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Literary fiction author, artist and musician, Boo Trundle is on the podcast talking about her debut literary fiction novel, "The Daughter Ship", the journey of writing it and the experiences she's gained through publishing her first book.

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Transcript

Introduction and Patreon Plug

00:00:00
Speaker
To listen without ads, head over to patreon.com slash rightandwrong.
00:00:04
Speaker
Ooh, a spicy question.
00:00:06
Speaker
I love it.
00:00:07
Speaker
Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
00:00:09
Speaker
You can fix plot holes, but if the writer... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
00:00:15
Speaker
So it's kind of a gamble.

Meet Boo Trundle

00:00:18
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
00:00:21
Speaker
With me today is a writer, artist and performer.
00:00:25
Speaker
She's released three original music albums with Big Deal Records and her first novel, The Daughtership, came out in the summer of last year.
00:00:32
Speaker
It's Boo Trundle.
00:00:33
Speaker
Hello, welcome.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hi, nice to be here.
00:00:37
Speaker
Thanks so much for coming.
00:00:38
Speaker
As is off in the way, love to start off with the novel so we can get a bit of a sense of what you write and kind of why you write

The Daughtership: A Psychological Novel?

00:00:46
Speaker
it.
00:00:46
Speaker
The Daughtership.
00:00:47
Speaker
Tell us about your debut.
00:00:50
Speaker
Well, like you said, it came out last summer and it is a, I would call it a psychological fiction and also literary fiction.
00:00:57
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So it is a different kind of a read.
00:01:01
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It's got two plot threads going.
00:01:03
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One thread is a woman going through her life, struggling with midlife,
00:01:09
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issues, I would say.
00:01:11
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And then underneath it, there's a speculative part, fantasy fiction, where these three little girls are stuck on a submarine at the bottom of the ocean, and they're trying to get the submarine working before they run out of air.
00:01:23
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So that's how it starts.
00:01:24
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And then these two threads end up intersecting in a really interesting way halfway through the book.
00:01:30
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It's somewhat, I've seen it described online as experimental in its construction.
00:01:37
Speaker
As like a first novel, did you think you were writing something sort of a bit different and a bit experimental?

Experimenting with Multiple Perspectives

00:01:44
Speaker
Or were you just writing what you felt?
00:01:46
Speaker
Well, it's not the first novel that I've written.
00:01:49
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I have, yeah, I've written...
00:01:52
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four other novels that were much more straightforward.
00:01:56
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So I think it was more of a solution.
00:02:00
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And it really, the way that the novels put together with both, not just with both of these plot lines, but also there's multiple voices that tell the story, lots of different characters, lots of different versions of the truth.
00:02:12
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And they're all sort of struggling to make sense of something that happened in the past.
00:02:16
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to this main character.
00:02:18
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I think that the nature of the story, it's really about trying to reckon with what's remembered and what's not remembered and what's confirmed by witnesses and what's not confirmed by witnesses.
00:02:31
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And sometimes you just have to roll with your version of the truth, whether or not others confirm it.
00:02:37
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And then also
00:02:38
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you have to heal from things you don't remember.
00:02:41
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So all of that swirl, because that was the topic, it just made sense to write it the way I did.
00:02:50
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And it was so, yeah, so the structure was more of a, it was sort of, I felt like it was given to me by the gods, you know, because it was, I came to it through many different efforts, many different tries.
00:03:03
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And then I found this sort of way through the forest of the story.
00:03:07
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Okay, right.
00:03:08
Speaker
So there's a lot of topics that you just mentioned there.
00:03:13
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Those sound like the kind of things where it would be challenging to write them without digging into some kind of personal experience.
00:03:21
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Is there an element of sort of autobiographical writing within this?
00:03:26
Speaker
Oh, definitely.
00:03:27
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Yeah, quite a bit.
00:03:28
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But again, because I don't really โ€“ I've always been a fiction writer, always.
00:03:34
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And I don't really โ€“ on the very first page of the novel, one of the characters says, what is true, there is no true.
00:03:41
Speaker
And I've always sort of felt that way, so I just felt โ€“
00:03:44
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rather than try to say this is true or that is true or take a stab at describing events in a realistic, honest way, I just threw that all out the window and called it a novel.
00:03:57
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Much more freedom with a novel and much more fun.
00:04:00
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But I did use a lot of memoir technique.
00:04:02
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I did...
00:04:03
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For example, I did research into my own family and into the town I grew up in, Virginia Beach, Virginia.
00:04:09
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It's a naval town.
00:04:11
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There was like a lot of nautical references.
00:04:13
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And so, you know, I have heard memoir writers talk about how they kind of treat their own family or their own life as a research project.
00:04:21
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I did some of that.
00:04:21
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And, you know, I used some tools.
00:04:23
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They were super helpful that, you know, I mean, fiction writers also do research, but not necessarily into their own family.
00:04:31
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So I combined them, I would say.
00:04:35
Speaker
Oh, okay.

