Rachael

Marianne Power is a writer and journalist who lives in London. Her first book, Help Me: How self-help did NOT change my life,, is about a year long quest to change her life by following the rules of a different self-help book each month for a year, is being published in more than 29 countries and is being optioned for a television series. 

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript

Rachael Herron: 00:01 Welcome to How Do You Write, I’m your host Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is, and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

00:16 Well, hello writers. Welcome to episode number one 153 of How Do You Write.

I’m Rachael Heron, I am 100% thrilled you’re here because today I am talking to Maryanne Power, who I am basically in love with. She wrote this book called Help Me, and it is as if she wrote it for me. I will not go into deep, kvelling, overcome, rapturous love right now, I’ll do that with her on the air, but it’s a book I really, really loved and it was wonderful to talk to her. So you are definitely gonna enjoy that. And in a little update, you may have noticed that if you watch this on YouTube or Facebook, number one, I’m not sure I’m going to continue those, I’m kind of thinking about discontinuing those. Not sure what I’m getting out of that. So if you really love it on YouTube or Facebook, send me a note or something that lets me know that because by far and away, I get 99% of my listens on Podcatcher feeds, so it’s all audible. And also these new mini podcasts that I’m doing, the ones where I’m actually giving advice and answering questions is just in audio. So if you watch it on the video, you’re missing those, so you may want to put this podcast into your favorite Podcatcher feed, that is my point here. 

01:40 What else is going on? I am having a good time with the new book. I believe I told you all, even though I wasn’t supposed to, that I sold the book to Penguin and it is now officially out. So you can tell all your friends that you were keeping this deep secret from. I know that you just couldn’t wait to tell everybody that this person you’ve never met in person sold a book. And in case you were, you can tell people, it’s official, and I’m deep inside it. I hesitate to say this, but I’m really liking the first drafting of it. I’m having some flow states, where I look down and I’m writing and I look up and 90 minutes has passed and I very rarely feel that. It is the goal, I think, of writing to feel that or of any creative endeavor to feel that flow, and I don’t feel it much. When I was a runner, which I am not now, but I ran a couple of marathons, two to be exact, but when I say a couple, it sounds like more, doesn’t it? I ran two marathons and I would get the runner’s high right around mile 13, 13 or 14. It’s when the endorphins are just flooding your body and it is an actual high, which feels good. And to me, flow state is kind of that feeling. It doesn’t feel euphoric when you’re in it. In fact, you don’t feel anything when you’re in flow state, that’s the whole point. Your body kind of abandoned you and you’re inside the project. But afterwards, I feel this euphoria that I like, plus you know that I’m sober, so I get my euphoria where I can get it, which is, mostly sugar and sometimes caffeine.

03:19 Speaking of that, I’m getting a large tattoo. It is across my back and down my arm, and it is a wisteria tattoo. When I go to Venice in the spring, I have often been there right before the wisteria blooms, so you see all these dead branches, just dead vines hanging everywhere. And then literally overnight– this has happened the last three times I’ve been there. When they bloom, overnight, you walk outside and the smell of the wisteria is everywhere. These dead sticks that you were looking at yesterday because you were wondering if this was going to happen, have bloomed with these purple and pink flowers and they’re everywhere. And for me, that’s really symbolic. I have been sober 21 months now, almost two years, God willing, and I feel like that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been going from dead wood into blooming, so the wood is dead across my back and then it’s kind of tumbling down my shoulder all the way and bursting into bloom as it goes. That is the tattoo I’m getting. 

04:23 The reason I mention it is that you do get serious euphoria from a tattoo when it is that big. I’ve never had such a big piece done, and in fact, my tattoo artist, she has a lot of little tattoos, and I said, “Do you have any big pieces?”, and she’s like, “Oh no, they hurt too much, I would never do that”, and I was laughing. Yes they do, but I got a good dose of euphoria. So on the euphoria train, I am looking forward and chasing flow, and in this new book, I have found some of it. That often goes away. Usually, I hit my hardest part, usually during the first draft at around 60% is when I really crash and burn. So do remind me soon when I hit that because I’ll be feeling terrible. A lot of people are wrapping it up in NaNoWriMo. I’m not doing a complete book in November because it just didn’t work out, but I am getting the words for NaNoWriMo, so I’m trying to remember to update my page and NaNoWriMo. If you are still struggling and flailing and throwing yourself at that finish line, keep it going. It’s just 1,667 words a day. Or it’s just like 7,000 words a day if you’re really far behind, but you can do it. Try dictation, that’s my pro tip for you. 

05:40 Everything else is great. I really want to get into this episode with Marianne because it is so good. And just a couple updates in Patreon. Stacy Fraser and Amy Tasakada upped their Patreon pledges to the $5 mark, which means that they get to ask me questions for the mini-podcast. And Stacy had a really great one this week about writing for NaNoWriMo, so if you missed that, go ahead and listen to it. And thank you for listening, thanks for being here for this journey. I hope that I am part of your writing journey. That is really the thing that makes me honest to God the happiest, and when you reach out and tell me that, whew, you can turn a bad day into a glorious one. I just got an incredible email this morning from someone who had written a book because she had found my show and that’s not why she wrote the book. That’s what she said, but my friend who wrote me the email, you did not write that book because of me, you wrote it because of you. It’s 100% yours. But if I was any kind of inspiration or help along the way, if I could remind you just once that yes, we’re writing terrible first drafts just to get them out of our systems and then we can fix them, then I am grateful. So with that, onward, happy writing to you and please enjoy this incredible interview with the awesome Marianne Power.

