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Episode 193: Allison Fallon — Find Your Voice
134 Plays5 years ago
Allison Fallon (@missallyfallon) is the author of twelve books. Her most recent is Indestructible.
Support for this show comes from Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing, HippoCamp 2020, and my monthly newsletter.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
ACNFers, did you know that? CNFpod is sponsored by Bay Path University's fully online MFA in creative non-fiction writing. Discover your story in Ireland, a destination renowned for its natural beauty and rich literary musical
00:00:19
Speaker
History, yes, this summer from August 1st to August 8th, study under such instructors as Mia Gallagher, Tommy Shea, and Anne Hood, and take your writing to the next level. Reading groups, tea and talk, and get outdoors in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Visit paypath.edu slash MFA for more information.
Podcast Overview and Social Media Engagement
00:00:49
Speaker
So it's CNF, the creative nonfiction podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hey, follow the show at CNF pod on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and be sure you're subscribed wherever you get your podcasts and whatever podcast player you prefer.
00:01:13
Speaker
I'd love for you. I'd love to hear from you in either email form, tweet, DM, comment, you name it and also share this hand to hand. That's how this thing is going to grow. You're right. So I'm told.
00:01:31
Speaker
Man, it's been a week seeing efforts. It has been a week, and it's only Wednesday when I'm recording this.
Personal Insights and Anticipations
00:01:37
Speaker
By the time you hear this, I will either have seen Tool or not. They have not canceled as of yet. They're here in Eugene. I hear it's a pretty wild show. I've never seen Tool before, but they are sort of icons, and they just won Grammy for Best Heavy Metal Performance, I think, or Hard Rock.
00:02:00
Speaker
In any case, hopefully we don't get diseased, but in any case we will be infected with the Rage of Nettle.
Guest Introduction: Allison Fallon
00:02:12
Speaker
I have a couple things to say this week, then I'll get to our wonderful guest Allison Fallon, author of the memoir Indestructible.
00:02:21
Speaker
If you've been in an abusive marriage, check it out, or maybe not. Depends on your head space. Here's a great quote from Ernest Hemingway, and no, there will not be like that little stupid riff part I do. I mean, I say stupid, but it's hilarious. He says, as a writer, you should not judge, you should understand. That's the crux of life right there, man. Even if there's unsavory shit going on in whatever you're writing, you still need to show empathy.
00:02:52
Speaker
So that's where we springboard because my baseball memoir, so far as I can tell, is dead. It doesn't want to be a memoir anymore. This is probably what I've been wrestling with for the better part of 11 years with this whole story. It doesn't want to be a memoir. I don't think it ever did. My father isn't the most forthcoming person. Asking how the weather is can be too personal a question.
00:03:17
Speaker
I did some talking with the old wife and, you know, mine, who thinks a novel would be fascinating. She kind of likes the idea of not knowing what is imagined and what is real. To me as a reader, that drives me insane. I hate it, but...
00:03:37
Speaker
my editor who had also suggested this option several months ago because he could tell where there was gaps in the story or where it needed to be flushed out or a bit deeper and he knew that I was just getting incredible pushback from
00:03:52
Speaker
from the pivotal players integral players and so Those are the things that could get backfilled with imagination you know my my father would rather wipe out certain parts of his hard drive when it comes to my mom and His marriage with her stuff, you know, that's so vital to story but there's no way there's no way you can crack that open so
00:04:17
Speaker
In a sense, that's when when memoir needs to be something something else it can be 90% Factual and I might I'm gonna keep some real names in there in real places. So it's gonna be like You almost can't even tell but it'll be like it'll be totally signaled as a novel So in any case my imagination sucks ass so we'll see how that turns out and also
00:04:45
Speaker
You know, my boss at work told me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to find a plan B.
00:04:52
Speaker
So yeah, since I work at a Gannett newspaper, you better believe I'm about to get laid off. It's bleak over there, man. Bleak. Our publisher got laid off, and since I'm on the editorial board, I was like, well, what does this mean for us? And my boss was like, well, Gannett doesn't do local editorial content, but more regional and national. So then the Plan B shit started. And, uh,
00:05:17
Speaker
You know, she gave me, you know, a good anecdote about her having to have a plan B, and when you start getting lectured about plan Bs, you start looking for new plan As. And so in any case, that has to happen. Hopefully she doesn't listen to the show, I don't think she does. And now my wife really thinks I'm a piece of work, because I can't hold down a job for more than a year, and I'm the worst freelancer in the world. Hank the dog, he's great. Hank is great. Hank's our new dog, by the way.
00:05:45
Speaker
We've had him for two weeks. He's a good boy. Very sweet, very smart, wicked smart. Did you know that registration is open for Hippocamp 2020? No more early birds. The worms are gone, as they say, but there's still ways to save some dough. Visit hippocamp2020.hippocampismagazine.com and use the promo code CNFPOD2020
00:06:10
Speaker
to get $40 off your fee. In fact, I'm going to be using this promo code myself. So long as there are slots available, I need to register fast. Trust me, best money you'll spend on a conference this year. I promise you.
00:06:28
Speaker
I'm going to read a review here from Apple Podcasts. If you're feeling froggy and you want to leave a kind review over there, I'll be sure to somehow weave it into the intro here as my way of giving props. We're all in this together. The comments and reviews of this nature help with the packaging of the show and validate it.
00:06:48
Speaker
And if they're a wayward podcast listener who doesn't know what it means to be a CNFer and they come across this and they see what you've written, that helps you. You're putting an arm around them saying, come on, this is our little tribe. This is our little corner of the internet. So this is from Matt Dennis, who actually happens to be a friend here in Eugene.
00:07:08
Speaker
He says, always shredding. Great pod, Brendan. I always come here for rejuvenation and inspiration. You and your guests are always shredding through the noise to get to the heart of literary expression. Keep rocking.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yes. I'll do my part, man. I'll do my part. So Allison Fallon, like I said, is here. She is at Miss Allie Fallon, Allie A-L-L-Y, F-A-L-L-O-N on Twitter, and at Allie Fallon on Instagram. This is her Twitter bio. I write books. I help people write books. I believe a regular practice of writing can change your life. Best-selling author and founder of Find Your Voice.
00:07:48
Speaker
Well, shit. I'd go check her out. I should say, I didn't have the bandwidth to comb through and edit this interview this week, but I think it came out good nevertheless. There are moments that I sound like a baboon, but what are you gonna do? Here's my conversation with Allison Fallon.
00:08:13
Speaker
rightly like to say. So get so I understand that you at least spent a significant chunk of your time in Portland, Oregon. I don't know if you're from Portland. But uh, where'd you grow up?