Family History and Ancestral Themes

00:04:36
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What made you want to sort of bring in elements of memoir?
00:04:40
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Well, for one, there's a whole thread in the novel about ancestors and my grandmother's โ€“ let's see, how do I say this without making it too confusing?
00:04:53
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Let's just say I have a relative that was in the Civil War, in the United States Civil War, and โ€“
00:05:01
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And there's a book of letters that he wrote to his wife that was preserved.
00:05:06
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And he was also fought for the South.
00:05:08
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So he was fighting to protect slavery.
00:05:10
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So there's been a lot of confusion and shame on my part about this character from my family's past who...
00:05:18
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is historically documented.
00:05:20
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I think that we probably all have shady, you might say even evil people that were in our families, but this guy's on record, you know what I mean?
00:05:29
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Okay, yeah.
00:05:30
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They have his uniform, they used to have his uniform in this museum that was since closed down.
00:05:36
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So there's this kind of bizarre Southern pride in this, that is attached to this museum
00:05:46
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war that was that the south was trying to preserve slavery so you know i just thought that was interesting and also i i still carry shame you know another topic in the novel is carried shame okay uh shame that we carry that may may like really belong to our parents or our grandparents but it's still in us we still walk around with it not just because of dna but because you know there's just some things that gets get
00:06:11
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that gets passed down like alcoholism or something.
00:06:13
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It gets passed down in a family.
00:06:15
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So those are things that I was, that I am still obsessed with and very interested in.
00:06:19
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And it just felt like taking that true bit from my family.
00:06:24
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And, you know, it's funny because my son was asking me about it and I, now I can't really, I can't really figure out, I can't remember what I made up and what's true.
00:06:31
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Cause I also made a lot up.
00:06:33
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And when I, I mean, I'm a very dangerous historian.
00:06:35
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Let's

Non-linear Storytelling: A New Authenticity?