07:02 Do you wonder why you’re not getting your creative work done? Do you make a plan to write and then fail to follow through again? Well, my sweet friend, maybe you’d get a lot out of my Pateon. Each month I write an essay on living your creative life as a creative person, which is way different than living as a person who had been just Netflix 20 hours a week, and I have lived both of those ways, so I know. You can get each essay and access to the whole back catalog of them for just a dollar a month, which is an amount that really, truly helps support me at this here writing desk. If you pledge at the $3 level, you’ll get motivating texts from me that you can respond to. And if you pledge at the $5 a month level, you get to ask me questions about your creative life that I’ll answer in the mini-episodes. So basically, I’m your mini-coach. Go to http://patreon.com/rachael, R-A-C-H-A-E-L, to get these perks and more. And thank you so much. 

08:02 Well, I could not be more pleased today to welcome Marianne Power to the show.

Hello, Marianne. 

Marianne Power: 08:07 Hello.

Rachael Herron: 08:08 I’m having a very big fangirl moment, so I’m going to jump into your introduction and then we’re going to chat. Absolutely, we started to chat and I was like, “No, no, we’ve got to get this on here”. Marianne Power is a writer and journalist who lives in London. Her first book Help Me!: How Self-Help Has Not Changed My Life is about a year-long quest to change her life by following the rules of a different self-help book each month for a year, and it’s been published in more than 29 countries, and it’s being optioned for a television series. And Marianne, this was one of those strange books, I have probably literally hundreds of books that I want to read, and when I went to the library to pick up a book, your book was sitting there on the new release shelf, I think I was the first person to get it, and it was one of those impulse grabs, which then you’ll be happy to know that I bought because I needed to own it. 

Marianne Power: 09:06 Thank you very much.

Rachael Herron: 09:07 You’re welcome. But it was as if you had written it for me, and I bet you hear this from women all over the globe, but I am passionate about what I call, I’m not sure if other people call it, but a stunt memoir. Do you use that term for this?

Marianne Power: 09:25 No, but it would be, I mean, it’s an accurate description and not the way’s, yeah it’s not [inaudible] I think.

Rachael Herron: 09:31  So A J Jacobs and Eve Shop and, even, you know, Elizabeth Gilbert, you do a thing for a year or a certain amount of time, and then you write about it.

And if one is written, I will read it. With the added incredible perks that you’re talking about, self-help books, which I have the same, passionate, irreverent, hatred, love of that you do, plus you’re about my age and about my level of irreverence, again, and humor, that I just fell into this book and I could not get up. And I have so much to read, I’m always jumping in and out of books, it’s a real problem. But yours, I just sat down and read from beginning to end and I loved it. So thank you so much. And my first question is not actually on our list, but the title is Help Me!: How Self-Help Has Not Changed My Life, which is an accurate title for this book. But how did that year really change your life?

Marianne Power: 10:33 That was the title that the publisher came up with. And in some ways, it’s true that I didn’t become a gazillionaire George and all that. You know, cause I think when I started this project, I had this vision that I was just flawed on so many different levels, and if I just tried hard enough, I could become one of these people that wakes up at five in the morning and drinks green smoothies and meditates before going and starting some fabulous company, I don’t know. You know, this sort of image, like Instagram image of what I thought life should be. I don’t know. So none of that happens. So in that way, it didn’t change my life. I’m the same person that I always was picking my spots and worrying. But then in other ways, a lot has also changed and I learned a lot through the process. So yeah, there’s kind of– some days I feel like nothing changed very much, and then other days I can see that my life is actually quite different, yeah.

Rachael Herron: 11:25 I am so passionate about memoir. It is what– it’s my favorite thing to write, I teach it, and you do this incredible thing that I’m always telling students, and it’s one of the hardest things to do. You look at areas of your life that hold shame and you dive right into them.

Marianne Power: 11:45 I know.

Rachael Herron: 11:47 Does journalism play a part in that? Was it easy for you to do or was this something that you went deeper and deeper into in revision? I’m really curious.

Marianne Power: 11:57 In my journalism before, I had accidentally started to get more into personal references, you know? So I would do the kind of articles where they would send me to report on the biggest Mexican ginger wave in Holland. And so as well as reporting on what it’s like to be a redhead surrounded by 7,000 redheads in a random town hall in Holland, I would then start thinking about my feelings about being a redhead, which in England quite often isn’t considered very attractive, you can get teased when you’re younger. So bit by bit, personal honesty started to come into my articles, but no, I never expected this book to be as deep and open and honest as it turned out. But the book came from a blog and I started blogging about my experiences and I suppose initially I did just think it would be this hopefully interesting, helpful story of me doing all these things and you know, that people would follow as I got better and better as the year progressed, I thought it’d be this upward trajectory. I had no clue, honestly, no clue on a psychological level what I was getting into. But it became clear that I didn’t– because people were responding to the blog so earnestly, it just became clear, “You’re either doing this honestly now or you’re not”.

13:21 I would have felt like I was cheating readers and cheating myself to not actually just lay it all out there. And so that, it surprised me a lot really. Sometimes when I was reading the audio, but recording to the audio, looking to read some of the passages out loud, I was like, “Oh God, did I really think that?”, and it was quite painful actually. Cause the other thing is that when people ask about your, you know, it’s honest and brave, sometimes it doesn’t feel that brave to type into a keyboard because, for me, writing is a way of helping me realize what I feel about things, you know? And I start typing and the feelings come out and I go, “Wow, I didn’t know I felt that way”. And then actually, in a way, I forget that then that’s going to be read by my uncles and my colleagues. So yeah, sometimes I look at the book and I am a bit taken aback by it, it’s like, “Oh my God, did I even read that?”, but I did. And then the amazing thing, of course, is that nobody has laughed at me, you know, nobody has gone, “You weirdo” or “How could you think that?”. Invariably it’s been, “Me too. Me too. Me too”. So you know, when we admit the most shameful things about ourselves, nine times out of ten, you are not the only one who’s thought that. And just like your response at the beginning, I have heard that from people in Korea, Taiwan, girls that look like supermodels in Paris saying, “It’s like reading about myself”, and I’m thinking, “Really?”. So none of us are that different, we’re different in some ways, and in other ways, there’s the stuff that we keep so shamefully hidden, it’s quite normal a lot of the time it seems.

