve been playing with this book. I’ve just been playing every day that I started to not enjoy the writing, I’ve back up and I say, okay, what’s fun. What is fun? How can I throw something into the mix here that goes along with her character arc, but ups the stakes, I need more high jinx. I need more fun, and surprise, and excitement. And it’s working. It’s, I’m really, really having a good time playing with this book. So that has just been a joy. It has been a long time since I worked on a first draft. I’ve been revising for the last seven or eight months, I think on, a couple of different books. So this is, this is fun. I’m enjoying this first draft. And I just wanted to share that with you. I hope that if you are doing NaNo, if you are behind throw out the behind number. Today, you need to get 1,667 words, and tomorrow 1,667 words. And if you’re short at the end of NaNo, you can either say, oh my gosh, I have 40,000 words. I’m an amazing person. Or if you want to win, you can sit down and have a terrible day of writing, terrible words and get 10 or 15,000 words. You can do that too. Me, if I miss it, I will just take that as a miss and, and a good number of words, but I don’t think I’m going to miss it. I think I’m going to make it.

[00:04:59] Nothing else really going on around here. So I will stop this update. I am just happy with how writing is going, and I hope that you are too. I hope that you come some place and tell me all about it. And next week I will do the drawing for the two books I talked about last week. I’m giving away, if you would like to enter to win either of those two books, CJ Cooke’s The Nesting or Becca Syme’s Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. You can go to RachaelHerron.com/Win and sign up there. So, I’m extending that for a week. So happy writing. Come find me. Tell me how your writing is going. And thank you for listening. Please enjoy this interview. 

[00:05:40] 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: [00:06:21] Well, I could not be more pleased today to welcome to the show today, Matt Haig. Matt, hello! 

Matt Haig: [00:06:26] Hello, Rachael. Thank you for having me.

Rachael Herron: [00:06:28] I’m thrilled to have you. I loved this new book of yours. Loved it, loved it. And I want to talk about that and your process of writing, but I want to give you a little introduction first. Matt Haig is the author of the internationally bestselling memoir Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet, along with six novels, including How to Stop Time and several award-winning children’s books. His work has been translated into 30 languages and his brand new book is The Midnight Library. I want to tell you a tiny bit of a story, Matt, for some reason, I got your book on net galley from our shared publisher and, and then I just forgot about it. And I realized two days ago that we had this interview coming up and I thought, oh gosh, I better dip into that book, but it’s a lib- it’s a book about libraries. And I just finished that beautiful book about libraries. And I don’t want to read another book about libraries and I realized I’d accidentally read yours, a month ago when I first got it. And it had it just seared in my brain. And for some reason I didn’t put the title with your name together. And it’s so good. It’s so fun. And I want to talk about this whole multi-verse idea, but first of all, can you tell us a little bit about your process and how you get all this writing done? Where, where, and when.

Matt Haig: [00:07:41] Well, yeah, I’m, you know, I’m not really a writer with a very predictable routine. It really fluctuates. I have months of procrastination, trying to form ideas, writer’s block, all of that stuff, staring at a blank word documents and not getting anywhere. And then at the other end of the scale, when I’ve got the idea, when I’m halfway through the novel, you know, seven days a week, all waking hours. I’ll just be there just typing away. So it’s kind of like a, kind of bipolar existence of one extreme to the other. And, I, you know, I sometimes think I need to have more of a sort of a rigid routine, but I actually think it’s kind of the only way I can work because I kind of need that period of procrastination. And I’m feeling like I’m unproductive limit. I’m not actually unproductive, but we’re so conditioned to think that unless we’re actively doing or physically creating in that moment, but it’s kind of wasted time and we still feel that in our lives generally, but certainly in our working lives. And to be a writer I feel like, you know, so much of writing happens when you’re not actually writing, when you’re just sort of like walking or you’re, you know, walking the dog or you’re out with your friends or you’re out in the garden or whatever you’re doing. And, yeah. I mean, so actually for me, when I’m actually stuck with my writing, I rather than just a plow through, I, I feel like the best thing I can do is to just sort of step away and do something else. And very often the biggest breakthroughs within a novel or a story happen when you’re not actually at your laptop, when you’re not in your word document, writing away 

Rachael Herron: [00:09:29] often when you’re not thinking about it at all, at all, at all.

Matt Haig: [00:09:33] Yeah

Rachael Herron: [00:09:33] Just- 

Matt Haig: [00:09:34] At all. Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:34] it lands on you full. Yeah 

Matt Haig: [00:09:36] Oh, that’s lovely. Yeah. The loveliest moment. I mean, it’s lovely in one sense, it’s frustrating that you can’t, you can’t ever, by definition, you can’t create those moments, but what you can do, you can switch off. And sometimes I feel like I don’t want to get to sort of pretentiously psychological or philosophical, but I- I’m, I’m a great fan of Young. You know, rather than Freud, I mean into Young. And in, in, in the red book, which was only sort of like published this century, because it’s all his scribblings from his psychotic episode, he writes about the spirit of the times, and the spirit of the depths. Being the two side of human nature. By the spirit of the times, he meant being so plugged into politics and what’s happening in the world and the world around you and the external stuff and the spirit of the depths is a sort of deeper existential human truth of view. And I feel like nowadays we’re so tilting towards the spirit of the times. And we’re so lost in the spirit of times, whether it’s like the latest American presidential debate or whether it’s you know, Coronavirus or whatever catastrophe, there’s so much to distract us in, in this kind of “hell-scape” that we, we, we feel we’re in, that we’re fed through Twitter and rolling news and all of that. And which yeah, we have to engage with. I’m not saying we don’t have to engage with that. We obviously have to engage. We have to get angry. We have to get organized about the world and stuff, but at the same time, we shouldn’t neglect another truth, which is the sort of inner truth of ourselves and the sort of what he called the spirit of the depths which you know, I’m quite into, as an idea. And he said, he thought, if you tilt too far one way or another, you end up with neuroses and going a bit mad. And I felt like collectively we’re so plugged into the spirit of the times. There’s a kind of collective madness is happening from all the world, BS that we’re, we’re surrounded by. 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:38] So then, if you’re, how do you honor the spirit of the depths in yourself? On a daily basis if you’re not actually actively deeply in a book. 

Matt Haig: [00:11:47] Well, books are one way, to do, if you’re reading a book, you know, I actually sort of like to step back and sort of meditate, I feel like books now are probably more valuable than ever in terms of giving you that sort of meditative space, where they’re interactive in a very deep sense, but they’re not interactive in the sense that you, you feel obliged to give them a Facebook Like or,

Rachael Herron: [00:12:09] It’s really interesting that you say that though. I agree completely. And I’ve been reading some rather heavy stuff lately and, and I find myself with a reaction when reading it, that I need to do something with that information. I should probably highlight it. I should probably copy it onto a card. I should probably share it 

Matt Haig: [00:12:25] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:26] with data. And I think that’s the spirit of the time affecting the spirit of the deep, instead of just reading, taking in and thinking. You know, 

Matt Haig: [00:12:25] Yes

Rachael Herron: [00:12:26] the, the spirit to move is so present. 

Matt Haig: [00:12:38] Yes, absolutely. And I, I hate that about myself. Like when, when I, when I have a thought and I can’t just let it be a thought and I’m trying to shape the thought into a tweet in my head. Like- 

Rachael Herron: [00:12:51] Yes, there’s nothing- I have done this during yoga. I have done this during meditation. I actually took myself off Twitter for about six months to see if I could break that thought cycle. It wasn’t anything about the time I was spending. I wasn’t spending too much time, but my brain forming tweets around my life was unacceptable and it actually did break it.

Matt Haig: [00:13:10] Yeah. Oh, that’s good. Yeah, I’m learning. I mean, what I’m doing now, prompted by my partner is to actually have like Sundays completely devoid of screens, not TV screens. I watched, like we watched with the kids, we watched some like it hot on Sunday and we watched an old classic movie or something, but to switch off from, you know, phones and laptops and emails and, and they’re designed to be so addictive and to play with our sense of guilt. I think like, for instance, like, you know, the fact that people can see when they’ve seen a message. I thought you feel like you have to respond to that message or you’re a bad person, but to actually have freedom to not get back to emails, to not get back to text messages to just, you know, I, I’m now religious- because I’m someone who finds balance hard unless I sort of like set a day in my calendar and say write, and some days I don’t do it at all. You know, cause if I say I’ll just do 20 minutes it ends up being two hours. So if I just say write, I’m not doing that at all. I find that easier than just having 20 minutes. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:21] I love that. I want to try that someday. Maybe not this week. 

Matt Haig: [00:14:24] It’s a scroll free Sunday. Well, I know, I know there’s always a reason though. There’s always a reason. There’s always seems to be a, the news seems to be getting exponentially bigger. You know, it’s always something. And I suppose, like, with you in California, you’re thinking, well, I need to, I need to be plugged in because I need to be knowing about wildfires. I need to be knowing about this, that the other and 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:29] Can I open the windows today? 

Matt Haig: [00:15:34] Can I open the window? Yeah. Has the zombie apocalypse happens yet? Are we there? Yeah, so it is, it’s, it’s a, it’s an addictive kind of world we’re in and we’re all trying to make it better, but we all have a sense that maybe, maybe we’re just contributing to, to it in our own way, you know, I never, Twitter’s the thing I’m really ambiguous about because I’ve spent so much time vending on Twitter, venting about politics, venting about personal life, venting about mental health. You always have the underlying suspicion that in trying to make it better, are you actually making it better? Are you contributing to the noise divisiveness? I don’t know. So yeah, more spirit of the depths. That’s what I’m sharing. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:29] And more spirit of the depths. Amen. Amen. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing? 

Matt Haig: [00:15:34] Biggest challenge. Well, I have a lot, I think indecisiveness. I’m I, I don’t really get proper writer’s block as such. I’ve always got something to write. I just don’t know if it’s any good or if that’s the idea I should be choosing. So I found my biggest challenge is having that barometer of knowing this is a story I should be writing. So I’ll have a lot of ideas in my head about all, obviously be a varying quality of varying interest if I wrote them. But I have, I- I’m quite bad in the initial stages of working out, which is the one that’s going to have legs, which is the one that’s going to be the most interesting. And so I actually have to write quite a chunk of it and ended up often abandoning quite a lot of writing because until I’ve written it, I don’t know. So I wish I was a bit better at that. So my- yeah, about challenging actually knowing what’s going to resonate initially before writing. I think I’m quite good as it goes on. I’m quite sort of self-critical and I, I, you know, that famous sort of polished detective I’m quite good at knowing when things aren’t working and I’m not shy to sort of scrap things or abandoned things or chop a chapter. I, I’m not scared of, you know, I don’t get too precious about it, but it’s just that, that initial thing of having different ideas and knowing which direction to go at the start is it takes me frustratingly long to get there as it did with The Midnight Library and my previous novel, had sometimes it takes me a while to go

Rachael Herron: [00:17:05] What is your biggest joy when it comes to writing then? 