Allison's Background and Writing Journey
00:08:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's where I grew up is Portland. And I spent a lot of my life there. But I've been gone for 10 years now. I have lived in Nashville, Tennessee, Minneapolis, Minnesota, West Palm Beach, Florida. I live in LA now is where I've landed. Yeah. Yeah, very nice. And what did your folks do?
00:08:44
Speaker
My dad is a clinical psychologist and my mom is a school teacher. Very nice. So yeah, the school teacher thing kind of probably resonated with you a little bit because that's kind of what you went into when you were an undergrad. It is. Yeah, yeah.
00:08:58
Speaker
Yeah. And, and so, okay. So you've got, so you've got a teacher, psychologist, and so you're growing up in Portland. So, you know, what kind of, uh, what kind of things were you into as like a tween and then as in a teenager, what were those things that were exciting Alison at the time? Well, I was a very introspective kid, so I was reading a lot of books. I was actually, I was, um, and this is still true about me, but I was social, but I was kind of shy.
00:09:27
Speaker
So, um, I had a lot of friends, but I wouldn't have considered myself super outgoing or necessarily part of the popular crew. I just really enjoy people. And that's still true about me. I always have been able to find a way to connect with just about anybody. I can make friends with, um, pretty much any stranger. I mean, on the street, I can like, you know, find a commonality and make friends with them and find something fascinating about them. So I had a lot of friends and definitely a lot of people who liked me, but I spent a lot of time.
00:09:57
Speaker
alone, reading books and writing poetry and journaling and processing through becoming familiar with my internal world, which I didn't learn until later wasn't something that everybody does. It was definitely something that was unique to me. I could go down a long tangent about this, but it felt like such an important
00:10:24
Speaker
safe place for me to process things that were going on that I didn't quite understand. I grew up in a very, like a really conservative Christian evangelical environment. And I, even as a young girl, it didn't quite feel like it suited me. My family, everybody else that I was looking around at, like my family and everybody who I went to church with and everybody was like so comfortable
00:10:53
Speaker
with all of it and I really had a lot of questions. So it didn't feel safe to ask those questions in that environment and it did feel safe to think about them or talk about them with myself in a journal. So that's kind of how I got started down the writing train. And that's just one example of many areas of my life where I felt like there was something I wanted to think about or ask about or talk about that I didn't really feel like I had another place to do that. So writing became my outlet.
00:11:18
Speaker
Was it something that you had to kind of do in private or was someone encouraging you along the way to process your thoughts in writing and to even just kind of kind of give you permission to do that? Yeah, that's a great question. I had a fourth grade teacher who praised me as a writer and really gave me permission to keep writing. She encouraged me to keep writing and gave me permission to think of myself as a writer. And I think it's an important question you're asking because a lot of one of the
00:11:48
Speaker
Um, questions that I ask when I teach workshops is I ask people to think about the earliest memory as it relates to writing, because those early memories we have. Do they, they play a really big role in shaping whether or not we're, we allow ourselves to adopt the identity as of writer. So I'll hear people say, well, I'm not really a writer. I'm not a great writer, but those sorts of things. And.
00:12:14
Speaker
And a lot of times what they're saying is someone told me at a young age that I'm not really good at this or that this is not really my skillset, but I feel drawn to it. And so, so that's what's made me decide to do it. And my fourth grade teacher is a great example of an adult, influential adult in my life who said, you're really good at this. You should keep on doing it. And so she gave me a composition notebook with a note to me on the inside cover that just said, you know, you're a great writer, Alison, keep writing.
00:12:44
Speaker
And that was fuel for my fire. It's so important to reflect back on what was important or what was playful and fun when you were a kid. And then, especially as we distanced ourselves from that time when everything was playful, there was no career or no ambition tied to it. You wrote because you liked to do it.
00:13:13
Speaker
It's so important to remember that little seed and then go back to it and nurture it and remember that this thing used to be fun and let's find the fun again. Yeah. It's funny because I haven't really thought about it this way, but since you asked the questions this way and in this order, I'm putting the pieces together that it's part of why writing has become for me what it's become, which is partly my profession. Yes, I'm making a full-time living writing books and
00:13:43
Speaker
Um, and you know, for years I've written books for other people and help people outline books. And this is, it's my full-time gig, but I also, there's also a huge part of what we do at Find Your Voice that's encouraging people to write as a way to process the world that we live in. You know, I talk all the time about the emotional, cognitive and physical benefits of writing.
00:14:08
Speaker
And, um, I didn't really put the pieces together before that that is probably born out of both my dad being a psychologist and my mom being a school teacher. Those two things are married together in the work that I do. And also my own entry into the world of writing, which wasn't really, I did have the fourth grade teacher who encouraged me, but the reason that I wrote wasn't because I wanted to publish something. It was because it was a way of.
00:14:36
Speaker
surviving in a world that didn't feel like it quite fit me. So it's a way to process what was going on around me. And I think that can be so powerful that one of the things that drives me crazy in just the world of writing and especially published writing in general is that we get really elitist about the task of writing. Like we think like only certain people are allowed to do this and only certain people are gifted and trained and skilled.
00:15:02
Speaker
And, you know, you have to go to a certain school or get a certain degree or make a certain best sellers list in order to be considered a quote, real writer. And I just think writing is such a important necessary tool for every human being to use as a way to metabolize the experiences of their life that I don't think we should, um, restrict that to only a certain group of people.
00:15:28
Speaker
Oh for sure and I think that's all the more, I think in writer circles it becomes important like whether you have representation or what publisher, like are you a big five publishing house writer and like there are these status symbols that are sort of hooked on to the
00:15:46
Speaker
hooked onto onto the craft but it's like and then sometimes for someone who's an amateur coming up trying to trying to get a toehold in it or just trying to make sense of their own writing in their own lives that they can get lost in that kind of rat race whereas it's just
00:16:04
Speaker
You know, it's nothing more complicated than putting graphite to paper or typing away. You just have to be kind of unbridled and divorce yourself from these status symbols. You just need to kind of get the work done. You just need to do it. And it doesn't always have to be published, but it helps to have the skill and nurture the skill so you can get through some of the things that you're talking about. 100%.
00:16:31
Speaker
Is that a conversation you have at times with the people you work with? Some people feel like they can't be writers unless they publish or something. Sometimes the sheer exercise of writing in a notebook or just having a blog with only a couple readers, every bit of success is having that, getting a big deal if you can.