Rachael Herron: 15:01 And I worship at the church of Brené Brown and her whole thing about, you know, “When shame is met with empathy, shame disappears”. Do you feel some of that, being met with all of this empathy?

Marianne Power: 15:15 It’s got a shiver when you ask that question. Yeah, it’s been extraordinary and I consider myself really lucky cause I was braced for a lot of criticism. I thought the criticism would come about the self-indulgence of a woman who already on paper had a really good life trying, you know, going about trying to fix myself. You know, I was aware this is a very privileged quest and I was bracing myself for a lot of attacks on that and absolutely some comments have been made about that and that’s fine, but 99% of it has been huge, huge, heart-open empathy, and then the beautiful part then is that people feel very able to tell me their real nitty gritty stuff. You know, it’s been a good end of small talk for me because anyone who’s read the book will go straight into, you know, the reality of what’s happening, and that’s lovely.

Rachael Herron: 16:08 Oh, that’s gorgeous.

Marianne Power: 16:10 It really is. Yeah.

Rachael Herron: 16:13 Okay, so you were blogging this. Let’s go into process, because that’s what I love to talk about. Were you blogging it under your real name as a journalist?

Marianne Power: 16:21 Yeah.

Rachael Herron: 16:22 So that was brave at the very beginning.

Marianne Power: 16:25 It wasn’t as a journalist, it was an independent project. And yes, at the beginning, I was really mindful of what would my newspaper, magazine colleagues think of this, because especially as I started to admit more and more to my insecurities, and I think it’s probably slightly less in the US, but in the UK, there really is quite a sneery attitude to self-help books. [inaudible] thousands, it’s still like one of the biggest growing sections of publishing, but in the public, people would not admit to reading them. So even the project in itself, I was a bit embarrassed about, but really quickly, colleagues and friends were just responding to it. And the interesting thing about the blog was it was the first time that I had written for myself and not for a newspaper or for a magazine, so over time, I can start to see the posts kind of softened a bit and opened up into something that was a little bit more my true voice, rather than something that was packaged in a certain way, which is the sort of formula of the kind of articles I’d written. So it allowed me to find something that’s a much truer sort of representation of my voice.

17:32 So the blog was a joy, and I’ve never done it before, and I’d recommend it to anyone just for that practice of getting the flow going and the discipline of doing it. I say discipline, I didn’t post every day, but I post a report about three or four times a week. And the discipline of then just paying attention to your life and paying attention to, obviously, in this case, the specific challenges that I had, but it made me very alert to life because everything was potentially material. And Seth Godin, I don’t know if you know Seth goes and he says that that’s one of his bits of advice, that absolutely every human should start a blog, even if it’s completely anonymous, but just for the discipline of the way it makes you engage in the world and pay attention because every day you’re thinking, “Okay, what do I think about something today?”. It’s lovely, it’s such a good process, and I miss it. I’m in the process of, I’m reading the blog at the moment, but I miss it, that connection and that expression, and then, yeah, the responses from people is wonderful. 

Rachael Herron: 18:35 That’s actually how I got started with creative nonfiction, I got a blog back in the days when we didn’t know what they were. I barely knew what it was, it was 2002, and that was my first, yeah, so that long ago. And it was a knitting blog and there were about a hundred knit bloggers in the entire world, and we all knew each other, and we were all writing every day, but I stopped writing about knitting and just started writing about my life on a really regular basis, and there was no Facebook, there was no other place to like share these kinds of things, so I got this community of readers and it trained me in much the way you’re saying, that the more honest I became in the blog, the more people reacted to me. I wrote about debt and alcohol and all of these things, you know that, that I was so scared when I would push play, when I’m pushed live–

Marianne Power:19:20 Oh, I know. I know that feeling, like just, “Oh, God”.

Rachael Herron: 19:23 “I can’t do it”, exactly. But the thing is, you know, Seth, I keep making this resolution, to blog every day, the way Seth Godin does, and I haven’t blogged in like two months and I miss it because I’m so busy with all the other, you know, with all your other writing projects, that it’s something that goes on the back burner. But I do believe it’s something that brings me so much joy and it would be a great experiment for someone. Just, if you’re listening to this and you’ve never tried it, try it for 90 days and see. Yeah, absolutely. Do it under a false name, do it under an anonymous, if you feel like, you can always change it later.

Marianne Power: 19:56 It’s like Seth Godin posted, all a paragraph. Keep the bar so low, just the discipline every day. What did I notice today? What have I been thinking about today? And it’s amazing once you start those first few sentences with very low pressure, what then comes out because that was also the joy of the blog. Because I was so absorbed in the actual tasks, I didn’t give the writing, the actual writing very much thought. In retrospect, I look back and see that it blossomed, but I wasn’t thinking about it, I was just communicating what I’d done and what I was thinking. And so that was lovely because I wasn’t crippled by self-consciousness or this idea of writing, because a blog is actually an informal kind of medium, it’s free of pressure.

Rachael Herron: 20:40 How much did it change from blog to book? How much revision was there? How much massaging and, you know, the connectivity tissue, what did you do with that?

Marianne Power: 20:50 There was loads. So the blog, I think in the end, the project, I thought it would be 12 neat months on this road to perfection, it ended up being 15 months of real chaos at points, that was the actual journey. My mom begged me not to use the word journey, but the actual journey of the experiment. And then I thought because I was a journalist and because I thought like the blog was all the notes really that I needed, I then went off to my friends’ cottage in Ireland and thought I could bash out a book in two months. I couldn’t because I mean, I did create a version of a book in two months, but it wasn’t a book, it was like a series of essays that were not linked. I had this idea about referring to the real people in my life in the book because, and this is a real thing, a point for discussion with anyone writing about their real life. I had chosen to write about my real life, my friends and family had not chosen to be part of a book. And so the first attempt in the book was no mention really of any friends and family. That couldn’t sustain a story–

Rachael Herron: 21:59No, and they’re so crucial to your book.