Matt Haig: [00:17:09] Biggest joy actually is when you’ve got the idea and you are on the first draft and you are literally the only person who has read your work and that is the thing, but that, that is pure writing to me. And that’s the aspect of writing. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve never have had a novel published in your life or whether you’re Stephen King, that is writing. You know, that aspect every writer has that you know, the stuff outside it and stuff to do in a publication, that’s a bit that fluctuates in degrees and that’s where, how popular you are or what your Goodreads ranking is and all of that. But the actual act of writing itself, I think you have to keep a love for that, for that first draft feeling when it’s flowing well. Obviously there’s times you just want to bang your head against the wall. It’s frustrating. But when you, when you kind of, when things are going right or when you surprise yourself, like you’ve imagined something you haven’t planned to imagine, but you’re just taking a left turn here or something. I think, I think that’s the moment where it feels like a really sort of fun activity, almost like a sport, I guess, sort of fishing and you’re finding new stuff that you didn’t have before, you know. I, I’m a bad editor in terms of when the editors involved and maybe you get the notes in and I really respect my editor. My editor’s very wise person and gives me good notes. But I find that process, it feels really like work and it feels like you’ve got a job in that that sense, but there’s moments in a, in a good first draft where it doesn’t feel like work and you’re sort of really enjoying it. And you almost can get into like a little trance state when you’re lost in your own daydreams. And, and that’s the stuff that always stays good. You know, you, you get, you know, a little bit as you get a little bit more well-read and a bit more well-known, I think the neuroses ramp up a little bit around publication and you think, well, what are you going to say? And, Oh, that’s amazing. I’m going to get a New York Times book review, but then you’re just like, well, what they’re going to say, this could be devastating and so all those stupid things that shouldn’t be problems, which are privileges, but, but you turned them into problems and yeah, but the actual the calming thing for me, and actually, the way I cope with having a book come out and be criticized or not criticized or whatever it is, the way I cope with that reaction, which is they’re all on set. Even the good stuff is unsettling. That’s what, that’s what I’ve discovered about my mind. I find even, even praise can be unsettling because you get too lost in that outer, you know, going back to the young you’re too plugged into the art. So the way to sort of calm and center yourself is to just sort of hide away and start writing something new. I think. 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:45] Hiding away in the writing is really wonderful. And I feel like writers have this gift that we’ve been giving- given during this pandemic. They do have a place to go and lose ourselves in a really, really deep way. Can you share a craft tip of any sort on writing?

Matt Haig: [00:20:00] Craft tip

Rachael Herron: [00:20:01] Yes!

Matt Haig: [00:20:04] Right. Okay. Craft tip. Well, this is possibly, you know, it’s a very subjective craft tip, but I, 

Rachael Herron: [00:20:13] The best kind.

Matt Haig: [00:20:14] Well, I am into breaking certain rules and the rule, you know, a lot of unwritten rules cause books look a certain way often. And, you know, in terms of like chapter lengths, a chapter length tends to be in the average novel, I don’t know between 10 and 20 pages and that’s sort of like a given and I sometimes do that, but sometimes I like to actually see a book and the page as a visual thing, as well as something you just read, I’m quite a visual person. I don’t actually see it as a visual thing. So I actually kind of like short chapters. So what I did with my very first number, when it wasn’t working. I, it was about 12 chapters long. I broke it up into something like 120 chapters. I scattered it and playing about with that and seeing certain paragraphs as, as sort of standard individual things. Really helped me understands what I’m doing. So I think my main craft tip is just kind of forget, in some ways that books have been written before. And you’ve got this story to tell. With the English language and you’re, you’re, you’re forgetting in, in, in, in some sense you’re forgetting the other books exist and you’re thinking, how best do I tell this particular story? And you forget about conventions in terms of how long chapters have to be, or how long paragraphs have to be or how you, you just communicate it. And it doesn’t mean you have to be sort of like overly pretentious or do something incredibly artistic or write poems halfway through the page or anything like that. It’s just, I think it can help clear the communication if you’re, if you’re, you know, uniquely doing it as you, how you want to communicate. And so, and also it’s a trick. I think, cause we all like to feel that we’re turning through the pages fast and the one psychological trick you can make that happen. If you’ve got a lot of white space in your book, they are going like that. They are turning the pages very fast. And it’s a nice feeling because I don’t know about you, but I don’t like that feeling of going to sleep halfway through a chapter ending, you know, I like that feeling of finishing a chapter 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:27] See and I’m, I’m the anomaly but I love to stop right when I’m really enjoying something, I’ll stop in the middle of a sentence during the crisis of a book and put it down and say, Ooh, I’m gonna do that later. 

Matt Haig: [00:22:38] Okay. 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:28] No one understands.

Matt Haig: [00:22:39] So that’s like, yeah, no, I get that as well. It’s like, you know, about Keat’s quote about the Unkissed Lips. It’s kind of like that moment of like to come. Yeah, I get that too. I get that too. But, I saw a program once, I can’t remember what it was, but it talks about the difference in skyscrapers between New York and Chicago. And it said that like in New York, the skyscrapers were all sort of crammed up together in Midtown. It’s very sort of cramped together, whereas in Chicago, the space around the skyscrapers and, and because the space around the skyscraper’s, you actually pay more attention to the individual structure of the skyscraper become more iconic. So, I think maybe an introvert, because my dad’s an architect or something, but I like the idea of a chapter being right. Like you can create space around it visually and you actually draw more attention. So you can take a line out of a chapter and you wouldn’t notice it in a chapter. But if you, if you turn that line into an entire page on a page venue, you’re suddenly, your attention is drawn to that. So I think there was a line somewhere in the book. And I don’t break up my books like that until the end, but I sometimes think, Oh, if I, if a line comes at a key moment, I think I’ll just turn that line and just put it on its own page and then yeah, so it’s a lot of that stuff, but yeah, 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:57] I love that

Matt Haig: [00:23:58] it’s not, it’s not, it’s definitely not right for every book, but for me, 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:00] But for playing. Yeah. 

Matt Haig: [00:24:02] Like being playful. Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:24:03] I love that. What thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way? 

Matt Haig: [00:24:10] Oh, okay. Well, the realization, I don’t know if this is the right answer to this, but one thing that changed for me as a writer is I used to have a writing room and then now I don’t have a writing room. I like literally write on my sofa and write with my laptop. And I actually think I write better and more productively, now I don’t have a writing room.

Rachael Herron: [00:24:38] Why? Why is that?

Matt Haig: [00:24:40] I don’t know. And again, this is very subjective. This is very me, this is not the universal. I think it’s because as soon as I have a writing room and it’s an office and it feels like it’s work, I go into work mode and I feel like for creativity, it helps to be a bit in play mode. And so if I’m on my sofa and writing, I actually like, and I’m also a writer who kind of likes a bit of background noise because I have tinnitus. So I have ringing in my ears all the time. So I- it’s not, it doesn’t, it doesn’t swap my life or anything. There’s lots of times I don’t hear it, but if it’s total silence, I’ll be aware of ringing in my ear. So I’ve got conditioned to having background noise and we’ve got kids. So there’s often a lot of background noise, but interestingly, when we bought a house here, I bought it because it had a shed in the garden and I thought I was going to be like Roald Dahl, 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:32] Heck yeah

Matt Haig: [00:25:33] Who famously had had a shed and walk out to his writing shed. And that didn’t happen, and that wouldn’t happen and the trouble is, in, in a cold rainy day, when you just want to get up and be warm in your pajamas, you wouldn’t go out to the shed. And, yeah, writing on the sofa has been the thing. I think, I think you can look at my books. If you look at my early books that were written in a writing office versus the books that are written on the sofa, they’re more enjoyable, the ones that are written on the sofa, because I was probably enjoying myself.

Rachael Herron: [00:26:06] That’s fascinating. So I wonder, I wonder if you are, if you’re Uber fans who have read every single thing you’ve ever written online. 

Matt Haig: [00:26:14] Well, the ones, yeah, the ones where I was in a sort of uncomfortable chair. Well, it’s something I massively changed. I massive, I mean, I’ve, I’ve written quite a few books and a lot of sort of them are seriously unread books that no one really read but my first three books, well, the first one did okay in the UK, but then the second, third didn’t lose as well. And they were so bleak. And it’s so interesting because now if I’m criticized, as I sometimes get criticized by reviewers in the UK, they will always say the same thing. They’ll say, Oh, you know, it descends into sort of optimistic platitudes or become like a, sort of like a Facebook wall of, they always say that same thing. And I’m not actually uniquely proud of that because, well, first and foremost, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not a snob about inspirational quotes. If someone can say something in a simple way, even if it feels a bit clichéd, it’s simple, clear expression to someone else that offers some comfort. I don’t, I don’t see what’s wrong with that, but also, you know, I, I, the writing that I’m ashamed of having written was when I was younger and I thought that to be a writer, you kind of had to reflect the bleakness and pessimism of the world. And, you know, I, I literally wrote a book called The Possession of Mr. Cave, which got very well reviewed. No one read it at all, but reviewers read it mean I really liked it because it was totally miserable. And literally everyone died in it. It was just a terrible, don’t read that book. And anyway, you know, about had no optimism or no sort of happy platitudes, and so they’d say, and I reached a point and I don’t know what happened in my thirties, but I thought if you’re contributing somethings of the world, why be ashamed of putting some sort of hope inside it or some optimism inside it? I’m someone who genuinely in my twenties, I nearly died because the pessimism, because I was suicidally depressed and depression gave me pessimism. And that pessimism wasn’t real. Yes, I know we live in a screwed up world, but so the voice in my head that depression was giving me was like, Oh, you will definitely be dead by the age of 25, your partner will leave you. This will happen. Nothing good will happen. Dah, dah, dah, dah. You know, that became like a sort of Fox news of the brain, which was just as beaming with sort of. Beaming with sort of tire of cycle of, of stuff. And so, in a, in a way optimism was more authentic for me, optimism was, and not only that, even if pessimism and optimism are equally inauthentic, only one of those things is useful and that’s optimism. Pessimism is not psychologically useful. So optimism, you have to, you have to have some hope. And instead, what I try and do now is take a pessimistic such situation or a person in a bad place, or a terrible situation, like a suicide, a woman between life and death or whatever. And try and then find the hope inside. And I think that’s a bit more useful. And, and I know it’s a bit weird to talk about novels having a use, but I feel like, you know, why not offer something as a human communicating to another human? That got some, 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:21] You know it’s perfect- perfect segue into the book. Will you please tell us a little bit about what the book is? Saying 

Matt Haig: [00:29:27] Yes. Sure. The Midnight Library is a book about a woman between life and death who finds herself in this infinite library. And all the books on the shelves are different versions of her life if she had lived it a different way, and she’s someone who’s full of regrets. So one of the book, which is the book of regrets reminds her of all the things and decisions she’s made that she regrets. So she now got a chance to undo those regrets and live in a different, try out these different existences with the help of a librarian; Mrs. Alum is God-like librarian and she gets to see if the grass really is greener in the life where she was an Olympic medalist of a life, where she was a rock star or a glaciologist, or owns a vineyard or whatever. So she can see, and some of those lives obviously is grass isn’t greener, some of those layers are perfectly fine, but maybe not right for her. And she has to work out the best way to live. 