00:06:36
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just put it that way.
00:06:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:38
Speaker
That's true.
00:06:39
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But in many ways, that's kind of how memory works for humans anyway.
00:06:43
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What you remember from a long time ago is you will have affected that with your own agenda and your own lens that has slightly altered the reality of the memory, or your memory of a specific event will be very different from someone who was also in attendance at that event.
00:07:02
Speaker
Definitely.
00:07:03
Speaker
And that's very interesting to me, especially as a writer and
00:07:08
Speaker
You used the word experimental earlier, and I wanted to fight back against it just a little bit because I think it's a scary word.
00:07:15
Speaker
I think if people hear experimental fiction, they just walk right by that book on the bookshelf.
00:07:19
Speaker
And I still want people to buy the book, even though it came out last summer.
00:07:23
Speaker
So, yeah, I think...
00:07:25
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I wouldn't call it experimental.
00:07:27
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I would call the way that I put this story together in some ways more authentic.
00:07:31
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And I can only speak for myself, but it's more authentic to the way that I experience my life.
00:07:37
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And I think we're kind of trapped in a storytelling tradition that is very linear and very...
00:07:46
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focus on this is the beginning, this is the middle, and this is the end.
00:07:49
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And then at the end, everything gets tied up in a pretty bow.
00:07:51
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And I think we can all agree that is not what life is like in any way.
00:07:56
Speaker
Like even at a funeral, I was at a funeral this week and there were so many open...
00:08:01
Speaker
storylines that will never, you know, they're not closed.
00:08:05
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I mean, I wouldn't say they'd never be closed, but they're still running even after this person's no longer on the earth, you know?
00:08:09
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So I just kind of reject that tradition and find that it's fun, not only fun to experiment with storytelling technique, but also
00:08:19
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we all are so familiar with that storyline, with that way of telling a story that you can actually mess with a little bit and people can still follow.
00:08:27
Speaker
You know, it's kind of like abstract painting.
00:08:29
Speaker
Like we've all seen a painting of a barn.
00:08:31
Speaker
So if somebody paints it with different colors or makes it kind of abstract, we all know it's a barn, you know, or if we don't know it's a barn, some part of us is attracted to it.
00:08:40
Speaker
So I kind of think of storytelling that way too.
00:08:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:44
Speaker
I mean, it feels like we're kind of at, there's almost a point where if it's not the kind of save the cat three act structure, it's deemed alternative experimental, something, you know, away from the norm, which, yeah, I can, I can agree.
00:08:59
Speaker
It's, it's, it's a kind of weird way to just narrow so many stories under one lens.
00:09:04
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Um,
00:09:05
Speaker
But it's cool that you're doing something different, mixing things up.
00:09:08
Speaker
I wanted to talk about the multiple points of view.
00:09:12
Speaker
And you're obviously talking about lots of different things that you're interested in, things that you feel, things that you think about.
00:09:19
Speaker
Do you use each of those narrators to investigate these different themes?
00:09:25
Speaker
Are they kind of representative of a theme or a topic that you want to discuss?
00:09:30
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Not so much topics, I don't think, because it is a work of fiction.
00:09:35
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It's more about taking the story forward.
00:09:39
Speaker
And like I said, rather than linear storytelling, I think of this as vertical.
00:09:46
Speaker
So in a sense, like there's one of the images that I come back to a lot in the novel is like an oil rig, the way that, you know, this giant drill just goes down into the earth and comes back up and goes down to the earth and comes back up and goes down to the earth until it punctures and it's looking for something.
00:10:03
Speaker
And then when it finds it, it just gushes up, you know?
00:10:07
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So that's kind of, and that image was sort of driving me as I wrote the story.
00:10:12
Speaker
So each of the voices were,
00:10:15
Speaker
goes back to look at the same thing over and over again, trying to find out what really happened and also trying to, but there's resistance.
00:10:22
Speaker
They're kind of fighting with each other a little bit, the voices.
00:10:24
Speaker
Like, this is how it happened.
00:10:26
Speaker
Like, no, this is not how it happened.
00:10:28
Speaker
And so it's almost like an investigative experience told from, and some of them are very young voices.
00:10:34
Speaker
Like some of them are children.
00:10:35
Speaker
And they also don't all have access to what the others know.
00:10:40
Speaker
And then there's the main character, Catherine.
00:10:42
Speaker
And like I said, at the,
00:10:44
Speaker
She's just a regular adult living in the real world.
00:10:46
Speaker
And at a certain point, all of these stories intersect.
00:10:51
Speaker
And it would be a spoiler to tell how.
00:10:53
Speaker
I mean, it's not hard to find if you want to go look online.
00:10:55
Speaker
But if you want to just read the book fresh, and I don't want to go too much into how they all affect each other, but they do engage, you know.
00:11:02
Speaker
That's such a cool way of describing the kind of story progression.
00:11:07
Speaker
The idea that it's sort of bouncing up and down, repeating to one spot until that breaks.
00:11:12
Speaker
And then that's the kind of like the solution to the mystery, the answer to the question.
00:11:17
Speaker
That's really original.
00:11:17
Speaker
I've never heard of a story described like that, but that's a really apt way of putting it.
00:11:22
Speaker
Thank you.
00:11:23
Speaker
And you mentioned that this is not the first, this is your first published novel.
00:11:27
Speaker
This is not the first novel that you have written.
00:11:30
Speaker
Have you been writing novels for a long time?
00:11:32
Speaker
Yes, I've been noveling for three decades.
00:11:35
Speaker
Noveling?
00:11:36
Speaker
Noveling along in obscurity and torture.
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah, so I started, I wrote my first novel in college and I started trying to get it published in 1993.
00:11:47
Speaker
And I've done a lot of other stuff too, obviously, but it was not my day job.
00:11:52
Speaker
But, you know, I've, it's, and some elements of the same, of the story are the same story I was trying to tell back then.
00:11:58
Speaker
So, and, you know, in that sense that I do think a lot of authors, especially literary writers,
00:12:03
Speaker
are kind of going back to the same thing over and over.
00:12:06
Speaker
Um, I do, I definitely, there's elements in this novel that I was trying to work out even then, especially like even the style of writing, like my first novel was told from multiple points of view to the point where, you know, it was a bit lunatic, it was a bit lunatic, uh,
00:12:19
Speaker
and people couldn't follow it.
00:12:20
Speaker
So I've, I've mastered that after many years, you know, because, because people don't, people, I mean, I think that readers, at least from, I can speak for myself as a reader.
00:12:28
Speaker
I don't, I like being challenged and I like to be taught how to read a book by the book.
00:12:32
Speaker
And I like a book that,
00:12:34
Speaker
answers its own questions and can ask any questions it wants as long as they get answered.
00:12:40
Speaker
So I don't, each book is different and I'm pretty game, but I also put books down right away if they're not, if they don't pull me along.
00:12:47
Speaker
There's way too many books out there for me to read something that's not pulling me along.
00:12:51
Speaker
So learning how to do something different and do something true to my own sort of fractured way of looking at things and experiencing things and also making it a page turner.
00:13:01
Speaker
I mean, that literally took me 30 years.
00:13:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:05
Speaker
I mean, it's, um,