Marianne Power: 22:03 [inaudible], so then never conversations, and everyone gave their permission. And with the friends, I kind of amalgamated characters and changed names, but no, there was a lot of revisions. Really, I didn’t know how to build a book, so the first draft was terrible. My agent sent me a very polite email saying, “This is a great start”, followed by 10 pages of all the notes that, you know, didn’t work about it. And then also, much to my shame, I haven’t read enough good books. I’ve read journalism constantly, I knew the shape of an article inside out. So when it comes to writing something between 1,000 and 2,500 words, I have an instinctive sense of how to do that. I also read a lot of self-help books. What I didn’t read were enough, you know, well-written stories. And so that’s what I started doing, I started reading books again. I replaced self-help books with books written about how to write books and just had to teach myself the structure and just a different way of writing because the details that I would leave out of an article are the gold in a book. The little tiny moments, the tiny details, they’re actually the thing. And I’ve never done dialogue before, and I still cringe at how bad some of the, you know, some of the dialogue is, but I’ve never done any of that before. 

Rachael Herron: 23:19 It’s wonderful.

Marianne Power: 23:21 Thank you. No, thank you. I mean, I will always see how everything could be better, but it was, yeah, a big, big learning curve and I completely underestimated that a book is a very different animal to an article. It’s not a long article, which is what I thought it would be.

Rachael Herron: 23:36 I am just smiling so hard because the same thing happened to me, and listeners may have heard me say this, but I sold my first book and I’d accidentally written a book with good structure. Because I had internalized it, I don’t know, and it happens sometimes. So I have this beautiful, it wasn’t beautiful, but it was my first book, God, I would never read it now, but I sold three books, so I had another book due six months later, and I turned in just a hot mess. And my editor said that she really didn’t know if I could fix it. It was, I did not know, I had a master’s in writing and I did not know, I didn’t know story structure, to pull it apart. I’d only done it accidentally right once, and I had to literally start to Google story structure. I didn’t understand it, which is why I’m so passionate about teaching it now and it just hurts when we have that realization that as professional writers, we still, “What the hell?”.

Marianne Power:24:29 Yeah. I read a fantastic book, I’m just looking at it on the bookshelf now, called Into The Woods – Do you know that one? – by John Yorke, who’s a British TV writer, he wrote a huge soap here. Into The Woods is stories and why we tell them, but he breaks down– it’s a very good combination of kind of the, you know, the hero’s journey and all these archetypes, but then with some very practical examples of some of the favorite stories that we know – it was so helpful – and why we need to see characters do certain things. And actually the reality was that my journey, my blog did actually have all of that arc, I just didn’t know how to draw it out. So anyway, I get a thrill now out of seeing how stories are put together and the shape of them, and it’s a skill. And then I suppose the more you understand those building blocks, the more you can play with them and move away from them if you want to. But for me, I needed to know, “Okay, this is how most of these stories work and you can see why”, and then play with that.

Rachael Herron: 25:35 That’s amazing. I love hearing you say this. I might play this for my class that I’m teaching right now at Stanford, so you’ll be played at Stanford.

Marianne Power: 25:43 Oh, congrats. No, but really, it helps. And I was very lucky that– so the first draft was terrible, my agent sent me this charming, very long message about all the things that needed work. I did a second draft that I thought was much better and I still don’t think it was good, but I thought it was better, and I sent it to my friend who’s a screenwriter thinking actually that he was going to say, “Wow, this is great”. He didn’t.

Rachael Herron: 26:06 It’s the worst.

Marianne Power: 26:08 Yeah. His response was, “You can do better than this”, and I cried for two days.

Rachael Herron: 26:14 But how good of him to say that.

Marianne Power: 26:17 It was a gift. It was an absolute gift. And he spent hours with me on Skype after that because, as a screenwriter, he knows story structure inside out, and he was the one who started telling me the books to read. And because he’d known my real experiences, he’s like, “Why haven’t you put that moment in?”, and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t think that was interesting”. He said, “Marianne, that’s the story”, and we joked that the book was so bad, but I might as well just give people my phone number and tell them to call me and I would tell them the good bits because I wasn’t including them in the book. And I think between various editors, you know, the international editors had slightly different takes. So I mean, the book that’s written now is probably about the sixth draft. There was a lot of writes and rewrites and a lot of learning and taking in and taking out, putting back in and cutting because it had gotten very long.

Rachael Herron: 27:08 I bet it did. 

Marianne Power: 27:10 So I think almost a fifth had to be cut.

Rachael Herron: 27:14 How long is the book word-wise? Do you know off the top of your head?

Marianne Power: 27:17 I don’t, I can’t remember. I’ve got 350 pages from the longer end, so it’s, yeah, I think at some point it was about 135,000 words, so a lot had to be– and[inaudible] because I wanted to keep the pace because even if the extra words are good words, we lose patients, like I know that my concentration span is the shortest it’s ever been. And so there’s a lot to be said for cutting out things, even if you’re cutting things that you think are good.

Rachael Herron: 27:45 It works. My attention span is shot and that’s why I didn’t jump in and out of books. So it worked and it glued me to the page. We’re going to skip some of these questions because this is so much more interesting, but I would love to know if you could share a craft tip of any type with us.

Marianne Power: 28:02 I actually got embarrassed when you sent these questions because I have this, you know, impostor thing. I’ve written one book, I feel like it was such a fluke that–

Rachael Herron: 28:10 Oh no.