Rachael Herron: [00:30:20] And it is beautiful. And wonderfully written 

Matt Haig: [00:30:24] Thank you.

Rachael Herron: [00:30:25] Dragged me through. Generally, I start the books and then I only finished them if they drag me through and it just dragged me through beautifully. So, what you’re exploring in this book is really the idea of multiverses, right?

Matt Haig: [00:30:39] Yes

Rachael Herron: [00:30:40] Of every choice that we do not take creates an infinite number of multiverses. Do you, do you believe in that? 

Matt Haig: [00:30:47] I do, actually. I think that’s a good scientific basis for believing in that. There’s a, a book by, I think he’s American, a guy called Brian Green who wrote a book called The Hidden Reality about how all our, current scientific thinking leads to the idea that are multiverses, they might be different kinds of multiverses like there’s a uni- some people believe in universe beyond the universities and others believe that the multiverse is right inches away from us if you’ve just done a different thing. But yeah, I, I, I, I do, but I also believe that we have the power to always enter a new universe within our own timelines and the, by the things we do. And I find that a very empowering thought because it can be a bit of a sort of depressing thought to think, Oh, there’s always better lives out there, but to actually realize you’ve got the power within your life to not necessarily become a billionaire or a rock star or whatever, but to actually, you know, suddenly within the same situation, within the same people in your life to actually have a totally different outlook opponent and I think that’s very helpful. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:49] What you did with your book too, in the framing of it, using the books as the device to display that, I thought was so approachable and understandable because I often think about the multiverse and get very confused and stuff, thinking, and then pick up Twitter. But it allowed me to think of it in another, in another way. It’s an infinitely branching library and it’s all hers. And I just want to say that I recommend it to anyone, especially anyone who likes books, did you have Mrs. Elm yourself? 

Matt Haig: [00:32:20] Yeah. Mrs. Elm is a bit of an amalgam, but I definitely had an English teacher who was a bit like Mrs. Elm, like who seriously got me into books or something that weren’t just things that are bad to be sort of worthwhile and do me good. But there is a, a proper thrilling life enhancing entertainment medium like cinema or whatever else it is. And yeah, she was one of those people. And, my grandmother, actually, my grandmother died when I was quite young, would often take me into the forest, you know, finding things that you’d know all about the forest. And she just seemed full of infinite wisdom. So a bit of her in that as well.

Rachael Herron: [00:32:57] I had a Mrs. Craig, my, my grade school librarian. She taught me how to crochet inside the library. It was wonderful.

Matt Haig: [00:33:03] Oh, very good. I love libraries as spaces that are more than just books. They’re important as a space, like town center libraries, they are spaces that don’t just like us as a consumer, but they like us, for us, you know, and we don’t have many of those spaces that are kind of like secular churches aren’t they.

Rachael Herron: [00:33:22] Yes

Matt Haig: [00:33:23] Aren’t just about money, and then we’re not a wallet to them. We are, you know, something beyond that. I think, one thing I think America does far better than Britain and Europe is value libraries. I think you, you really play, you know, our libraries are being decimated and underfunded and closing down and the last sort of areas that where we need to be more deprived areas. It’s very hard to find the library now. Whereas I felt like libraries certainly are still very much center of the culture of America and that’s something 

Rachael Herron: [00:33:55] the center of book culture, but they’re also turning into a, a social safety net center, as well as, as the social safety net is cut from other places, then we’re forcing these libraries to, our librarians must become social workers and mental health experts and, and all of this. And so I, 100% agree with you, but I wish we would also give some more money, always more money to libraries. Oh, I live in, you know, I mentioned in Oakland and our library system is amazing. And what I can do is I request the book I want, I’m usually the first one to request it. And that means they buy it in E-book and they send it to my Kindle and the author gets paid and I get to read it for free four days later, you know it’s, Oh, it’s the best ever. 

Matt Haig: [00:34:43] Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. Yeah. Unlike certainly in our country, the debate around libraries was often says, well, the internet has made it irrelevant because we can access all this information and we can answer 

Rachael Herron: [00:34:52] What about the books? 

Matt Haig: [00:34:53] What about the books? What about that four dimensional space that you can go into and the fact that it’s, it’s the kind of thing that glues a community together. Isn’t it? You’ve got a library. You have hospitals, you have a church, but you have a library at the heart of it. And yeah. So, you know, we’re not quite in the state, America’s in with leadership, but our leadership. Yeah. But we’ve had, we’ve had over 10 years of a conservative government that have been not good for culture and communities at all. So, yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:35:23] I think if, if we weren’t, if we were not collapsing over here, we’d be spending a lot of time commiserating with you. But 

Matt Haig: [00:35:27] yeah, I know

Rachael Herron: [00:35:28] but I’ll find ways.

Matt Haig: [00:35:29] so American to be absolutely the best, even after being the worst. 

Rachael Herron: [00:35:36] You know it is, it’s embarrassing. All of it. All of it isn’t fair.

Matt Haig: [00:35:38] I know.

Rachael Herron: [00:35:45] Thank you so, so, so very much for doing this with me. I really appreciated talking to you. I really loved reading the book so much so that I forgot it was your book. And I didn’t want to read this other guy’s book about libraries. Because it was yours. 

Matt Haig: [00:35:56] Thank you, Rachael. It was a joy.

Rachael Herron: [00:35:57] No need for any more library books. It was beautiful.

Matt Haig: [00:36:01] That was a joy. And I hope that hopefully in some post-COVID happier future, I’ll meet you in Oakland or San Francisco and we’ll have an event and that’d be good. 

Rachael Herron: [00:36:09] Absolutely. That would be wonderful. Okay. Thanks man, take care!

Matt Haig: [00:36:11] Cheers, Rachael, bye!

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.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 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 rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

C. J. Cooke is an award-winning poet and novelist published in twenty-three languages. She teaches creative writing at the University of Glasgow, where she also researches the impact of motherhood on women’s writing and creative writing interventions for mental health. The Nesting is her most recent release. 

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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.

[00:00:15] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #208 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. Absolutely thrilled that you’re here today because we are talking to C.J. Cooke who wrote a book called The Nesting, which blew my damn mind, it’s a really excellent representation of gothic horror, or gothic thriller really straddles the line there. And it scared me and it kept me up and it most of all put me into a place where I usually am not. In the snow, in the cold, and it was really, really, really beautifully written and kept me on the edge of my seat so I was so thrilled to talk to CJ about this. What happens sometimes, and you’ve heard me talk about this before, is that publishers will reach out to me and ask me to talk to some of their writers and I will say yes to the ones that I’m interested in and no to the ones I am not. And I was interested in CJ and I got the net galley version, so I could read it on my Kindle.

[00:01:23] However, they also sent me a paper back. So I’m trying to divest of belongings as we get ready to move to New Zealand, sometime in the next six months to a year. So I don’t need copies of books. This one is un-cracked, I’ve never opened it and I would love to give it to someone. So if you are interested in winning a copy of CJ’s book, go to RachaelHerron.com/Win. RachaelHerron.com/Win, you can sign up for that if you’re interested and also I have a large confession to make. Probably about a month ago, I also had an extra copy of Becca Syme’s Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. That is a hugely popular, popular episode of the show, everybody loves listening to Becca Syme talk. The book is fantastic. You need it. And about a month ago, I said I had a copy and I would give it away to somebody in a drawing. For the last month, I will admit this to you. I have not been able to find the sheet on which I tallied the entries. I can’t find it, every single Thursday as I go to set up Friday’s podcast. I look for it and I’m giving up. I’m giving up. So I apologize to those of you who entered last time. Please enter again, same place RachaelHerron.com/Win. And that is a drawing for either CJ’s, Nesting book or Becca’s Dear Writer, You Need to Quit and either of which if you win it, I will be happy to send it to you and I know you’ll be happy to get it. So come over and enter for that. I would really love to send these out international is okay. I’m willing to pay the money to ship a book to you. So please come over and enter. 

[00:03:12] And what else is going on? Well, the big thing that’s going on of course is National Novel Writing Month, which I am 5 days deep and so far I’m behind. And that is okay. I did the first 3 days’ spot on, even November 3rd, the day we were all glued to the news and we’re still glued to the news over here in America because, wow. Anyway, I actually wrote on that day because it was a Tuesday and I had Rachael Says Write where we gathered together and write together. So I really, really needed that. We also have that this afternoon and I’m using it however, yesterday was our recovery day after the election. And I had given myself the entire day off and I meant it, which is sometimes hard for me to do so I did nothing. I played some Poker online with no money just playing on the game because I’m trying to learn Texas Hold ‘Em, I’m very, very interested in poker right now, because right now I am reading The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova and it is so good. It’s about a woman who decides to learn Texas Hold ‘Em, in order to write a stunt memoir in which she spends a year doing that, and then enters the world series of poker. And I will not tell you how it goes. It’s just really beautifully written and I’m deeply into it in the way she looks at the way humans make decisions as she was writing this book. And I have gone on a tangent to tell you, I played poker on November 4th, instead of writing my words. And you know, what, what I want to say to everyone right now is that is okay. It is always okay. No matter what your goal is, if your goal is to win NaNoWriMo and write 1,667 words a day, fantastic. Knowing your goal is huge. In my classes, I’m constantly talking about rejiggering our goals. You can look ahead, see how many days you have to write until your specific goal, which could be anything.