00:16:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's a huge part of the conversation with writers we work with. In fact, I would say at least 25% of the products and services we offer are for authors who don't plan to publish. They're for authors who are struggling with something in their life and they're willing to use writing as a tool to process through that something.
Writing as Transformation and Profession
00:17:15
Speaker
So I teach a workshop every year. We host this workshop called Find Your Voice One Day Workshop. It's a writing workshop, but it's really, for lack of a better term, it's more like a journaling workshop.
00:17:27
Speaker
And it's a writing workshop for anybody who kind of feels drawn to writing, who's interested in, like I said, processing through some event from their life. And it's not just writing, but it's a bunch of other modalities that research shows to be incredibly effective in helping us access our creative brains. So body movement and music and, you know, activating that sense of play. And it's focused on dropping us out of our frontal cortex and into our limbic system, which
00:17:56
Speaker
ironically helps us get way more writing done. And for the people who come to those workshops who do plan to publish something, they end up coming away with usually flashes of creative inspiration. So I think there's a strong tie there and because of all the brain science and neuroscience I've read on this and what I've learned in the last decade, there's a strong tie between getting unstuck in our writing and getting unstuck in our life. In fact, I kind of think you cannot separate the two. And this is true from the research
00:18:26
Speaker
I've read is true even for fiction writers. So I know we're talking about nonfiction here, but even if you're writing fiction, it's true that the act of writing a fiction story has a way of unlocking your brain to discover new pathways forward. So it helps us access the most creative part of our brain, the most imaginative, imaginative part of our brain. It gets us out of old ruts and helps us carve new pathways. It's
00:18:52
Speaker
It's really incredibly effective. And when writers come to me who are looking to publish and they're like, and this happens to me all the time. Cause I work with a lot of really successful writers, writers who have been much more successful in the marketplace than I have. And they have written several books and they're there, you know, that have sold millions of copies or whatever they've done. And they'll be like on a deadline with a publisher and they're freaking out as, as we do. And they're like, I am stuck. I've got terrible writers block. What do I do?
00:19:21
Speaker
And I always tell them the same thing, which is that writer's block isn't really writer's block. It's life block. So when we don't know what words to put on the page, it's not because we don't know what words to put on the page. It's because there's something we want to say or something we want to do that we feel we can't say, or we feel we can't do for some reason. So finding the words to put on the page, isn't just about finding the words to put on the page. It's about discovering the thing we've wanted to say or wanted to do, or the way we've wanted to be in the world that we haven't allowed ourselves to be.
00:19:50
Speaker
And the act of writing unsticks us from our life and the act of getting unstuck in our life unsticks us in our writing. And the two are just intricately connected. I'm more and more convinced of that. The more I do this work and the more I read the research.
00:20:03
Speaker
And you're like, now you can go back to work, Stephen King. I've given you your advice. Yeah, exactly. Hope he's listening. Yeah, exactly. Of course. He's a regular. Circling, backing up just a little bit.
00:20:24
Speaker
You know I understand like you came out of school, came out of your master's program wanting to be a teacher and shortly into that having of course sunk years of education and lots of money into your education, you had a sinking feeling in your stomach that this wasn't exactly what you wanted to do and so your path to being a professional writer wasn't exactly linear. So take us to that moment of that pit in your stomach and you know that
00:20:52
Speaker
You know, that feeling of, oh man, I'm in this thing and I don't think I want to be here. Yeah. Well, I think all of us have felt that feeling at some point in our life before, unless you're 18 years old or something and listening to this and maybe you haven't gotten there yet. But, um, but yeah, all of us have had that moment where you're like the, the way I usually describe it as I would drive to work and feel like I was driving in the wrong direction. Like it was just this deep sense that something was really off. And the hard part about that feeling is that.
00:21:21
Speaker
When I really sat down and looked at the facts and the details of my life, I was like, listen, I've got a great job. This is, it was 2008 at the time. So I was like, plenty of other people don't have jobs. All these other, my friends who I graduated from with master's degrees were struggling to find work. And I had found work. I have a great supportive, strong friendship network, a good supportive family network. I.
00:21:43
Speaker
live in a city that's really fun. There's lots of great things to do. I live in a really nice apartment. I have a plan for my future for a retirement plan and all of that. When I would really sit down and think through the details, I would be like, this doesn't make sense that I'm feeling as unsettled as I am. The conclusion I came to for a long time was, so there must be something wrong with me. I must just need to have an attitude adjustment or get my head out of this space and
00:22:13
Speaker
just try to figure out how to make this work. And the more I did that, the more I felt like, you know what, if I have to do this for the next 30 years of my life, I will, I will not make it. I just will, I will want to disappear, you know? And so the attention grew and grew and grew until the point where I, I felt like, you know, you get to that point, this is kind of a cliche, but you get to that point where,
00:22:39
Speaker
You feel like the risk of moving on from there feels less risky than the risk of staying. And that's kind of your crossroads and your breaking point where you're like, you know what, this might totally suck. Can't possibly suck worse than what I'm doing right now. So I just made the decision when it was at the end of the school year, I made the decision not to renew my contract and to free up the job for another teacher who I really felt like would do a better job and be more invested and, um,
00:23:09
Speaker
And completely naively, by the way, like didn't know a thing about the publishing industry or really what the hell to do when it came to writing a book. I was like, I'm going to take the next six months. I've got enough savings to cover me for six months. And I thought that would be enough time to get a book written and published, which is like hilarious. But, um, yeah. So then, so I was like, I have enough, I have six months of time to basically make this happen.
00:23:38
Speaker
And, and then that kind of set me into the next three year spiral of realizing it was much more difficult than I thought it was going to be.
00:23:46
Speaker
Well that's, I think that's a good springboard because of course you have to, you know, you gave yourself a little bit of a, you know, this timeline and some people, you know, I'm quoting loosely like Chase Jarvis or something who always talks about going from like zero to one and then one to 10 from there. So what was your zero to one step after, you know, in that six month window? Well, to me at the time it seemed simple. I was like, okay, so I just need to sit down and write this book. And I,
00:24:15
Speaker
I actually had, because of my background, I had a bachelor's degree in English, a master's degree in education. I had done a lot of writing. I again, have that fourth grade experience where my skillset as a writer has been validated. So I didn't, I did have insecurities as a writer for sure. And I still do, but I didn't have like a barrage of voices telling me that I wasn't a good writer and I couldn't do this. So I kind of felt like, okay, all I have to do is just sit down and write this book.
00:24:44
Speaker
And I, what I ran into was this, the realization that writing a book is a whole different animal. And even though I was a strong writer, I didn't really know the first place to start when it came to writing a book. So this is what I tell authors. Now, when I work with him, the biggest mistake I see new authors make, and I made the same mistake was thinking you can sit down and write a book without an outline.