Marianne Power: 28:11 That’s not like false modesty like I worked really hard at it, but a bit of me gets embarrassed being asked questions about writing because I don’t feel like I’ve–

Rachael Herron: 28:19 What’s a journalistic crap tip then that you could share with us?

I don’t know the ins and outs of an article, I can barely pull it off.

Marianne Power: 28:29 Well, actually, so having said that, what you leave in an article and what you leave out to– what you put in an article is what you leave out of the book, and vice versa. The more I write, the more I realize that it’s the tiny little everyday moments that are golden. So like just one of the favorite scenes I have in the book was just a conversation I had with two homeless guys at the bus shelter. And the conversation only lasted four minutes, but it had a significant– so for me, it’s the discipline that – I’m not as good as I’d like – but the discipline that I think would save all of it is just paying attention to life and writing notes, writing a diary, writing notes in your phone of everything, the color of the wallpaper, the, you know, what he was wearing, what you were wearing, what you ordered at the cafe and little tiny things. ‘Cause when your life is happening, you think it’s quite boring but if, you know, if I have a look back on old diaries from three, four years ago, I’m quite fascinated by what was going on. And in journalism too, now I’m taking what I learned from the book and putting that more into my articles, the little tiny details that I would have left out before. And lots of them will get edited out, but there’ll be a few that stay and somehow they sort of ping with truth and aliveness and that sort of present moment. So craft-wise, take notes of everything that’s happening all the time. Capture your thoughts. You always think you’re going to remember things and you don’t, I don’t remember things, so I have notes on my iPhone, I have journals, I have, you know, just notes, places, repositories everywhere. 

Rachael Herron: 30:08 Do you think you did yourself a favor by, well probably in many, many ways, but by doing the blog because then you had exterior accountability? I can imagine that this could have been something that you started and seven months in when it got rough, you just stopped writing that private book.

Marianne Power: 30:25 A hundred percent. The blog, that was the main– ’cause the idea was I always wanted it to be a book, the blog was the way of making me do it, of being accountable, because exactly, there would have been a million points where I just thought, “No, this is a mess, I’m stopping”. But because I had that public accountability, people were interested quite quickly. I had to show up, I had to get– If I said I was going to perform standup comedy on Sunday, I knew there would be messages on Monday, so you know, there was no bit of me wants to do standup comedy. If I had any, any option, I would have, you know, maybe had a minor accident or something just to get out of doing it, but I couldn’t because that pride kicks in when you know that you’ve got people waiting for something. Yeah, it was a very good method, that one.

Rachael Herron: 31:10 And now so many people in 29 countries know your story, and I think that is beautiful. I really, really do. What is the best book that you’ve read recently and why did you love it? I like to increase my list of books that I’m currently not reading.

Marianne Power: 31:28 I’ve just finished re-reading Writing Down the Bone, by Natalie Goldberg, and I read that while I was writing the book and it’s a joy, and I re-read it because I’m now trying to get going on the second one and just, you know, trying to get myself. And it’s an absolutely beautiful human book about writing, and it really opens the door to just, everything is material. So she’s the one who then puts the focus on the tiny, tiny moments that she says, “Writing is almost a meditation”, it’s like your way of really paying attention to your life and honoring it in a way. And she’s so un-disciplinarian, she’s like, “You know, try this writing exercise, but if you don’t want to do it, that’s okay, don’t do it, but maybe try it”. You know, she’s so lovely. That really helped me get back into the swing a bit more the last few weeks. And I’m also reading a book called Wild, which is not the Cheryl Strayed one, it’s I think her name is Jay Griffiths, and it came out about 15 years ago, and it’s a book– she was a British journalist and she traveled all around the world, the Outback in Australia and the Antarctic and rainforests, in search of the wild. And it’s about her experience in nature, and she breaks up into different elements. So there’s air and ice and water and fire, and she talks to lots of indigenous communities.

32:59 The writing is magnificent, like just the way she describes even being under the sea and life under the ocean, it’s extraordinary, like poetry, but not pretentious. You know, it’s very easy to read, but it’s extraordinary writing. But also I think at the moment with the environmental issues being so live and pressing, this book, is just a reminder of how beautiful the world is, how amazing the world is. So there’s a kind of an education a little bit in me and the planet, and the beauty of it’s– so yeah, they’re the two better too. Wild is on the go, it’s quite a big book, I think it’s about 500 pages. So I’m, yeah, getting through that at the moment, that is fantastic.

Rachael Herron: 33:43  I’m going to reread the Natalie Goldberg cause I haven’t read that in 20 years. I know it’s on my shelf somewhere.

Marianne Power: 33:50 It’s a joy. It’s so on intimidating and warm and friendly, and it would make almost anyone want to write, just for the joy of it.

Rachael Herron: 33:58 And I’m going to add Wild to the list. I remember reading about that book cause, when you said it, I thought, “Well, who would be cheeky enough to have named their book Wild now?”, and it was before. And I remember reading about her in a sideways article to the Cheryl Strayed and she was saying, “I’m getting so many sales because people are buying the wrong book”. When Wild came out and everybody started talking about it and she was, I think it was in the New York Times or something, and she said, “It’s terrible, and yet I’m taking the money”, so I’m glad to hear that they bought a good book.

Marianne Power: 34:26 She really went for it though. She had seven years traveling the world, funding it herself. She really, it’s the most amazing book, it really is. Yeah, I would recommend it to everyone.

Rachael Herron: 34:38 I love your recommendations. I adore you. I think you are truly amazing. You are the charmer. Where can we find you? What’s your website? And tell us again the name of the book and where that can be found.