[00:05:21] Tell yourself the number of words you have to write in a day in order to hit that. And if you don’t hit it, rejigger. Rejigger, move the date out, move your numbers up. Those are the two things you can do. However, for NaNoWriMo, this is my decision this year and I’ve never done it this way. In the past, I have let myself get very far behind in NaNo and then I get frustrated and then I just kind of give up and I write wherein when I can and I stop tracking my numbers. This is what I decided even before NaNo started this year. On a day that I don’t write, on the day that I don’t get those 1667 words, I am not going to try to make them up. What instead, I will do the next day is try to get 1,667. And I will try to do that every day in the month of November. If I end up short on words, fantastic. I’ll probably still end up with 40 or 45,000 words and if I go over, fabulous and I hit it and I win, great. No matter what though, this will net me more words than giving up on day 10 when I’m three days behind, which happens so often with NaNoWriMo and which happens so often with our goals, the, the goal of goals is to set that goal and show up.

[00:06:39] What we don’t want goals to do is start punishing us because we’ve gotten so far behind. When we get behind, we reset, we rejigger, we move the starting point again for us and we move it again and again and again, and I have to tell you when I’m on serious deadline, I rejigger almost every day for about the last month that I’m on deadline, because I’m constantly either writing more than I thought or lots more often, fewer words than I thought. Rejiggering is the name of the game and you get to do it in any way that you want in any way that helps you best. So I hope that that helps to hear, I hope that some of you listening are participating in NaNoWriMo. You can always come and find me over at RachaelHerron over there. I think that’s who I am. Either that, or Aryana Gogo, I lost my account for a couple of years, couldn’t remember how to log in. So I made a new account, so I think RachaelHerron is the one I’m at right now. Okay. That’s about it. Let’s get into awesome interview with CJ Cooke. I know you’re going to adore her. Don’t forget to come by and enter for a chance to win her book RachaelHerron.com/Win. 

[00:07:48] I’m all out of a patron mini coach questions too. So if you are supporting me at the $5 a month or up level, please send me some questions. I’d love to do another mini episode. Those make me really, really happy. And you know what else makes me happy? Knowing that you’re out there writing too, that we are doing this together and that we are struggling and failing and exalting and having a wonderful time sometimes. Remember that this is fun. Look for the joy inside your writing. And we will talk soon my friends, happy writing.

[00:08:24] 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: [00:08:40] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show today, CJ Cooke. Hello, CJ.

C. J. Cooke: [00:08:44] Hi there. Thanks so much for having me.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:46] I am absolutely thrilled. If anybody’s watching the most people listen to this as a podcast, but if anybody’s watching on the YouTube, we get to see Ralph, the cocker spaniel who is so, we had a cocker spaniel dachshund mix for a while, and her face looked like his.

C. J. Cooke: [00:09:04] Really

Rachael Herron: [00:09:07] It’s, I saw him already and I’m in love with him. Let me give you a little bio before we get started. CJ Cooke is an award-winning poet and novelist published in 23 languages. She teaches creative writing at the University of Glasgow, where she also researches the impact of motherhood on women’s writing and creative writing interventions for mental health. So the creative writing interventions for mental health is so fascinating to me. And I am reading your book that by the time this podcast goes out is called The Nesting, and it is truly CJ, exactly what I wanted to read 

C. J. Cooke: [00:09:42] Yay 

Rachael Herron: [00:09:43] It, you know, in this time of weirdness and strange things going on, I just keep going to scary things.

C. J. Cooke: [00:09:50] Yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:09:51] Not very pandemic things, but I want truly scary and there was one night, a couple of nights ago I couldn’t sleep after reading your book. And I was fighting a headache and I turned on, I turned on a meditation that I like to use, and in this meditation, he walks you through cities and then out into the country. And my brain kept getting confused and I was in Norway and I was running from thing, so beautiful. So I’m loving it. So thank you for that. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:10:18] I’m so pleased. That’s good to hear. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:20] So this is a show about process and you had an interesting process for this book. You actually got a grant to go to Norway, right?

C. J. Cooke: [00:10:27] Yeah, I did. I hadn’t been before. Oh, it was absolutely transformative. You know, I, I, I recommend highly. I feel like I can only ever write again, if I’m on a boat sailing around the West coast of Norway, so, but no, I- I hadn’t been to Norway before, before I wrote The Nesting. But when I was plotting the book, I’m thinking about the particular tone I wanted for the story, because I knew it had to be a Gothic and which was a departure for me. But I, I have particular thoughts about the relationship between Gothic and despair and I, I can talk about that, but I think that the Gothic is sort of the genre of the moment, because it you know, really speaks to what we’re going through. But, 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:06] Yeah

C. J. Cooke: [00:11:07] So I, I knew I needed a setting that was going to be, you know, really sort of beautiful, but hostile and not very human friendly. And that’s particularly with Norway is that it’s this place that is so gorgeous, but you know, it doesn’t look like a place or it doesn’t feel like place that human should be in. You feel like you’re encroaching upon this terrain that that is not for you which I loved. So, but yeah, I decided that that was the spot for the book. And I applied to the arts council and they were so wonderful because they give me a ground on that meant I could go. I went four times. 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:44] Oh wow!

C. J. Cooke: [00:11:45] I know. Well, so I had to go to also to chat with, I had to go to also, I had to also to chat with them, the co-director of the office of Nordic architecture or the Nordic office of architecture, because the book involves architecture 

Rachael Herron: [00:12:02] In a very deep way. Yeah

C. J. Cooke: [00:12:04] Yeah. It’s sort of part of the story is that the reason it’s set in Norway is that this architect is these from London. And he’s building this high concept eco-friendly summer home in this, in the wilds of Norway. And so I’m not an architect and when I did do a lot of research into just general architecture, but in particular it’s, it’s, it’s sat in, in Norway and I needed to know the kind of policies and what I couldn’t make that stuff up. You know, I had to get it right. So I went to speak to him and all this low, and that was, that was terrific. And he really gave me good guidance, but then I did feel like I just needed to be, I didn’t know much about Norway. I did know that it’s a very progressive society and not politically for me was, was very appealing for that thread in the book, the politics of the book and I also wanted to say what climate change looks like in the Arctic, because I had heard that it’s most visible there and I, you know, I’ve nothing to compare it to it’s not, you know, but I did speak to I went to this little fishing village at the very top of Norway, in Finmark beside the Russian border. There’s only like 60 people in this little fishing village. So I was chatting to them and, and from that those conversations, I was able to get much more insight into, you know, it’s stuff that you maybe can’t find online. So it’s just being there, experiencing the place, experiencing what it’s like to, you know, for there to be new song. It was just dark all the time. And there was two hours in the day where it was slightly like dusk, but not sunny or anything like that. I thought, how do people live? You know, but they, they do and they’re happy. But it was just phenomenal. I love Norway and I would move there. So good. 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:51] Well, I think at your knowledge and all of that study comes through it and it comes through in the exact perfect way for a writer to place it. It’s never heavy handed. It just feels like being there and we’re with both of these female characters and it’s, it’s pretty funny because this morning I was pulling up your bio so I could read it. And, you know, looking at the press materials that the publisher sent me and I realized, Oh my God, it’s, it’s a Gothic. And that is how you have contemporized it. Is that, is that a word? Yes. Is that, I’m a huge fan of the Gothic I was raised on Mary Stewart. I love a woman on a cliff side and I hadn’t put it together that it was, it was so obviously a Gothic you’ve, you’ve really recast it in this contemporary way. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:14:39] Yeah, I, I think it was very, because I didn’t have a necessarily light bulb moment where I had this story just there, it came in sort of little drips and drabs, and I knew the sort of things I wanted to write about. And I wanted to write a book that I would read, which is a good idea. Yeah, I, I wasn’t shooting the gothic though. I get quite nerdy about form on John Roe and things like that. So I knew specifically this is going to be a Gothic, as I said, I am interested in the relationship between the Gothic and despair. And I think that, you know, the Gothic examines the unspeakable attributes of despair and the ways that it’s, it’s very surreal, or the way that reality kind of gets tipped upside down and the, the logical world and the rational world cease to exist and the unknown is thrust to the forefront. So I just think that this kind of you know, the state of despair when there’s no solution, then, then what is that? It’s, it’s despair, 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:48] But you up the stakes, even more by making our main character main, main character, have mental health issues. Can you speak to that? Because that’s incredibly beautiful where she sees when she sees things that don’t make sense, she cannot trust herself. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:16:03] Yeah. So Lexi came sort of fully formed it’s funny because when I was planning this story, I kind of felt it was going to be this quite serious, scary story, obviously, very sinister. And so I start writing it and Lexi just comes in and has the sort of humor. She’s very funny and

Rachael Herron: [00:16:27] Yeah. Witty. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:16:29] Yeah. And she’s quirky and kind of just, I just thought she was phenomenal to write. I just thought she was just this really, really interesting character that I didn’t have to sit down and, you know, do character interviews and choose her or anything like that. She was just there. And so I just had this fun writing her. I mean, I think a lot of writing is going with what works. You experiment, if it seems right, you think right. That’s, that works and I’ll keep that. With Lexi, you know, I hadn’t plotted the story when I started that, an idea of some elements. And I wrote the first three or four chapters, which remained in the, as they are in the book. 

Rachael Herron: [00:17:04] Oh, wow. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:17:05] And then I went back and kind of plotted. I got index cards and everything, and I, I upload as from there, but I had to get a sense of, of who she was, and I, I do know from experience that if the voice of the book is not right, if it’s just not working, then it doesn’t matter what your plot looks like. If you don’t have a voice. But because of the voice was working, but it was sort of just there, so all the, I think, because I hadn’t sort of delved into her character and her history too deeply, when I was writing her, I was kind of curious. So I was thinking, Oh, and, and how can I investigate that more? So obviously further along in the book, certain things are revealed about her paths and on her life. But yeah, we, we begin when she’s at rock bottom and I’m not sure that that was planned. It was just the way it came. 