00:25:10
Speaker
And I think I had, not everybody has this, there's kind of a divide here, but I had this idealistic view of a great writer who was like following the whims of her creativity and just listening to her muse, that the idea of an outline really felt like it demystified all of that for me and felt like it kind of took away from
00:25:31
Speaker
the, it took away from it somehow or took away from my skill. So I was resistant to the idea of putting together an outline. And I think it really hurt me. And then it cost me years of, I mean, really two full years of throwing away bad drafts, trying things, them not working. And then also, I mean, you have to remember I get six months into this process and I run out of money. So I start selling stuff to like make money. I start like selling my possessions.
00:26:02
Speaker
I start picking up jobs on Craigslist. I wrote copy for an erectile dysfunction ad. I wrote like, you know, just, just like anything to make 50 bucks, anything to save 50 bucks. It was like the exact picture you have in your mind of a starving artist. And it, there's a kind of sweetness or a, or a not sweetness, like a glance, like a little bit of glamor to that for a period of time. And cause you're like, and then her best selling
00:26:31
Speaker
book came out and she became a star and everybody's heard of her everywhere. But that, the, and then never happened for me. So, or not never, not that it never happened for me, but it was a slower growth than that.
Entrepreneurial Ventures in Writing
00:26:43
Speaker
And, and so it was three years of wondering, like, did I just destroy my life and was this all for nothing? And what if, you know, what if nobody ever reads these words and what if I'm actually a terrible writer and nobody has had the guts to tell me. And, um, yeah, what if this was all a massive mistake?
00:27:02
Speaker
I love the different shapes a writing career can take, and part of the reason why I was really drawn to talking to you is what has to do with the agency that you showed to kind of build this thing, finding your voice and the 12 books you've written and how you're able to kind of craft this community around your particular brand of writing and storytelling.
00:27:30
Speaker
How, how did that start to manifest itself in that, in those, in those three years that, um, you know, post teaching? Well, the gift of those three years was that by the time my book came out in 2013, so I quit my job in 2010 book comes out end of 2013. And by the time the book came out, even though the book did well in the marketplace, I just started to realize that this whole process had been so much harder than it needed to be. And that there was really nobody out there guiding.
00:28:00
Speaker
authors and guiding especially new authors who were coming on the scene. This is at a time too, when blogging was at its height and everybody was blogging and I was connecting with all these other bloggers who wanted to write books. And, and I was just realizing that there wasn't really any, there weren't really any great resources out there to support writers through this process. So I have always had a little bit of an entrepreneurial streak and I think I saw like the light bulb went off in my head and I saw an opportunity.
00:28:27
Speaker
both to serve writers just like me who, you know, they know they have something to say. They just aren't sure exactly how to say it yet. And then also to find a way to make a living that felt like a good living to me instead of, you know, like eating oatmeal until I could get my next advance check. And, you know, like I think the publishing industry is a bit like the music industry where you have like a few people who do really well.
00:28:56
Speaker
because they sell millions of copies of their work. And then you have most people who are living the daily grind who it's not like you can't make money as a writer. That's not the case at all. You have to move a lot of units of a $20 unit when you're making 10% of a cut or 15% or whatever your royalty split is. You have to move a lot of units to make
00:29:23
Speaker
a healthy living to support a family. So yeah, to me, I just saw an opportunity. I was like, not only can I help people, but I can also make a living that feels like the kind of lifestyle that I want to have in the world. So that was really where the idea was born. And then the first thing I did, I was like, okay, so I could put together a curriculum and I had a master's degree in teaching. That's all that we did was put together curriculum. So
00:29:49
Speaker
I was like, that's a skillset I have. I can put together a 12 month curriculum that walks people through the process of outlining, writing, editing, and publishing their book all in 12 months. And that was the first iteration of Find Your Voice was that 12 month curriculum. And I found 10 authors who were, they were new authors. They were all bloggers who wanted to write books who were interested in the program. And that was our first, that was the first round and first iteration of what has become Find Your Voice.
00:30:19
Speaker
Yeah. And you mentioned that you kind of had this entrepreneurial streak in you. Where does that come from? Not a lot of artists have that. So where did that come from? Well, I think it just came from necessity. I don't have neither. Well, my dad does. My dad's a clinical psychologist and runs his own business. I wouldn't necessarily call anyone in my family, particularly entrepreneurial. In my extended family, there are people who
00:30:46
Speaker
I have an uncle who's done very well in business and actually two separate uncles who've done well in business. For me, it was more like when I left home when I was 18, my first job was waiting tables at a restaurant. To me, the entrepreneurial spirit is you're like, okay, what do I need to do to walk out of here at the end of the night with $200 in cash in my pocket? How many days a week do I need to work making $200 in cash so that I can pay my bills?
00:31:16
Speaker
I think sometimes we overestimate what it means to be entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial is just literally like a little bit opportunistic and like, how can I work at work as efficiently as possible and, and get the greatest return on my investment. Um, so that working waiting tables actually was the first glimpse that I saw of my own entrepreneurial spirit. I was like, everybody at eight o'clock at a restaurant is trying to go home. All those, all the servers are, they like want to go out with their friends and go drink and party.
00:31:45
Speaker
So everybody's trying to leave and I'm like, go ahead, leave. I'll take your tables. I'm like, if I stay here until midnight and close the store, I leave with three times as much money as you. That seems kind of worth it to me. So, um, so that was really where that started. But I think there's something to be said here for anybody who's listening that in the 21st century, if you want to be an author, you are an entrepreneur. There is no.
00:32:13
Speaker
getting around that it wasn't that way 50 years ago or a hundred years ago. Um, you know, that's the, the idea of advance on royalties was that's kind of your salary. It's your paycheck that you live off of. And for most authors that I've known, there's just such a small percentage of authors who can live fully off of their advance on royalties that, um, for most authors, you have to find other ways to bring in revenue.
00:32:41
Speaker
And you can just get creative about that. A lot of authors will build courses or workshops or online courses or, um, or find some other way or they'll travel and speak from stages or, um, sell digital products or there's a, there's a million different ways that you can do it. It's just a matter of finding a way that makes sense for you within your lifestyle or the other way you can do it. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with this is you go get a job that
00:33:10
Speaker
gives you a regular paycheck, um, that doesn't require too much of you. It's a 40 hour a week job. You show up, you clock in, you clock out, you do your, your work. And maybe it's a job that uses a different muscle in your brain or a different part of your brain than your creative writing work does. And then every Saturday or once a quarter for a week, you go away and you do your writing and it's, it's a passion project for you. And you still very well may publish and who
00:33:40
Speaker
Who knows or who can say what will happen with those words you published? Cause you could be like Paul Young who wrote the shack, who wrote a book for his children and had no clue that book would go on to sell 26 million copies and become a major motion picture. So, you know, who knows that could happen. Crazier things have happened. I just think it's not really wise to count on that happening. And I'm saying that from my own personal experience of floundering.