Marianne Power: 34:53 Well, Help Me is the book, and I think actually it’s got a different subheader in America and Canada. Each country seems to change the cover and change– so many covers, it’s fascinating. The Dutch and German cover is a picture of a woman with a lampshade over her head. And my friends saw it and they said, “That’s so you”, but I was like, “How is that me? When have I ever had a lampshade on my head?”. So the basic title is Help Me by Marianne Power, and I think, you know, you can get it on Amazon and all good book shops around the world, it seems like, extraordinarily. The website is under construction, but yeah, if you Google my name, Help Me, or Marianne Power writer, I come up on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all those things.

Rachael Herron: 35:41 Thank you for giving me some of your time and I really, really appreciate talking to you. And this has been just a joy. And best of luck with your next book, I cannot wait to read it.

Marianne Power: 35:52 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I can use your motivation. Please keep me on track

Rachael Herron: 35:57 Anytime. Thank you, Marianne. Have a wonderful evening.

Rachael Herron: 36:03 Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of How Do You Write. You can reach me on Twitter, Rachael Herron, or at my website, http://rachaelherron.com. You can also support me on Patreon, and get essays on living your creative life, for as little as a buck an essay, at http://www.patreon.com/rachael, spelled R-A-C-H-A-E-L. And do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers at http://rachaelherron.com/write. Now, go to your desk and create your own process, and get to writing my friends.

What if your NaNoWriMo novel (or any of your writing) is crashing? Does it mean you should give up writing and get a job in finance? Or move to Antarctica where there are no writing devices at all (this is what I’ve been told, anyway…)? Listen to find out!

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: 00:04 Welcome to How Do You Write, I’m your host Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is, and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

00:16 Well, hello writers. Welcome to episode number 152, a bonus mini-episode. I am already really enjoying the idea of doing these and doing these, and the people who support at the five dollar and up level at http://patreon.com/rachael are just sending me the greatest questions and I’ve got a bunch queued up to come. But today I wanted to hit a really important one, especially for right now, and it actually jumped to the top of the queue because it is time-sensitive.

00:47 So in response to Stacy, Stacy first of all, thank you so much for upping your pledge, you upped your pledge and then immediately sent a question. I hope that you continue to send questions as you go, it makes me so happy. Your question is, “You’ve mentioned you wrote your first novel in NaNoWriMo. I’m in the thick of my first NaNo now, and my story has totally fallen apart, like the wheels are off and the cart is crashing hard, yet I keep writing, shaking my head all the while thinking, this is bad, this is so very, very bad. Could you share what your first experience with NaNo was like? Then give a girl a little encouragement. Many thanks, Rachael, love what you do here. 

01:27 Thank you Stacey, and thank you for asking such an exciting question. Nobody ever asks me that, and we talk a lot about how my first published book was written during NaNoWriMo, my first NaNo in 2006, and I talk a lot about what it was like to try to write a lot of books before that and always fail– Walen, the cat, says hello. That’s what that was. But I don’t usually talk about what that first NaNo was like, which is why I love this question. My first NaNo was so exciting, it felt every single day like an impossible task to get up once again and try to write 1667 words a day. I am definitely one of those people– this is embarrassing to admit, but I never do more than I have to. I am not one of those people who gets into the flow and looks up four hours later with 6,000 words, impossible. If I am supposed to write 1,667 words during November, I will write 1,668 just to be on the safe side. So I guess I’ll do a little extra work, I’ll do like one word extra work. 

02:41 But every day to wake up and know that I was going to do that again felt so exciting and daring and crazy, and every day that I pulled it off, which was most of the days, I completed one nano that year, every day that I did left me happier. However, what you’re saying about the wheels coming off and the cart crashing hard, that absolutely happened that year. I went completely off the rails, I had I think a mini-outline, like maybe a, you know, a notecard. I think I tried to do notecards, now that I’m remembering it because people always talk about writing notecards. So I would write notecards, I didn’t know where to put them, I didn’t know what order notecards went in, when I shuffled through them later, I didn’t know what I had meant, so I was really writing blind, I was really, really pantsing it that year. 

03:31 And the book went in so many directions. A lot of times I talk with my writing students about, you know, you write this mess of a first novel and then in revision you kind of figure out your way up to the top of this particular mountain and you come back down and do a little bit more revision, go back up, and all the time you’re building this path, and that path is what the book was meant to be. On that first way up the mountain, when we’re doing this first draft, we go all around the mountain, we spin around the mountain, we take trails that go absolutely nowhere. We connect those trails that went nowhere with something that is interesting and nothing makes sense. Nothing made sense in that book that year, and I have to tell you that that is still the way I write, even though now I plot a lot more. Guys, goodness, dogs and cats, it’s anarchy up in here. I still plot a lot more and still the wheels come off the cart every single book I write. It is absolutely 100% unavoidable for me to have the feeling that my story has totally fallen apart. And in fact, I’m in the midst of doing some deep plotting for the book I just sold. And I need to get this particular part of the plot right before I start writing, because this is under an intense time schedule, and I don’t want to take all of those false trails. And just yesterday, even after I’d sold this book on synopsis and sample chapters, so I know what the book is doing and I know what it is meant to be., yesterday I just had this crisis that I realized there’s no story there. 

05:11 There’s no drama, arc, stakes, twists, there’s no thriller inside this thriller, and I know that that’s just the way I feel. The book is still the book. The stuff is still inside the book. Later on is when we get to decide what that stuff actually does, but I was putting too much pressure on myself to get this first draft right, forgetting that first drafts are never right. They are just full of wheelless carts piled up on the sides of those paths that you’re making up this mountain. Cart after crashed cart after crashed cart and that is 100% fine. If that is happening to you, you are in exactly the right place. You are a writer. This is the point in which a lot of new writers say, “Well, I guess I’m not a writer”. Oh no, that is proof that you are a writer. If you’re confused and stymied and despairing that you will ever pull this into any shape that even you could read, let alone anybody else, you’re in exactly the right place, and just keep forging forward. Keep having fun too. The most important thing I learned that first year was when everything was this gigantic pile-up, I would just shake my head and go, “Okay, what could happen next that’s fun? What could happen next that surprises me?”, and that’s a tool I still use. When I just despair of everything, I just write for fun and more often than not, even though I’m giving myself permission to write something silly that probably won’t make it into the book, more often than not, it does make it into the book because I relax, I let go and I have fun, and suddenly the writing feel sweet and smooth again, even if it’s only for a few minutes. 