Rachael Herron: [00:18:00] I, I love that. And there are, and these are questions that are not on the list that I sent you, but because I am a writer, and I am so fascinated with this, you did, you played with voice and tense in this book in a nesting way. Like there are nested stories. Lexi is in first person past tense for the now section, and the past section, which is not very past, past, but it’s in the present tense omniscient. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:18:32] Yes

Rachael Herron: [00:18:33] How did you make that decision? I mean, it’s, it’s so curious. I’ve never, I- it’s, it’s unique. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:18:38] I think that was actually a conscious decision creatively, you know, I think we like, we all of us like to sort of push ourselves a wee bit and just challenge ourselves. And my natural inclination is to write in first person, that’s just what comes natural. I think all writers lean either way. You’re naturally towards third person or you’re naturally towards first, a minus first person and I’ve been really trying to write in third person. And I just think in terms of, in terms of the reader, it’s nice to have a bit of a change.

Rachael Herron: [00:19:06] It really is. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:19:07] Yeah. It, it just keeps things in a rhythmic way. I don’t mean changing all over the place, but to have a kind of consistent pattern, but there’s a bit of alteration and I do like first person as well, because it can you know go, it’s like a floating camera. Isn’t it? It can go past these and not I suppose on hindsight was, was, was maybe necessary. But for me, the third person, the shift from first person to third person, I thought, you know, I do enjoy writing Lexi, but I think maybe the reader will get fatigued if it’s all through her perspective. 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:45] Yeah. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:19:46] So we need a wee bit of a change and I could also change the tone. So then the narrator for the third person is, is just different. And maybe I was trying to capture the world how it looked through Tom and Aurelia’s eyes and they’re quite different people and different, a different strata of society as well, so yeah, but it was a bit of a challenge,  

Rachael Herron: [00:20:08] I bet it was a fun challenge and very interesting as a re- as a writer to read, I bet that the reader, I think readers don’t think about these things very much. They’re they go with the book, but as a writer, it’s been fascinating. You’re just such a beautiful writer. You really are. I’m just

C. J. Cooke: [00:20:22] Thank you. Thank you so much

Rachael Herron: [00:20:24] So, so, so, so much. Okay. So what is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing? 

C. J. Cooke: [00:20:30] Oh gosh. It’s I think it’s well, actually I remember what this book. So I wrote the last third of it when I was on that ship that I was on in Norway and actually that

Rachael Herron: [00:20:42] Oh fun

C. J. Cooke: [00:20:43] – that, that I know, right. It was, it was, it was really literally pardon upon pushing the boat out because, because I’d never been away from my kids that long I was, I was gone for like two weeks and

Rachael Herron: [00:20:54] That’s a long time. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:20:56] It was a long time and so my little, my youngest child is autistic and I haven’t been able to go away at all. She’s, she’s at nine. So she, she, she’s verbal now and she can communicate with me in Skype. I mean, she’s still filmed me every day and demanded that I return home, but I just felt more comfortable leaving her, 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:20] Yeah

C. J. Cooke: [00:21:22] now that she was able to communicate and let me know she was fine, but yet, two weeks, I was away and I thought, right, I have, no, I was off work, I didn’t have the school run or all the stuff of normal life. I thought I’m using this time. So I really just pushed myself to write the last third and actually that you asked about the challenges of writing, I, I thought it’s so good that I’m able to just be away and sit in my cabin at night and write because mentally I think that last third, where you’re having to pull together all the narrative threads that you’ve set up at the beginning. Cause you know, you can set up whatever you liked at the beginning, but you have to follow through, right?

Rachael Herron: [00:22:03] Yeah

C. J. Cooke: [00:22:04] So I saw, thank goodness., I’m here because it’s not just the time you need the mental space to pull all those threads together. So that, that is a challenge. And I have PhD students who are writing novels, and I tell them this all the time that you know, that, that last bit pulling everything together is so tough. So tough. 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:25] I just generally don’t do it, but yeah, I, my first drafts are so bad that nothing is pulled together at the end. And I usually quit in despair and then go back and start revising. cause I, it’s so hard. Yeah.

C. J. Cooke: [00:22:37] Right. I get it, yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:22:39] So what is your biggest joy when it comes to writing? 

C. J. Cooke: [00:22:42] Oh, well, when I think, I think when you get a writing day or just when, when you write something that surprises you, and I think that’s why writing Lexi was too joyous, because she just seemed to come from a place that I, I hadn’t, I, I dunno it was like maybe hearing someone talk or whatever, but it just seems so beyond what I had planned. And she just seemed to just talk and I just wrote, and that was terrific. You know, if, if, if every book was like that, it would be great. But that, that was a joy when, when you write something that is, it’s just like, oh yes, because you have this book in your head and somehow that’s process or the journey from head to screen or page. You know, if something gets lost, or it can get lost very, very easily. And this is why, you know, writing so hard. If you could just download it then maybe that would be great, but 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:41] There’s something about Lexi that is just so joyous to be around. There’s I talked to my students a lot about you know, creating that empathetic care. They don’t have to be sympathetic, but that we have to have some kind of empathy for this character to keep going with them, there’s no and there’s, you fall in love with Lexi on the very first page, you are

C. J. Cooke: [00:23:57] Oh, good

Rachael Herron: [00:23:58] 100% in her camp from the, I just, it would be a craft tip for people just to read your book on that. Speaking of craft tips, can you share a craft tip of any sort with us?

C. J. Cooke: [00:24:10] Ticking clock. I teach my students this ticking clock technique. I think that you know, sometimes tension is this abstract concept and it’s why we see blockbusters on the screen that you can have any number of explosions, but you might not care. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:29] Yeah

C. J. Cooke: [00:24:30] But, but nonetheless, I think if you’ve got a story and you, you’ve got, you know, you thought about your characters and you thought about roughly what happens and you’re not sure why it seems like a quiet story or it’s not really, you know, there’s not sort of tension in there. I think if you introduced the ticking clock technique, then it’s, it’s all good. It’s, and it doesn’t have to be a timer on a bomb in a, you know, in a building that has five minutes to go. It can be, you know, like it can be a, any number of things. It can be just a tally of, of things or just something that is, is reminding the reader of limited or finite time or space that a particular problem has to be resolved by or there might be a crisis. So I think that’s, that’s might be something that you know, it, it doesn’t involve major structural tweaking, but if, if, if there’s a piece of writing that you have that you think, you know, it’s maybe not, nothing’s moving. Just think about it a way that you can decrease the, the, the, the time zone. And there are some high or the, the numbers in some way, if you can remind the reader that there’s a finite kind of shape or space here, that the story exists then, then I think that’s good. 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:53] And it doesn’t have to be relegated to one genre. It doesn’t have to be thriller or horror. It can be any genre that you up those stakes intention by using that something, something that

C. J. Cooke: [00:26:05] Yeah 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:09] I forget all the time trying to create tension. What thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way?

C. J. Cooke: [00:26:14] Oh, my gosh, it’s going to sound so boring, but sleep. 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:21] No, that’s not boring. That’s like the focus of my life. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:26:24] Yeah. Right. And I know trying to get enough sleep is just like, you know, my it’s endless this mission, because I just can’t. I, I really envy people who say, Oh, I had four hours sleep last night and they, they seem that they can string a sentence together. It’s, it’s marvelous. And it’s like a super power that I don’t have. But so when I get enough sleep, I, it’s amazing. I just feel like I can think, and I can, I can function and I have clarity and that is just wonderful. So yeah, I, I do think, and I actually find writing a novel is so draining. It is really a marathon for the brain, it is so taxing and I do find more and more that, you know, maybe it’s certain stages of the novel, but I just need more sleep when I’m at a certain point, because I think I’m constantly just even when I’m not at my desk or not at my computer, I am just processing and processing and thinking and it’s so tiring. So you just, you do need to, to do that just as much as if you were training for a marathon, which someday I’m sure I will, but you know, 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:32] Yeah. Yeah. I bet on the boat, and when you’re pushing that last third out, I bet you slept like a baby because you didn’t have kids. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:27:40] Oh I did. Yes.

Rachael Herron: [00:27:43] You are constantly surrounded by newness and you’re working your ass off.

C. J. Cooke: [00:27:47] Yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:50] It was; it must be wonderful.

C. J. Cooke: [00:27:50] It was so good. And I also find that because it was so dark, like I had no clue what was going on, you know, your setting. It was, it was fabulous. I mean, this was meant to be a ferry, but it was, it was a ship it’s like, not like a cruise, cruise ship, but it was definitely lovely. But, yeah. To be sitting, eating your breakfast or your lunch and its just midnight outside is like it’s so your body has to adjust to that. But I did, like, I was able to write until like three in the morning and then sort of sleep into whatever. And I am a night owl, which is not good with, with kids and I, I wish I could convert to a Lark 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:31] Yeah

C. J. Cooke: [00:28:32] Because 5:30 would be ideal, but I’m just not that person. 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:35] Yeah. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:28:36] So 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:37] I love that

C. J. Cooke: [00:28:38] It was good to be able to sleep in.

Rachael Herron: [00:28:41] Okay, so what is the best book that you have read recently? I would personally, and I do not say to my listeners no, I do not say this for everybody. I personally would say, your book. What, I want everybody to read The Nesting. So what about you though? What’s the best book you’ve read recently? 

C. J. Cooke: [00:28:54] Well, I’ve read quite a few good ones and there’s, there’s a debut called The Memory Wood by Sam Lloyd, and I’m not sure that that’s, I’m not sure if it’s, it’s published in the States. But it’s really good, but there’s another one by Camilla Bruce and she’s a Norwegian author actually, called You Let Me In. Oh my goodness. It blew me away.

Rachael Herron: [00:29:20] What genre is it?

C. J. Cooke: [00:29:23] It’s creepy horror. It’s got weird Bay fairy folk in it and oh my gosh. I just, yeah, it’s a book I’m like begging people to read, but it is very weird. 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:37] Yeah

C. J. Cooke: [00:29:38] Which is right up my street. It’s not up, everyone’s street but, 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:41] It’s Camilla Bruce and what’s the title again? 

C. J. Cooke: [00:29:43] Camilla Bruce, You Let Me In. It’s kind of- the title, I don’t think, I don’t think it’s like it, it might be alludes to the book being in a different genre, but it’s just, it’s a unique book and it, I just love it. I thought it was phenomenal. So that, that was my, and it’s a debut, but I just blew me away. It was just 

Rachael Herron: [00:30:02] How fun. Oh, I can’t wait to read that then

C. J. Cooke: [00:30:04] I know. Then I could read weird all day long, so yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:30:08] That’s, that’s what I want right now. So speaking of creepy and awesome. Can you tell people maybe the premise of The Nesting and then where they can find you.