00:34:08
Speaker
for three years not really having a hard time supporting myself.
00:34:12
Speaker
Yeah and in that, you need to, you cannot possibly come to this craft as a results driven person because so much of that is out of your control. You know you even said like a calling is a journey and part of the reason why this is so important is because there's just so much joy in the journey and that's where you actually have some authority and agency about
00:34:38
Speaker
the work you're doing so it's all the more important to put your joy and your energy into the journey and then and then and then hopefully you do sell 26 million copies of the shack but you can't really bank on that but you can bank on enjoying the process if you truly if it comes from a place of joy and love yes well said well said
00:35:03
Speaker
What is, uh, you know, I think a lot of people too, who might have that, that, that day job, but they also want to have a side hustle or just write this book on the side. Um, what might they not understand about the sacrifice that goes into that? I mean, what sacrifices have you made to manifest your writing career? Yeah. Well, again, we have this image in our head of a writer and it's a little different for everyone, but there are a lot of commonalities when I ask people to describe to me what they see when they think of a writer.
00:35:32
Speaker
We picture this person who's very peacefully perched at their keyboard or at their typewriter, which I think is funny because there's always a typewriter in the image, but there's like sun streaming in the window and they're just being hit with flashes of inspiration and the words are just flowing so smoothly. And then, you know, they have this chance encounter with an editor who loves their work and, you know,
00:35:58
Speaker
These are the images that we have in our head that we've glorified about what it means to be a writer. And the truth is that I have a friend who describes it like being a farmer. It's not really much more glamorous than being a farmer. You wake up every day, you tell the fields, sometimes storms hit or natural disasters happen and you harvest no crops for the year. And you've invested all your time and all your money and all your energy into this thing. And you realize you've got nothing to take to market at the end of the year. And that, that happens to writers all the time.
00:36:28
Speaker
that I've worked with. So I think you have to go into it knowing that that's a real possibility.
Philosophy and Process of Writing
00:36:33
Speaker
And then there are years when you harvest more crops than you could possibly imagine. So I think we have to have the mindset of writing. We have to sort of like strip away the glamorous idea we have about a writer, this movie scene of a writer and think about writing as really not that different than anything else that we do in our lives. Being a business owner or a parent or working a job or, um,
00:36:57
Speaker
or tending to your household or to a backyard garden or whatever it is. It's like you have duties that you take care of every day. You show up, you sit down at your computer, you get your words written. You don't get too precious about them. You aren't attached to them. You don't need them to be perfect. You don't feel like they are you and they're part of you and your ego is going to be crushed if other people don't love them. You just get up every day and you write your words down and you keep on moving forward. And you do hope, all of us hope that someday they
00:37:27
Speaker
amount to something in the sense of that they have an impact on somebody else, but we don't, there's no guarantee that comes along with that. So I think that's the biggest thing. And then the second thing I would say is I tell authors all the time that the one person who I can guarantee your book will change is you. So as you write your book, it will transform you in the way you hope that it will transform your reader. There's no possible way for that not to happen.
00:37:55
Speaker
Except when you just go, I don't want to do this. I'm going to hire someone else to do it for me, which is your prerogative. But if you're going to sit down and write a book about ideas that mean something to you, it is going to transform you in the process. It's going to transform you the way you hope it transforms your reader. And that transformation is really wonderful. And I'll speak from personal experience here. I've written about some really challenging topics I wrote. My last book is called Indestructible and it's about, it's a super
00:38:23
Speaker
vulnerable and personal story about leaving an abusive marriage and going through a divorce. And that book was a really, really hard book to write because I had to go back and relive a lot of experiences that were traumatic the first time around, little in the second time around. So, um, it was a really challenging book to write, but I can tell you from the emails that I get that the way that it's transforming the reader is the same way that it transformed me. So it's a, it's a great thing. But when you're in the process of transformation,
00:38:53
Speaker
If you think symbolically, the thing that transforms us is fire. It's heat. It's uncomfortable. It's not fun to be in the midst of that kind of transformation. It's why so many people have an idea for a book that they want to write. Then they sit down to write it and they get into the process and they're like, this is not fun. This is too chaotic and I don't know what's happening here. Things in my life seem to be falling apart and I'm suddenly confused about things that I was very certain about before.
00:39:20
Speaker
And they give up and they walk away from the writing process. And I just tell people, you can count on this. You can take it to the bank. The writing process will transform you if you stay in it, if you let it.
00:39:35
Speaker
And towards the end of Indestructible, you kind of allude to that you're starting to write the thing. And so you're pretty, it's still pretty the experience, I imagine, of what was an abusive marriage and the time that followed where you're still trying to find some footing.
00:40:00
Speaker
It seems like you were still very close to that as you began writing this book. So how were you able to process those events and write the book without some of the requisite distance that sometimes writing memoir requires? Well, here's my take on that. I think it's really important to have distance before you publish a memoir. I don't necessarily think it's important to have distance before you start writing it. In fact, I think writing is part of how I got
00:40:28
Speaker
from point A to point B. And I would say that I'm just projecting my passion onto other people, except that I've read the data that's so clear about how this works. So expressive writing, the act of sitting down to write about what's happening to you in your life and expressing your true thoughts and feelings about the writing, improves every aspect of your life. It improves your sleep. It improves your immune system by as much as 50%. People are 50% less likely to visit
00:40:56
Speaker
the doctor for upper respiratory infections in flu if they're writing, expressively writing regularly in their life. And people who are in this kind of writing practice report being happier in their romantic partnerships, they are more likely to get promoted. They're more likely to be paid more. They have deeper levels of empathy. The research is really astounding. And so I think that telling someone that you need to wait before you write about this circumstance
00:41:25
Speaker
isn't necessarily helpful advice. Um, you can trust yourself if you don't feel ready to write about something. So, um, for example, I had a friend who went through a really massive loss. She lost her husband very suddenly out of nowhere and was pregnant when this happened. And, um, she within days of finding out that he wasn't here anymore,
00:41:54
Speaker
She would say to me things like, can you write that down for me? I don't want to forget that. Can you write that down for me? I don't want to forget that. You know, we, I'd have like a memory or something of him. And she'd say, can you please write that down for me? This is, that's the impulse to write. It's the impulse to record the details of our lives so that we can, we can kind of mark them in our memories forever. And then as months went on, that impulse turned to, I'm going to make a note of that in my phone. So she started doing it herself. And then.