06:51 Waylon behind me is crying that he needs his breakfast, so I’m going to go feed him. Happy NaNo to everyone who is doing it. I’m behind as usual in NaNo, but I’m still plugging away. And happy writing to everyone who isn’t doing NaNo, but just thinking about writing. Dosie is now chasing Waylon away. Somebody’s gonna eat somebody, so I’m going to go feed all of the animals, and happy writing to all of you. Thank you so, so much, Stacy, for that question and we’ll talk soon.

07:20 Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of How Do You Write. You can reach me on Twitter, Rachael Herron, or at my website, http://rachaelherron.com. You can also support me on Patreon, and get essays on living your creative life, for as little as a buck an essay, at http://www.patreon.com/rachael, spelled R-A-C-H-A-E-L. And do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers at http://rachaelherron.com/write. Now, go to your desk and create your own process, and get to writing my friends.

How Do You Write BONUS EPISODE: This mini-episode brought to you by $5 and up Patreons. You too can use me as a writing coach on retainer – join here! http://patreon.com/rachael

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: 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.

Welcome to “How do you, Write?” mini episode number one 151. I’m Rachael Herron.

I’m so glad that you’re here for this first mini episode. And I’ve decided that I’m going to keep the numbering tradition so that good old iTunes doesn’t get too confused and I’m going to launch right in. Basically what this is, the many episodes are supported by Patreon members at the $5 and up level.

You basically put me on retainer to ask any of your questions and I’ll generally answer between one and three questions, but I want these to be super short so that you can listen to them. And the time that you drive to the grocery store, perhaps. So I’m going to start from the top and work my way down.  I’ve got a bunch queued up, so if I don’t get to yours today, I will get to it soon. Please enjoy!

So this first one is from Afton. Uh, and she says, What? Oh my gosh. I love this because you can ask any question about anything. And I even have like a question about maybe a heater down here, so we’ll get to that one.

But this one is very technical. What is your opinion on the, “Never use the word “I” to start a sentence?”. That is one of those things that we learned in school and I did a little bit of Googling on it, and it is just one of those old myths along with the one that says, you can’t start a sentence with and, or but all myths, all a little bit archaic. And they come from the time when, uh, people were a little bit more formal about their writing. Nowadays, we can start sentences with I in fact, as a memoir writer, I do it all the time. I love starting sentences with “and” or “but”. And the really interesting thing about “and” and “but” to start a sentence is that sometime you can swap the two, which does not seem to make sense. You should logically “and” does not mean anything like “but” does, and it still stands that you can sometimes stop them and the meaning is enhanced a little bit. So go ahead and start your sentences with “and” and “but” and I, what you do want to remember is sentence variation. Don’t start a lot of sentences with “and” or “but” don’t start every sentence with “I”. If you do, your words can sound a little bit, wrote a little prescribed, and you want to mix up your sentence length the way that your sentences are structured to give the reader a more dynamic experience of your writing. But yeah, there’s a, there are no more rules left around “I”, “And”, or, “But” so have fun with those sentences. Afton also wants to know if I ever wear my No Human Is Illegal Armband that she made me, and in fact I do and I love it. So thank you. 

Let’s see. Lefty asks, do you have any other tips and tricks for first drafting? Like the sprint advice? I had a quick show a little while back on sprinting, and that’s actually where I got the idea to do these mini podcasts.

And my only other tricks Lefty, are these: just to remember on a real base, cellular level that we are trying to get terrible drafts done and down on the page, and I always say this, but I am the last person to believe that. I always think that I should be the exception that surely this time, my first draft is going to be something a little bit better than my old, crappy first drafts have been and every single time I am let down by myself that I can’t make them better. And that is true of most every writer. So the biggest thing for me, and first drafting, is to just try to get out of the way of this perfectionist self of mine that sabotages so much of my work. I always have a vision for every book that I’m writing and they show up and I try to put it on the page and my vision fails and it is ugly and awful, and I can see that gap between the book I want it to be and the book I’m actually writing, and that gap just freaks me out every time. And I always believe I’m not going to be able to fix it, and I always am and you will always be too. The thing to remember is to get out of our own way, lower our standards for what our first draft writing should look like and allow our hands to go as fast as possible.

If you are having a hard time with first draft, I do recommend dictation. I think I mentioned it in that podcast, but if you’re using a Mac, there’s already dictation built into your computer. Just hit the function button twice and a voice to text will pop up in whatever program you’re using. It’s not perfect, none of them are. I really like using Dragon anywhere on my phone. It is a paid service, but you basically talk into your phone and then you email yourself the document, copy and paste it into whatever you’re working on because you’re doing that so quickly. You’re doing it at the speed that you talk. It does come out super crappy and it kind of gets you over yourself, which I like.

I can on days where I’m really struggling to write, I will honestly go lie in bed and sometimes I even pull the covers over my head and I just talk into the phone and when I’m done talking for 15 minutes, I have a thousand or 1500 words that are terrible that will need a lot of cleaning up, but I have moved forward and I can put them on my document.

I can spend a little bit of time tinkering with them. I don’t ever edit when I’m writing a first draft, I do not revise. I believe most of us don’t do our work that way and complete books. Uh, but I will let myself tinker to fix up the sentences that make no sense because they were voice to text.