C. J. Cooke: [00:30:18] Certainly, Yes. So The Nesting is a Gothic suspense, and it’s set in Norway. It’s about a nanny who or a woman called Lexi who takes a job as a nanny under false pretenses. She’s not a nanny not trained at all, but she ends up being a nanny to these two little girls in a remote part of Norway where she finds that there are spooky goings on, and the, the mother whose children she’s taking care of doesn’t appear to have committed suicide as everyone is telling her, but seems to be murdered. And so, she has to deal with this kind of threat that’s posed, but there’s a lot of folklore. There’s a lot of ghostliness and there’s a lot of wildlife in this story. So I’m, I’m really hoping it appeals to people who want a really epic halloween read with all of those different elements. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:12] So good. And those little girls, Gaia and Cocoa are wonderful.

C. J. Cooke: [00:31:17] Yeah

Rachael Herron: [00:31:18] I just, I could read them all day long

C. J. Cooke: [00:31:19] I loved writing them and I loved writing the relationship between Gaia and Lexi in particular. I mean, I just, I loved writing that relationship and I thought, why, why couldn’t, I wish I could write a series of this, but I know that that’s yeah, that they were

Rachael Herron: [00:31:36] I have this theory and I’m not sure if it’s correct, but that’s some of, sometimes we get a gift book that’s, there is no gift book. There’s no book that is easy to write from beginning to end. It’s impossible. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:31:46] Yes

Rachael Herron: [00:31:47] Every one’s like for me, it’s like one in every five or six books. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:31:52] I agree. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:53] Hits

C. J. Cooke: [00:31:54] I, I agree. It is that ratio and it’s, it’s sad that that is the case. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:58] I know. Every time I think, Oh, I finally got it. Now I know how to write a book 

C. J. Cooke: [00:32:02] Yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:32:02] And it’s not true. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:32:04] I know there are some books it’s like digging for coal. It’s like, I’ve literally lost the ability to write. I dunno, what I’ve been doing all this time maybe I need to go on teach Pilates or something, but, but this was, this was definitely, it wasn’t, it was still hard in some ways, but, you know, but on hindsight I just had such joy writing it and it, it is lovely when it comes out as a kind of hat book you had in your head is sort of there or it’s even better than that. So yeah. You asked where it’s going to be sold, I think it’s going to be in most Barnes and Nobles and all the excellent indie stores support independence. 

Rachael Herron: [00:32:41] Yeah. Yeah. It’s so good. And where can we find you? Online 

C. J. Cooke: [00:32:46] Find me. so I’m on social media on Instagram, I’m cjcooke_author, and that’s Cooke with an E and I’ve been posting some of the footage from Norway, like the videos and photographs I took to their on my Instapage and Facebook, I have an author page as just CJCookeBooks, I think it might be CJ Cooke books. And then on Twitter, I’m CJessCooke that’s my handle (C J E S S C O O K E) and I have a website, cjcookeauthor.com  (CarolynJessCooke.com) and The Nesting has its own dedicated website where I sort of posted a research blog and that’s TheNestingBook.com  

Rachael Herron: [00:33:28] Ooh, I’m going to go check that out immediately. Maybe after I finished the book, I don’t want to, I just want to finish the book. I was so irritated that I couldn’t finish it last night. But I needed sleep like we were talking about, 

C. J. Cooke: [00:33:39] well, exactly.

Rachael Herron: [00:33:42] CJ. It has been such a treat to talk to you. I’m very sad that we can’t see Ralph a little bit more. We’ve just, you know, but I know that he’s, he’s there. Thank you so much for being here and for writing such an amazing book that I am personally learning so much from and just enjoying the hell out of. Thank you. 

C. J. Cooke: [00:33:59] Oh that’s good to hear. Thank you very much for having me have a great day. 

Rachael Herron: [00:34:02] You too. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.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 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 rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.

Donna Baier Stein is the author of The Silver Baron’s Wife (PEN/New England Discovery Award, Foreword Reviews Winner), Sympathetic People (Iowa Fiction Award Finalist), Letting Rain Have Its Say, and Scenes from the Heartland: Stories Based on Lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton (Foreword Reviews Finalist). A Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review, she founded and publishes Tiferet Journal. She has received a Bread Loaf Scholarship, Johns Hopkins University Fellowship, and other awards. Donna’s writing appears in Next Avenue, Virginia Quarterly Review, Saturday Evening Post, Writer’s Digest, LitHub, Washingtonian, and other journals as well as in I’ve Always Meant to Tell You (Pocket Books) and To Fathers: What I’ve Never Said (featured in O Magazine).

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.

[00:00:15] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #207 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I’m so thrilled that you’re here today. Today, we are talking to Donna Baier Stein about her surprising tip for getting into the voice of a character. It was really, really fun to talk to her and the way she mixes art and writing. And I know that you are going to enjoy that portion of the podcast and what’s been going on around here. Well, I have been writing my Patreon essay, which is about to go out and I know that I have told you, the past that I’m writing this memoir called You’re Already Ready. It was called Replenish, and it was the result of me burning out at the end of 2017. I decided to take 2018 to do a month- sorry, a year-long challenge. Every month would be a different challenge, I would focus on one different thing and see if it could help replenish my empty well. Well, what ended up happening, was completely unexpected and it happened exactly at the inciting incident wherein right about 20% through that year because of what I was doing and because of the journaling I was doing, I discovered that I had slipped into alcoholism, which was my biggest fear of my life. One of my biggest fears. And it had happened, after many years of being a heavy drinker, I was no longer able to stop drinking. So I continued to write those monthly essays for my Patreon subscribers, and they were true and real and honest, and they told the way I felt, but I kept all mentioned of my recovery out of them. We’re just going to have to ignore that cat; who’s yelling in the background. I apologize for that. That’s what he does. 

[00:02:05] And so I kept all the mention of alcoholism and addiction out of those essays. I am now as I’m revising the memoir, I’m putting them back in because I wanted to be a true representation of the year that I spent. So I am pulling in a bunch of stuff from the journals and I am doing one essay and then I do a little bit of a journal about what was happening at that time in terms of recovery. And today I am working on that inciting incident moment of that discovery and what happened after that and how I felt, which was not good. It was not good. Let’s, let’s put it that way. So it’s been actually a really fun for the last few days to be going through those journal entries and doing what we get to do with journal entries. When we are memoirists, we get to put things together. We get to take out the boring idiotic sentences and finesse some of the sentences that were not even real words. If any of you were journalists, you know what I mean. Not adding anything, but cleaning them up and making them readable and hopefully enjoyable. And I get to send that out this week for my Patreon subscribers. And I’m a little bit nervous because this is, that was an intense thing that happened and it didn’t feel good. I really liked writing about perhaps not feeling as good and then finding out how to feel better and that doesn’t happen for a while in this part of my story. And it doesn’t happen in this particular journal entry. How that goes over the course of a couple of the first days of me getting sober. So I’m excited to send that out and I am nervous and I’m happy to do that. 

[00:03:49] So that’s been my writing for the last couple of days and I’m also plotting for NaNoWriMo, for the few people who are listening, who don’t know what that is, it is National Novel Writing Month. It happens every year in November. It starts November 1^st, ends November 30^th. It is a free online challenge in which you write a book in a month, you write 50,000 words. As soon as you write 50,000 words, you win, you win NaNoWriMo. What do you win? Not much. You win, congratulations! A heartfelt congratulation from the NaNoWriMo staff. And, but the big thing that you win is you could just say forever that you won NaNoWriMo, that you wrote a book in a month. It’s a short book. 50,000 words is a short book. It’s like a Hemingway-esque of maybe like a, of, of Mice & Men Steinbeck length but it’s a book. My first time I did NaNo was in 2006 and that book became How to Knit a Love Song, my first published book from Harper Collins and I have participated every year since then. I don’t always win. I hope I win this year. I’m really going to give it a good shot this year. I might not. And that’s okay. I will still write more words because I’m doing NaNo than I would if I weren’t. And that is one of the awesome things. There won’t be any in-person NaNoWriMo events, which is too bad because those writings where you get together in cafes and you have challenges to see who can write the fastest. Cause you’re not writing good words in NaNo, you are writing fast. So necessarily, they’re going to be crappy and that’s what we want. 

[00:05:25] So there’s no getting together in cafes to do those kind of challenges. So there will be so many online sprints and challenges and zoom rooms, and you can find all of those at the forums in NaNoWriMo. I save looking at the forums, of course, for after I’ve done my work for the day after I’ve written my 1,667 words that day, I can spend as much time as I want in the forums. And to read what other people are doing and harnessing that energy of everybody doing this at the same time is something that’s really incredible. So as this goes out tomorrow on the 30th of October, we’ll be starting on Sunday. So I think you should join us. I joined my first year without even an idea of what my book was going to be about. I just knew it was going to be about a woman who loved knitting. There we go. And I started, and again, it doesn’t have to be good. You just write fast. There is something called the reverse Nano. If you want to Google that, pull that up. I’ve done that a couple of times. It’s pretty great. You start the month with a high word count per day. I think it goes from like 4,000 words and then down the second day, maybe to 3000 something, and every day you write fewer words until the very end of the month, the very last day, you only have to write one word. That’s your goal on the 30^th of November is to write your 50,000 word and you can find that by Googling reverse NaNo. Maybe I’ll do that. I don’t know. We’ll see. 

[00:06:46] Anyway, I am excited about it. I’m excited about the book I’m going to write, and I’m going to try to bring to this book, just joy. Just happiness. Just fun. I want to have fun on the page and I want to remember to have fun. So you should come friend me over there. I think I am Rachael Herron. If I’m not Rachael Herron, I’m Yana Gogo. Although I think that’s my old name. Their website is kind of wonky right now. I’m not totally happy with the website, but it’s fine. It is what it is. It does what it does. It is a nonprofit that raises money to bring this into school. Their young writers program is amazing. And if you do NaNoWriMo, I would humbly plead you to toss them a few dollars. This is a nonprofit. They work extremely hard all year to promote literacy and they’re amazing. So that’s NaNoWriMo.org  or just Google National Novel Writing Month, and you should play. 

[00:07:40] And now let us jump into the interview. I know you’re going to enjoy it. Come find me on the internet you can come over to HowDoYouWrite.net and leave me a comment or find me anywhere else that I am online and tell me how your writing is going. I really want to know. Okay. Happy writing my friends.