00:42:23
Speaker
Now she's at a place where she's writing and talking about this, you know, I say publicly by publicly, I mean to her friends on Instagram, but there's, there's some sort of healthy progression, psychological progression that's happening there for her. And I think the same thing happens for us. When you go through something traumatic, you'll know if it's too early to write about it. If you feel, if you don't feel safe in your body, if you feel too traumatized, if it feels like you get flooded with emotion, when you sit down to write about something, it's too soon to sit down and write about it.
00:42:53
Speaker
But if you're feeling the impulse to write or the draw to write about it, then write about it and write about it privately in a journal until you feel ready to start sharing. And that's what I think we need distance for is the readiness to share. But like the evolution of indestructible, for example, I wrote the first draft of that book, which was, um, you know, I talk about this in my next book, but the first draft of indestructible was
Crafting 'Indestructible' and Writing Techniques
00:43:20
Speaker
a mess. And I don't just mean from a writing standpoint, I mean, it was, it was not publishable. It was like, just a very hurting woman kind of whining about what had happened to her. It wasn't, it wouldn't have been helpful for anyone to read, but it was really, really helpful for me to write it. And it was helpful for me to go back months later and look at it and read it and see
00:43:45
Speaker
how much had changed for me and in my perspective, because I could see this relic of where I was at from one month to another month. So I would encourage a writer to do that, to sit down and write the first draft whenever they feel ready to do that. And then you go back and edit the draft to a better draft that's more a perspective that you want to take more permanently. And then the next thing I did was I started sharing, I shared that
00:44:15
Speaker
draft of the manuscript with about five friends, because I just had this impulse to say to them, like, this is what I've been living through. I had been keeping a lot of secrets for a long time. And so it felt nice to be like, this is what was really going on in my house. And then the third draft was actually a lot of the stuff that was in that second draft got cut out between the second and the third, because, I mean, for obvious legal reasons, because there were stories I couldn't tell. And then, and then just thinking practically about like,
00:44:44
Speaker
How much of this did I really want the whole world to know if I was going to make this public? And, and so just making some strategic decisions about that. And that all happened before I ever showed it to any agents or publishers. And then a whole other round of edits happened before we shared it with the world. So, so that just to give people a sense of, you don't have to wait until your five years gone from a situation to write about it. You might need to wait until your five years past a situation to publish it, but
00:45:14
Speaker
But write about it now if it's, you know, if you're feeling ready to do so. How did you and how have you become comfortable writing really bad shitty first drafts to get to something that will eventually be good after, you know, maybe a dozen drafts? I think it's muscle memory like anything. It doesn't really ever feel comfortable to write a shitty first draft. You, you always are a bit like, oh, this is the, for me, it's the worst part of the
00:45:44
Speaker
process. I hate the first draft. Um, but you're, the muscle memory reminds you, this gets better. You know, you, there will be a time when this draft will be better than it is right now. And, and so I think that's what pulls me back again and again to try it. Um, it's also, there's also, I don't know if this is just true for me or I'm curious if other writers identify with this, but there's a draw to like solving the puzzle.
00:46:13
Speaker
Like, I don't know if you've ever gotten like on a, one of those candy crush games or something on your phone where you like, can't get from one level to the next. And it's almost like an addiction. Like you're like, must get to level 227 or whatever. Um, or our Rubik's cube or whatever, whatever it is for you. But to me, writing feels a little bit like that. Like I've got to crack this code to make this make sense to myself and to other people. And that I think is the other thing that pulls me back to the page.
00:46:41
Speaker
How cognizant are you maybe on a spectrum of the reader when you sit down to write? And that might move over the course of your drafting, but I wonder if there's someone sitting on your shoulder early, or when does that reader come onto your shoulder? So let me make a distinction, because it depends on what kind of writing I'm doing. But if I'm working on a book, so if I'm writing something that
00:47:10
Speaker
I have a plan to publish someday. It's a little different than with expressive writing. With expressive writing, I'm not really thinking about a reader. I'm just like spilling my guts. But if I'm writing something that's going to be an Instagram caption or it's going to be a book or it's going to be a blog post or whatever, then the way I like to think about it is one reader. So I don't write to the masses. I don't. And I teach other writers not to do this too. I think it's an incredible distraction.
00:47:37
Speaker
to try to think about like demographics, for example. And you're like, I'm writing to 25 year old women everywhere or 25 year old women who live in urban centers who drive a Passat, you know, like it's like demographics are helpful when it comes to selling something. But when it comes to writing something, you really need to be able to see someone's face and know their name and think about who cares about what kind of car they drive. You need to know what keeps them up at night and what
00:48:04
Speaker
What matters to them more than anything else? What would they die for? What are the problems that they're facing every day in their life that they wish that they could overcome? And what do they whisper in secret to their friends that they don't want anyone else to ever know? And these are the things that we need to know about our reader. And we couldn't possibly know that about some obscure 25-year-old woman living in Seattle driving a bussat. So I just think the demographics conversation
00:48:32
Speaker
when it comes to writing needs to be shifted to, to like, who's my one reader, whose name I know and whose face I can see in my head. And I know them, I know them personally enough that I can take some pretty good guesses about what's going on under the surface. And that's who I'm thinking about while I'm writing. And I'm thinking about it as if I'm literally sitting across the dinner table from them, having a conversation about this thing we're talking about. Hmm.
00:48:56
Speaker
Is that typically kind of the same person or do you kind of, you know, lack of a better term, kind of shoehorn your voice to that ideal reader for whatever it is you happen to be writing? Well, here's what's funny is it doesn't, to write from one reader to another reader, it doesn't change your voice at all. It's like this. Okay. So an example would be if I am going to go tell my, tell a story to my grandma,
00:49:25
Speaker
I'm going to tell it really differently than I would if I'm going to go tell it to my husband, because I'm going to cut out all the curse words. I'm not going to assume she knows what I know about technology. You know what I'm saying? You're making these allowances because you know who you're talking to, but it's still me. It's still my voice. It's still the same story. The same is true when you're sitting down to write that different books that I've written have been written to different single readers, but the voice
00:49:55
Speaker
really is the through line. The voice stays the same. The voice doesn't ever change. And that's really the big gift of the writing life is that you start to know and recognize and own the sound of your own voice. And you really know who you are, what matters to you, what's important in the world, what your perspective is. You can quickly and easily recognize when your perspective has shifted and you can have space for that. And yeah, there's just like such a
00:50:23
Speaker
a piece and a serenity that comes with knowing like I know the sound of my own voice and I can kind of carry myself with confidence into any situation because of that. Now you've almost written two books a year, a year since that first one came out about seven years ago. So what would you say you're better at today than you were seven years ago?