And you know how auto correct works. That happens with our books too. And I prefer to fix those auto correct problems right after I say them or on the same day that I say them. Otherwise, a couple of days go by and I do not know what I said. That made that sound, that made those words appear on the page.

So I do kind of tinker with those, but that’s all I do. So those are a couple of tips and tricks for you, Lefty. And, um, Lefty also asks, I’d love to know more about your draft pass technique for editing. Like you said one time that it takes you one hour to add setting in your novel, and I just don’t understand how you can do it so fast.

It’s cause I’m terrible at setting, uh, when I’m writing a first draft, I leave setting almost completely out. I am not a visual writer. I do not see things in my mind’s eye like a movie. I barely see anything in my mind’s eye. I am a completely word driven person. I have this thing called teletype synesthesia that every word that I say, and every word that I hear, and every word that I hear in a song, and every word I hear in conversation, I can kind of see it running in a ticker tape in my brain. Always. Always, always, always. So it’s very important to, for me to understand spelling of people’s names because I’m seeing it now drive me crazy if I’m constantly playing with the spelling of it as there, you know, as somebody saying their name, so I don’t see images and therefore I’m just very bad at setting.

So I understand. I accept that about myself. And setting is one of those draft passes. What a draft path – pass is for me, I write the terrible first draft, the absolute crap, shitty first draft first, and then I do a major revision and my major revision is the revision that takes the most time. And what it is, is really making sure that all the scenes are in the right place, that my characters have a character arc that I believe in, that they are doing the right things at the right time. It’s a lot of getting rid of scenes that don’t work and writing new scenes that fill in the places. I don’t ever know what a book is going to be really, truly, even if I outline it from hell, I still don’t know what a book wants to be until I’ve written the whole first draft.

So that big a revision that I do, that first revision is just getting things in their place. I don’t make any of the words look pretty. There’s no point to making any words look pretty. If you’re going to take that scene out later, and in fact, it can do you a disservice if you make a scene really good and later it shouldn’t be there.

You for – for plot sake or for character sake, you will have a very hard time recognizing that. If you’ve already gone over it three or four times or more to make it look beautiful and make all the sentences gorgeous and as strong as they can be. So I tend to not do that at all. I like to keep that till much later.

So I do my first big revision and that is the one that takes the longest. And then after that I might have another revision to make sure that the plot really works and that my characters really work. And after that I just get into something I call draft passes. And that means I’m looking at one thing and just one thing.

As I virtually flipped the pages in the book, or as I scroll the word document, so when I’m doing my settings pass, I go to each scene and I make sure that there are one or two, maybe five sentences about the scene. My books are really, really character-driven. So setting is not something that turns into a character.

I am not writing a beautiful mountain that acts as a character in this book. I just don’t think I would ever do that. So my settings are minimal and I can easily do it in an hour, insert one to five sentences into each scene just to make sure my people are in the right place. Maybe, maybe there’s more setting if you know, the fires crackling or something, but even that feels a little bit odd to me.

So I do that other draft, um, passes that I do, uh, include… Let’s see, dialogue. I’ll go through and look at each line of dialogue and make sure that it is as strong as it can be. I tried to get rid of as many tags as I can, like he said, or she said, by adding action beats if I can, and I never let myself do something like, you know, he shouted, or worst of all, remember from, uh, the Hardy boys and Nancy drew, he ejaculated. We’re not going to use those kinds of herbs. Um, he said, and she said, those disappear in the reader’s eyes, but even though they actually disappear, readers don’t actually see them.

I do like to try to remove as many as I can. And still have everything make sense. So that is a pass for me. What else are passes? Sometimes character arc is another pass. I will pull out all of the Stefanie chapters and I’ll just read the Stefanie chapters with nothing else in there and make sure that her story is cohesive and I’ll remove another character and just read his chapters to make sure those are cohesive.

I feel like there’s a lot of other draft passes that I do that I am not thinking about. Um, the- but the very last draft pass that is the most fun pass is what I call the lyrical pass. And it is truly the last, the last, last revision pass that I do. And it is when I look at every sentence to see if I can make that sentence any better or any prettier or any more lyrical or any more strong, I look at the paragraphs around it and make sure that the paragraphs are built beautifully. And this is when I get to put my full craft into play. And that is not an hour thing that is going to take days and weeks to do that lyrical pass. But for me, it’s the reward of knowing that everything is now in its place as good as I can get it, and I get to make the word sing. And it is true that as I’ve been going through and doing all of these other passes and the first and maybe second larger vision that I have been tightening up sentences. So a lot of times I get to sentences in there. It’s good as they are going to get. They are sturdy, they’re doing exactly their job. But the lyrical passes, this is the time I can experiment with metaphor and simile. If it doesn’t get in the way. I don’t want to be creating more darlings that I should be killing, but I just want to make things sing a little bit more. So that is my favorite last pass. I hope that helps a little bit and I am very excited to be doing this particular format for this podcast. I look forward to the next mini podcast of “How do you, Write?” 

Please lay your questions on me. All questions are welcome. I’m sure that we’re going to go over and over some of the similar questions as they come up. In months and perhaps years to come. And that’s fine because I always feel like when I need to know something, I like to hear it a few times and I always learn something else.

So I look forward to doing this with you. Thank you again for your questions, and we’ll talk again about these kinds of things next week. Bye.

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you, Write?” You can reach me on Twitter https://twitter.com/RachaelHerron or at my website, 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 https://www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers  at http://rachaelherron.com/write/. Now, go to your desk and create your own process. Get to writing my friends.

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

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

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

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

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers.

Transcript

Rachael Herron: 00:01  Welcome to How Do You Write, I’m your host Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is, and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachael Herron: 14:50 Right, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shamim Sarif: 21:00 Wine? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachael Herron: 24:34 Great title.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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