[00:07:57] Hey writers, I’ve opened up some coaching slots. I’m not taking clients on a weekly basis right now as I’m working on my own books, but I am doing one-offs. I call them tune-ups. Tell me your plot problems and ask your character queries. Let me know what stumbling blocks you’re up against. Get tips and tricks to get you back on the right track. Ask any questions about all things publishing. Together we’ll brainstorm your specific plan of action, making sure you’re in the driver’s seat of your book again. You’ll receive a 30-minute call over Skype or FaceTime, giving you the honest encouragement you need to keep getting better or a polite ass-kicking if that’s what you need and ask for it. Plus, you’ll get an MP3 audio recording or MP4 video, your choice of our chat. So you can re-listen at your leisure. And if you want a little more help, I can also critique either 10 pages or your book’s outline and talk you through my findings. Just check out RachaelHerron.com/Coach for more info. I’d love to work with you. Now on to the interview. 

Rachael Herron: [00:08:59] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show my guest, Donna Baier Stein. Hi, Donna. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:09:04] Hi, Rachael, I’m happy to be here with you. 

Rachael Herron: [00:09:07] I’m thrilled to have you. Let me give you a little introduction before we get into the meat of it. Donna Baier Stein is the author of The Silver Barron’s Wife, which is a PEN New England Discovery Award, and a Foreword Reviews Winner, Sympathetic People. Which was an Iowa Fiction Award Finalist, Letting Rain Have Its Say and Scenes from the Heartland: Stories Based on Lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton, a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review. She found it in publishes Tiferet Journal. Is that how you say it? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:09:38] Yes. 

Rachael Herron: [00:09:38] Great. She has received the Bread Loaf Scholarship, Johns Hopkins University Fellowship, and other awards. Her writing appears in Next Avenue, Virginia Quarterly Review, Saturday Evening Post, Writer’s Digest, LitHub, Washingtonian, and other journals. As well as in, I’ve Always Meant to Tell You from Pocket Books and To Fathers: What I’ve Never Said, featured in O Magazine. Welcome!

Donna Baier Stein: [00:10:03] Thank you, Rachael. Thank you.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:06] It’s- I was looking at your website and so the newest book is the scenes from the Heartland, right? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:10:12] Yes. Yes. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:15] So before actually I want to, I want to get to that at the end because it looks so fascinating. I was telling you before we got on here, that it’s at the top of my to be read pile right now, but let’s, first of all, that’s a lot of writing that you have under your belt 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:10:27] and a lot of different directions too. So I tend to, 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:32] I, I like that in a person I write in five genres. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:10:36] Yes. I noticed and it’s so impressive. All the books you’ve written and sold as well. So it’s terrific. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:43] But I really, and I really like that about people when we aren’t boxed in, when we have just, I know I’ve shot myself in the foot by going so many different directions, but I wouldn’t change it

Donna Baier Stein: [00:10:56] Yes

Rachael Herron: [00:10:57] because it’s weird. Yeah.

Donna Baier Stein: [00:10:57] Yeah, I feel the same because, each of the three fiction books are, they’re very different. And, but I feel like I want to write what I want to write. So it’s not the best marketing ploy, but as far as what one wants to do. So, and you have an animal there too. I have my cat. I’m trying to keep off my lap.

Rachael Herron: [00:11:22] I’m very sorry, my wife is getting home. So I’ll ask the question quickly and then I’ll go on mute. Can you tell us about your writing process, how you get it done? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:11:30] Yes. Usually I write in the mornings, sometimes at the computer, sometimes in a notebook and while I’m still in bed, I have to say that you know, I was thinking earlier, the last couple months I have been less, less consistent in my writing than I was earlier because I tend to get caught up in headlines, et cetera. I think it’s, it’s, you know, but I find, I really find, and I have always found this in my life that I feel much better when I write. As opposed to times that I don’t. Right, so having multiple projects is a good solution for that. So if I don’t feel like working on the, on the current novel, I, I can write a poem or an essay, et cetera, again, possibly not the most, you know, fine-tuned direct approach, but, but it’s what works for me, so. 

Rachael Herron: [00:12:35] Now, let me ask about the writing by hand. How does that work? Is that like a first draft? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:12:41] Yes. And usually, and it’s actually interesting because it’s really just this summer that I went back to writing by hand I’ve, my first computer I remember was a televideo and I remember being so thrilled to, to be able to add it so easily and cut and paste paragraphs, et cetera, and not have to redo the whole- I’m older, so not, I didn’t have to redo the whole page if I wanted to change something on a page, as we used to have to do when we were using typewriters. So I love using the computer. My brain runs really fast. So, I find that typing on the keyboard generally works best for me, but again, this summer, I have found myself wanting to slow down a little bit and wanting the physical process of, of pen on paper. Spalding Gray, I don’t know if you know that name. He was from a long, from a while ago, he wrote something, I think, Swimming to Cambodia. He was on Broadway and he said something like, the pen becomes part of his musculature and I’ve just really wanted that physical presence of the pen on the, on the notebook. And then I type it into the computer, but, and, and that I do more for poetry and maybe an essay I don’t, I usually for the novel that I’m working on, I usually go directly to the computer. I write very messy first drafts and that’s something that do you too? 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:25] Oh, the worst, the absolute messiest. They’re unintelligible to any other human beings. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:14:29] Yes. And I always write way too much and, and I researched too much. Right. And put it all in and then when I go back, I need to cut out. But, you know, and I think I, I’m teaching a number of writing classes now. And one of the things that I really want any writer to know is, get something on the page. It doesn’t have to be perfect Ernest Hemingway said all first drafts are S H I T. Virginia Wolf said she looked for the diamonds and the dust steep in her writing and yeah, there are people and I have friends who are writers. There are people who can write first draft, final draft. I’m not one of those. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:13] I think they’re very few and far between, and they’ve developed a process of going through the garbage in their brain. And I always tell my students that that’s only your method, if you are revising as you go and you complete books. If you’re not completed books, that’s not your method. You should write a crappy first draft. But the other thing is, is it takes us so long to accept that. Because I really wanted for many years of not doing much writing, I wanted to finally be the writer who was good when I sat down. And I mean, we never get that way. I think it was Malcolm. I love your quotes. And Malcolm Gladwell said the first eight drafts of anything is terrible. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:15:47] Oh, good. Yeah. I have that to my repertoire. That’s good quote. Yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:53] Yeah. And it’s, it’s so hard to remember that. And I also love the, the by hand thing. I have gotten really into writing on my iPad, brand new thing, but the writing is actually searchable and you can change it into text if you want.

Donna Baier Stein: [00:16:09] So you use the stylus? 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:11] Yes. You use the Apple pencil it’s really kind of satisfying both sides of my brain of wanting the kinesthetic spirit connected experience. And also, you know, if I needed to move it into the word document I could, which I must garbage, but yeah, that’s great. I’m sorry. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:16:29] Good. 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:30] She’s finally stopped. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:16:32] Don’t worry. I have a dog back in the back of the house, so 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:37] Good. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:16:41] Perfectionism and with The Silver Barron’s wife, for instance, that that novel is a topic that obsessed me, for decades and, Baby Doe Tabor, in Colorado. I first learned about her when I was seven years old and her life obsessed me and

Rachael Herron: [00:17:04] Can you give me a quick sentence of who she was? Cause I’m not sure-

Donna Baier Stein: [00:17:09] Yes. Okay. She was a woman who lived in the late 19th, early 20th century. She bucked a lot of social expectations. She worked in the silver mines, which women didn’t do. She had two marriages. The first was to Harvey Doe and, and then she left, she divorced him. He, he was a Philander and possibly an addict. And she caught the attention of Horace Tabor, who was a very wealthy silver Baron. He was worth about $24 million in 1883. When, when Horace and Lizzie married, they married at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC. President Chester Arthur came anyway her life and then when, when, the Sherman silver purchase act was repealed horses fortune, which was based on silver, being the standard for US, for the, for the United States, his fortune was, was lost and she stayed with him. And then when he died, she went to the matchless mine, where he had made most of his fortune. And she lived there for the next few decades, writing down thousands of dreams. 

Rachael Herron: [00:18:25] Wait, she lived in, she lived in the mine? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:18:27] Well in the shack.

Rachael Herron: [00:18:28] Oh, how fascinating. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:18:29] Oh yes. So her life, her life includes fabulous wealth that dire poverty, materialism spirituality. She had two daughters, love, loneliness, just huge contrast in her life. And one of the things that really struck me, I think even as a child was I had these postcards of her one and an urban opera code and one standing in front of the cabin in the mine. And I thought, how does a woman go from point A to point B? How, how does a life go like this? And, and also the fact that she wrote down these dreams, which people were doing that, I mean, now there are dream journals and dream groups and, but, Freud’s interpretation of dreams I think was 1896, something around there, it was published. I don’t know whether she read it or not, but it was very unusual that she wrote down these dreams and there were thousands of them, that are in the history Colorado center. So she was a real, and she had some, there are some people, some theologians think she was a mystic. There’s a woman, Judy Nolte Temple who wrote a non-fiction book about Baby Doe Taber and her dreams. And she talked to some theologians and she, she had a lot of visions of Jesus and Mary and saints. 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:54] Oh, wow. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:19:55] Other people think she was crazy. And 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:58] What was that like to take that, put it into a book along with that perfection, perfectionism that you have?

Donna Baier Stein: [00:20:03] Well, it took a long time talking about the first, the first chapter of that book of that novel of this novel. I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, really the first couple pages I had to get it perfect. And I, that was a mistake because I needed to write to the end and then perfect. So that was the lesson I learned. 

Rachael Herron: [00:20:27] Yeah. Because we don’t know what our book wants to have

Donna Baier Stein: [00:20:30] Exactly

Rachael Herron: [00:20:30] In the first part until the, until it’s done.

Donna Baier Stein: [00:20:31] Exactly. 

Rachael Herron: [00:20:32] Sometimes not even then. Sometimes it’s right there. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:20:35] That’s right. That’s right.

Rachael Herron: [00:20:36] Yeah. Oh, wonderful. What is your biggest joy when it comes to writing? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:20:41] Finding synchronicities in research, like 

Rachael Herron: [00:20:46] Yes

Donna Baier Stein: [00:20:47] When I pull upon something, I love that. And like in the Thomas Hart Benton book, I- I own one lithograph by Benton. I’m from Kansas City originally and my father was given one of them. 