00:50:50
Speaker
Well, the thing I'm really best at is outlining books. I mean, that's what my business is built around. And part of it is I didn't do this on purpose. A friend said to me the other day, he was like, you know, you've started doing this new thing where you outline books. And I was like, no, no, this is not a new thing. I've been doing this for 10 years. And he was like, 10 years. I thought this was new. I thought, you know, that you had just started doing it. And I'm like, no, I just
00:51:13
Speaker
I kept it a secret for so long because I thought my career as an author was really going to take off. And then this other thing I was doing for money on the side was going to disappear. And that just isn't the way that things worked. In fact, I kind of fell in love with helping other authors. So all that to say, what I did by accident was I basically got a master's degree in writing books because I wrote books for other people. I outlined books for hundreds of people. I outlined my own books and threw them away.
00:51:43
Speaker
outline books that never got written or never got published, um, outline the books that I have written. And over the course of time, I just got really, really good at being able to sit down with someone and listen to them and their idea and tell them, here's how we can frame that. That makes it really interesting to a reader. Here's where we should start. Here's where we should finish. This is what goes in there. This is what to leave out and kind of pulling, pulling from them. What is their idea and helping them turn it into the shape of a book.
00:52:11
Speaker
So I feel like I've cracked the code to that puzzle a bit in the last 10 years. When I rewind and think about myself in 2010, sitting there in my halfway empty apartment with no furniture, eating oatmeal on the floor, I'm like, that was the thing I didn't know how to do. And it was driving me crazy. And it's the thing that I feel like I've become really, really gifted at in the last 10 years.
00:52:34
Speaker
Earlier you said when you were picturing that ideal reader, you know, trying to get into her head in an empathic way, like what, what keeps her up at night? Um, I'd extend that to you. What keeps you up at night? Oh, that's a good question. Honestly, at the end of the day, the thing that drives me, my passion is helping people define their voice, which is, that's a, it's a vague way to say it, but it's why I named my company that. So.
00:53:04
Speaker
It's not just about helping people find their voice as writers. It's about helping people find their voice and their way in the world. And I think as a woman in the world, and I'm a white woman, so I don't even have the full spectrum of experience on this matter. But as a woman, I know what it's like to be silenced and to be marginalized and to struggle, to find a way to
00:53:33
Speaker
show up as my true self in the world. And I think that there are people out there who, for a whole litany of various reasons, have that similar kind of struggle. And I think writing is such a powerful way to help us figure out what our voice even sounds like and what it would look like for us to say the things we want to say in the world and do the things we want to do in the world, like I talked about earlier.
00:54:01
Speaker
that born out of that oftentimes is great writing. But even if it's not great writing, that's like passed down through generations or published it, that would be great if it was, but even if it's not, if, if I could help someone in this lifetime feel that way, feel like I can show up in any environment and stand tall and comfortable in my own skin and say what I need to say and do what I need to do and own my life as my own.
00:54:28
Speaker
If I can help someone do that, I feel like I've done what I came here to do. And yeah, to your point of sitting with your truth or being comfortable with it, too, you also cite in Indestructible this great David Foster Wallace quote of, the truth will set you free, but not until it's done with you. It's such a good quote. Why did that connect with you? I just heard that quote. Well, part of it is.
00:54:54
Speaker
You read the book, so the story goes that I discover basically that my husband at the time has been living this double life. And I discover like the thread that unwinds everything, like one piece of information and then kind of go down the rabbit hole and find all of these other pieces of information. And what was great about that is it actually freed me to make the decision that I had wanted to make for a long time. I had been really miserable in the marriage for the entire time that we'd been married.
00:55:22
Speaker
Um, but it also set into motion this chaotic string of events for me. That was like everything that I knew to be true about my life had to be dismantled so that it could be rebuilt. So, um, it felt like you've got to be kidding me. And I remember having moments where I was like, just when you think everything that could be taken from you has been taken, you know, something else gets taken there. There's a scene in the book where.
00:55:47
Speaker
He comes and takes our, the dog that was ours. He comes and takes the dog for me. And I just have, I just know this is the last time I'm going to see the dog. And it was just one of those moments where it's like, everything else is already gone. I'm living in this house with no furniture. And, and now you come and take the dog and like, it just, it doesn't get any lower than this. You know, you kind of feel like you're at that rock bottom, but it's liberating because now you're like, I don't have to keep your secrets anymore. I don't have to keep my secrets anymore.
00:56:15
Speaker
I don't have to pretend like I'm happy when I'm not happy. I can actually figure out what the hell does make me happy and I can go do that. And I don't have to worry about, you know, criticism or pushback or from, from you telling me that I can't do those things. So it, it's like this weird, um, catch 22, but, but also like so beautiful to be like, I'm not gonna hold together this facade of my life anymore. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go live the life that I've always wanted to live because there's no better time than right now.
00:56:46
Speaker
And I think you write too that basically the only reason we get strong is so we can be soft. And I thought that was a great juxtaposition, a great, uh, a great bit of advice to anybody that, you know, they can go hand in hand. They do. They have to go hand in hand. Well, I mean, we have, we can't, we can't, we can, if we're only one or the other, then we, we either get trampled on in life or
00:57:14
Speaker
We never feel truly loved and cared for and held. That's why it's so necessary that they go hand in hand. We both know who we are, what we're about, what we stand for. We have our boundaries and our values that we don't budge on. We also have space and grace for people who are not like us and who see the world differently than us.
00:57:42
Speaker
It's part of why I called the book Indestructible. It's after a John Steinbeck quote, and I think I have it memorized, but I hope I don't butcher it. He says, I think a woman must be stronger than a man, particularly if she has love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible. And the reason I called the book that is because there's something about being able to hold space for yourself and other people that makes you feel invincible.
00:58:11
Speaker
You're like, you know what? Bring it on. Nothing you can do to me can touch me. Because at the end of the day, I have the thing that matters most to me of all, which is myself.
00:58:24
Speaker
And you've said that you tell writers you can't write your story and not come face to face with yourself. And in writing indestructible, what was that experience like coming face to face with a really dichotomous version of yourself, this sort of pre and post divorce and pre and post marriage? What was that like coming face to face with? Well, I sort of touched on this, but I'll be more explicit about it that the the experience for me
00:58:54
Speaker
When I went into writing the book, writing that first draft, I was in a head space of like, I was feeling really victimized. And to be fair, in many ways I was. So I was feeling like this terrible thing had happened to me. How dare you do this to me? You've treated me terribly this whole time. And now I find out that all this stuff has been going on. And I was angry. I was hurt. I felt betrayed. I was like, so all of that was coming out.
00:59:23
Speaker
out in the writing that I was doing. And I remember sitting down thinking, I'm telling, I'm going to tell everything. I'm going to write this book and I'm going to publish every terrible thing you ever said to me, you know, um, kind of in that head space. And, and as I started to put the words on the page, I realized it was a very uninteresting story and it made me sound bitter and vindictive. And I guess in some ways I kind of was, and it, I wasn't a very interesting character. I wasn't a likable character. And so it was, it flipped everything on its head for me. Suddenly I was like, whoa, hold on.
00:59:52
Speaker
This is not even who I want to
Authenticity and Future Writing Plans
00:59:54
Speaker
be. And this is, it just, it made me see my, what I had brought to the table that had, um, like the flip for me happened when I realized I was thinking about like, what's the hook? What's the story question that gets the reader interested in the story? And the question I kept asking in my life was like, how could he do this to me? And I'm like, that's not an interesting story question. No one wants to read a book about how could he do this to me? What is a really interesting story question is why on earth would a woman
01:00:23
Speaker
walk down the aisle and marry a man she does not want to marry. That's a fascinating story question. And if I was going to write the book from the place of that story question, it was going to be a really different book and I was going to have to be super vulnerable. And, and that's, that's really what I ended up deciding to do. It flipped the entire story on its head for me. And I realized while yes, there were many times when he physically overpowered me, or those are things like,
01:00:51
Speaker
I'm not saying that a woman who's in an abusive relationship is to blame, but I'm saying that when you walk away and you're in a position of physical safety, again, and emotional safety, I started to gain a lot of emotional safety and support around me, it gave me the freedom to start asking, what did I do that got me there? And that was the question that helped me find freedom. And another question you ask in the book too is, why are so many of us working so hard to hold on to things we don't even want?
01:01:21
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the answer to that is because they make us look good. You know, we're, we're trying to hold on to the image of what we wanted to be or who we wanted to be. And it's all at the expense of who we actually are. And I think if we could really see how much beauty there is in the person that we truly are and in the story that we really have to tell the true story, the real details of our real story, then
01:01:48
Speaker
We wouldn't feel so attached to this ideal version that we're, we're trying to pitch to the world. Instagram, by the way, is Instagram is just Instagram, but it's such a great example of this. And it's a good way to kind of self-diagnose your, to see where you're at on this, to just ask yourself like, and, and it's connected to our writing lives because people so often say like, yeah, if you want to be a writer, you need to grow your platform. So then we go to Instagram and we're like, okay, I got to take really pretty pictures and I got to put them up here and I got to
01:02:17
Speaker
Pair them with inspirational quotes and that's how I'm going to get people to follow me. And, and it, you know, I mean, we noticed our tendency to do that. That tendency is a tendency to sacrifice our own voice for the sake of, you know, making a paycheck or the sake of becoming a famous author or hitting a bestseller list or whatever it is that we're hoping to do. Versus, you know, the people that we're really drawn to in the world, whether that be their books or their Instagram profiles.
01:02:45
Speaker
almost always are just really stupidly authentic. You know, they're just like really themselves unapologetically. They're not very careful people. Like, you know, people who we, who we, the words that we end up loving and holding dear are words that are, they can be kind of, um, they're hard to read sometimes, but they're, they're so good and we need them. And I think we can,
01:03:11
Speaker
As we think about our relationship to Instagram or something equivalent, we can kind of self-diagnose and go, how much am I trying to prove myself here? And how much am I really just saying what's true?
01:03:25
Speaker
And over the course of writing this book and publishing it and getting it out into the world, you know, it's a very, you know, raw, raw book and a raw experience for you. And I wonder what did this book unlock within you for the next wave of creativity that's, you know, unfurling before it's before you. Yeah, it's funny. I tell people a lot of times that sometimes you have to write
01:03:53
Speaker
There's a book that you have to write and kind of get out of the way before you can write the book that, I don't know, I don't have great language for it, but it's like Indestructible is a book that was a really personal book for me and it's not been a bestseller. It's not hit any lists. I've gotten great feedback from people. I'm like really happy with how the book has done, but it's not, you know, it's not selling millions of copies. But it was a book I needed to write so that now I can do the work that I'm doing, which is helping people to
01:04:23
Speaker
to do the same thing, to tell the really hard stories from their life so that they can unlock what's next for them. And sometimes that's more books. I've worked with a bunch of authors who have been really successful in the marketplace with books, but sometimes it's not books. Sometimes it's businesses or relationships or families or whatever it is that comes next. And so for me, it's find your voice. Our team is growing over here and we're hosting workshops and launched a podcast and have lots of
01:04:52
Speaker
digital products and online opportunities and just all kinds of opportunities to help support writers. So that's part of it. And then I have another book coming out in January of 2021. So a little bit of time from now, but, um, that will be the book that teaches people how to do for themselves what I did within destructible, which is to use a practice of writing as a way to heal their hearts and, and become their best selves in the world. So.
01:05:19
Speaker
That book is coming and was really born. I don't think I could have written that book if I didn't write Indestructible is what I'm saying. Who knows? It remains to be seen how that book will do in the marketplace, but I think it has a wider market appeal than Indestructible does. And we'll just, I mean, we'll have to see how it does, but that's what has been born out of that.
01:05:40
Speaker
Nice. Well, I think that kind of brings us full circle to the whole, you know, the process of generating this kind of material and how you approach the work and how you coach other people to approach it. So that's wonderful. And so where can people get more familiar with finding your voice, the podcast and your writing and even your social media profiles? Where can people find you, Allison?
01:06:08
Speaker
The best place to go because everything is there is findyourvoice.com. But the podcast is called find your voice. We're on Instagram at let's find your voice. And there are links to everything from the blog so from the website. So if you go to find your voice calm, you can find our blog and and courses and products and all that stuff. So
01:06:31
Speaker
We did it. We made it CNF-ers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanO'Mara.com.
01:06:50
Speaker
Follow the show on the various social media channels at cnfpodacrossamall. Get that newsletter at my website. Win books, win zines, hang out with your buddy BO. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Are we done here? We must. Because if you can do interviews, see ya!