Rachael Herron: [00:21:01] Oh how cool

Donna Baier Stein: [00:20:02] Yeah. So one day I sat down. I had written my first book was a collection of short stories and I thought I want to do something that’s, you know, kind of out of the realm of my daily life and not contemporary. And I started creating a story based on what I saw in the lithograph and that was published in Virginia court that stores in Virginia Quarterly Review. And then I decide, Oh, let’s do some more of these and I happen to own a book of lithographs, by Benton. And one of them, here’s an example of synchronicity and research. One of the lithographs shows two women standing by a flooded river and Benton had titled it The Flood. And it’s 1937. Well, I didn’t know, but there was a very large, very damaging flood in 1937. And, I did research and one of the places that was flooded was New Madrid, Missouri, which was on, and there was a landing that was literally called Compromise. And I remember, I can’t remember the year I wrote that story, but it was the last story I wrote for that book. And at the time, and this is before the day when it’s even more terrible. But at the time I was thinking about the divisiveness in this country. And I see this landing called Compromise and that struck me and there was a church in, in, in the research I found in New Madrid, there was a church that literally sat on a state line and the people from Kentucky sat on one side and the people from Missouri sat on the other and they had armed men with guns at the ends of the pews. Yeah, and I thought, whoa!

Rachael Herron: [00:22:58] Oh my gosh

Donna Baier Stein: [00:22:59] I know, so that really seemed to touch on what was going on and it’s still going on in this country, so that was an example of wow, you know, it was just perfect for a theme that I wanted to explore. 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:15] And it’s so interesting when you go looking, you find something that’s just what happens. And the other thing I love about synchronicity is that how it happens all around us and listen things on the radio, and somebody mentions a word that you’ve never heard before you just learned for this book and you hear it four more times that week, you know,

Donna Baier Stein: [00:23:33] Yes, 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:34] It’s a beautiful. So can you share a craft tip of any sort with us 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:23:39] One thing that I’ve realized is that, that, is that it’s helpful that it’s something to consider as when you, when a writer is creating a character to at least do one draft in first person. I think writers need to be actors, psychologists, and wordsmiths. And, I, I find that getting into a character writing from that character’s first-person point of view is helpful. It may not stay that way. I may later go change it to third, but it helps me get inside the character.

Rachael Herron: [00:24:19] That is wild. And I love it. I have only gotten one book out of the 26 in first person and it’s the most recent book. And it was, it was really scary in a way to be that close inside her head. That’s fascinating. I love that idea. And I’m going to use that in the future. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:24:42] And 26 books, I’m so impressed. That is amazing. You must be a much more disciplined writer than I am. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:51] I, I have little discipline, but a lot of stamina. I just keep showing up and writing terrible, terrible first drafts.

Donna Baier Stein: [00:25:00] That’s what, that’s what it takes.

Rachael Herron: [00:25:03] I love that tip. Thank you. Thank you so much. That is completely unique and I’ve never 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:25:06] I’ll looked for your last book too. 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:09] Just came out in paperback. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:25:11] Okay, great. 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:12] Thriller about police corruption. So I don’t know if that’s up your alley, 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:25:16] Awesome. But wait, for I saw something on Twitter where you a police dispatcher? 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:22] I was. I was a police and fire medical dispatcher for 17 years. So this was the book that was about the dispatcher that I had to get out of the industry in order to write, I haven’t dispatched for a four and a half years, so. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:25:34] Wow, but you wrote it in first person?

Rachael Herron: [00:25:37] That one actually was in third. The one I just turned in that’s coming out in spring is in first person.

Donna Baier Stein: [00:25:41] Okay.

Rachael Herron: [00:25:42] Yeah. Yeah. But it was fun. It was really fun. Okay. So what thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:25:57] Probably, well, there are two ways I can answer this. One is that, one is that, I sometimes let my emotions get the best of me as, and that affects the consistency of the writing.

Rachael Herron: [00:26:22] I think that might be a common thing for writers. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:26:24] Yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:25] And how does it happen?

Donna Baier Stein: [00:26:29] What, in that I, that I have to push myself more to get to the computer or the notebook. And I have to keep myself away from Twitter news and headlines. And again, especially with the pandemic and everything else going on right now, that’s kind of really up, up. And you know, that that’s the negative side, the positive lesson from that is, acknowledge what you’re feeling and go sit there and write anyway,

Rachael Herron: [00:27:06] I’m 48 years old and I’m just learning how to feel feelings. I am not good at it. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:27:10] Oh, I’m too good at it. It’s not, it’s not a plus, you know, so I mean, there’s a balance obviously, but, but I think the thing, I think the thing that’s important is that even if you don’t feel like writing, get out the pen and notebook and start free-writing and say, I don’t feel like writing right now, but and just come out. And again, the classes that I teach, you know, they have, I give them prompts and they have free writing sessions and it’s like silencing that inner critic and silencing that voice that says, I don’t want to do this right now and just doing it. And lo and behold, every time I do that, I feel better 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:56] every single time. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:27:57] Right. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:58] It never misses. Sometimes you don’t get anything good out of it, but other times you get gold. You had no idea you could pull from nowhere.

Donna Baier Stein: [00:28:06] Exactly. That’s right.

Rachael Herron: [00:28:08] Yeah. And no matter what you feel better, my wife always tell- she can tell when I haven’t had a writing day

Donna Baier Stein: [00:28:13] Yes. Yes. Me too. 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:18] not feeling emotions, but perhaps I’m good at showing them. Maybe too, too good. Okay. So what is the best book you read recently and why did you love it? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:28:26] No question about it. The Overstory by Richard Powers. 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:30] I love Richard Powers, but I haven’t read that one. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:28:33] Well this is the first of his that I’ve read and it’s, oh my God. It blew me away. I think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. I also really love Lincoln and the Bardo a few years ago, those two books are the best, are two of the best books I’ve ever read. And The Overstory is just a work of genius and I do 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:53] What did you love about it?

Donna Baier Stein: [00:28:55] The way he shows the interconnectedness not only of praise 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:03] Oh I’m so-

Donna Baier Stein: [00:29:04] Oh, it’s all about the environment and trees, have trees take care of each other and the importance. It’s also about video game creation. It’s, it’s I can’t even say what it’s about because it’s so huge. And there are multiple characters, multiple stories. When I first started reading it, I thought I didn’t realize it was a novel and I read the first section, chapter. And I thought it was going to be a collection of short stories and each chapter is focused on different characters, but he mag- he, with a genius touch, he ties every thread together. It, it touches, it’s a consciousness raising book in my opinion, about how we’re all connected about the planet and what we need to do to save it. And, it’s just a mind bogglingly, wonderful book. 

Rachael Herron: [00:30:02] I love reading books that make me question my choice of careers. You know, I really, really love it where I am dumped by how someone can be that intelligent and do all of this. Like, that is one of my happy places. So that’s gonna be right underneath your book on my TBR pile. Speaking of your most recent book, can you tell us a little bit more about these stories and the lithographs and how this came to be?

Donna Baier Stein: [00:30:27] Yeah. Again, you know, I, I own one of the lithographs and you know, just having 

Rachael Herron: [00:30:33] Is it nine, is it nine stories? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:30:36] Yes, either eight or nine. Hold on. That’s terrible. Yeah. Nine. Sorry. And it, it was just the first, it was interesting because my first book of short stories people, well, it’s not autobiographical. There are elements of it in it that are all biographical or things from friends’ lives, et cetera. And I really was thinking, I want to write something that’s not related to my life. Well, lo and behold, so I go into this Benton lithograph, which actually, I don’t know. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:26] Oh yeah

Donna Baier Stein: [00:31:28] There on the wall. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:29] Yes, gorgeous. It’s beautiful

Donna Baier Stein: [00:31:30] Yeah. And it’s a two boys on a horse and there’s a gray farm house in the background. And you know, I started just basically describing what I saw and then I started doing some research from Missouri, Missouri in that era and farming, et cetera. And I knew that I didn’t want the main character to be an adolescent boy. So I started thinking, well, there are logs cut, that means there’s an adult around, there’s farmhouse in the back, the parents are probably there and I went into the voice of the wife, mother, and it’s, it’s really her story. So what surprised me was that I mean anything we write our own psyche makes it stamp on it. So it surprised me that that came out in that story. But again, I love doing the research and I love making up a story based on a picture. 

Rachael Herron: [00:32:28] I think that is such a beautiful, beautiful, idea plus your, I didn’t know who he was before, I, I love it.

Donna Baier Stein: [00:32:38] He was a regionalist painter from Kansas City and Martha’s Vineyard. He was actually the mentor-teacher to Jackson Pollock. 

Rachael Herron: [00:32:45] Oh wow. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:32:46] In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there’s a room full of, I mean, his paintings are in museums all over the world, but at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there’s a room, that has murals or on all four walls and it’s called America Today and it shows, there are bankers and farmers and steelworkers and dance hall girls, you know, the, the, the incredible variety of people that make up America.

Rachael Herron: [00:33:16] I love that I would love to be able to go to New York and look at that

Donna Baier Stein: [00:33:19] Yeah

Rachael Herron: [00:33:20] Wait for us, 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:33:21] You can Google it and see it’s really, so, so he was, he was a very, he was a very famous paint and 

Rachael Herron: [00:33:31] Plus you have this connection to him through your father. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:33:34] Yeah

Rachael Herron: [00:33:35] Oh, that’s beautiful. Okay, and where can we find you online? 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:33:38] My website is my name, DonnaBaierStein.com. And I also published an interfaith literary journal called Tiferet Journal. That’s (T I F E R E T) TiferetJournal.com  

Rachael Herron: [00:33:53] What is, what does interfaith mean in this specific case? Is it?

Donna Baier Stein: [00:33:56] Well, my father was Jewish and my mother was Christian, so I grew up thinking we all need to get along. And so I publish authors from different faiths.

Rachael Herron: [00:34:05] It sounds like that might be one of your core stories. In your life, is, is that coming together and that 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:34:12] Yes. I think that 

Rachael Herron: [00:34:13] like, like that church and

Donna Baier Stein: [00:34:15] Yes. That’s right

Rachael Herron: [00:34:16] The vision of it being so separated, putting it back together. 

Donna Baier Stein: [00:34:20] Exactly. Exactly.

Rachael Herron: [00:34:21] Beautiful. Oh, it is, it is

Donna Baier Stein: [00:34:23] Our country needs to do that too 

Rachael Herron: [00:34:24] It absolutely does. It have some fingers crossed for the election. It has been such a joy to talk to you today.

Donna Baier Stein: [00:34:33] To you too, Rachael. Thank you. And I’m going to get your book and thank you so much for having me on 

Rachael Herron: [00:34:40] Take care. Bye.

Donna Baier Stein: [00:34:41] Have a good rest of the evening or afternoon for you. 

Rachael Herron: [00:34:44] Thank you. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.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 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 rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.