Music and Writing: A Creative Comparison

00:13:07
Speaker
I think it's very common for authors to learn to write a book by writing previous books.
00:13:14
Speaker
It's, it's such a classic case of, uh, like, you know, it took, it took decades to become an overnight success because everyone, you know, the world,
00:13:22
Speaker
at large was to see this as your first published novel, not knowing that you had written many novels previously.
00:13:26
Speaker
And that's the true of so many authors, um, like Brandon Sanderson, who's one of the biggest fantasy authors currently writing at the moment.
00:13:33
Speaker
I think he said he's written 12 novels before he actually published a novel.
00:13:39
Speaker
So you, so readers come to this book.
00:13:42
Speaker
Four is kind of a, four is a paltry number.
00:13:47
Speaker
But the point is that people come to this seeing it as like, wow, this is a really cool first novel, but they forget that most authors have written one, two, three, four, 12 novels before their debut.
00:14:01
Speaker
And that in some ways, for me at least, was the only way to really learn how to properly write was to write a couple of full manuscripts before anything else.
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:13
Speaker
Well, I think there are levels of...
00:14:18
Speaker
writing.
00:14:19
Speaker
And because we all, I'm not, I can't say we all, but many of us learn to write in school and we get assigned writing assignments.
00:14:28
Speaker
And we are told sometimes in a good school, we're taught to write creatively.
00:14:32
Speaker
Mostly we're taught to write exposition and essays and explain why this book, what you loved about this book or prove your point here.
00:14:40
Speaker
So we get taught how to write and we come
00:14:43
Speaker
along thinking, oh, I could write a great novel because I know how to write.
00:14:47
Speaker
But as you know, because you're saying you've done the same thing, it's not that easy to write a good book.
00:14:54
Speaker
And I do think some people are naturally talented storytellers and it might come to them easier.
00:15:02
Speaker
And I also think that writers are weirdos across the board to just spend that much time alone and like โ€“
00:15:10
Speaker
Also to have that much faith in their own imagination, it takes a certain kind of person to even want to do that.
00:15:15
Speaker
And then it takes a whole nother loved person to stick with it.
00:15:18
Speaker
So like that, you know, at each, at each checkpoint people fall away.
00:15:24
Speaker
But yeah, so yeah, it's not like we might not all know how to write a letter or write an email or write a
00:15:30
Speaker
even an essay, but, you know, sticking with something, uh, for years and letting a story come through you and never giving up on it.
00:15:38
Speaker
And then, and, and working out all those kinks, uh, it takes a sort of crazy person, but also you get better every time you do it for sure.
00:15:48
Speaker
That's it.
00:15:49
Speaker
And a huge part of it, which I think the part that almost takes the most time is actually also finding your own way of writing and your own way of storytelling.
00:15:58
Speaker
Because it's not like you look at some of the most critically acclaimed writers in the world and they all write the same.
00:16:07
Speaker
Stephen King and Zadie Smith have very different styles of writing.
00:16:12
Speaker
Not even just talking about the subject matter that they're writing about, but just the way they construct sentences, the way that they use characters and stuff.
00:16:18
Speaker
They're so completely different, but both brilliant in their own way.
00:16:22
Speaker
Well, yeah.
00:16:23
Speaker
And then also the thing I was thinking about that's kind of scary is that even really great novelists sometimes write bad novels, you know, they may have, you know, and that is terrifying.
00:16:32
Speaker
Like even though you might know what you're doing and you might have done it well many times, then you might stumble into something you just can't fix, you know.
00:16:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:16:42
Speaker
So that's terrifying.
00:16:44
Speaker
Yeah, because you could be the most skilled person with a kind of ton of phrase and writing things down.
00:16:52
Speaker
But if the story doesn't make sense or if it doesn't hold up or if it kind of falls flat, then it doesn't matter how kind of well written it is.
00:17:01
Speaker
in a way it's always going to struggle.
00:17:03
Speaker
And conversely, it's the same thing.
00:17:04
Speaker
You might have the greatest concept with the most amazing storyline and these kind of incredible character arcs that are really fully formed.
00:17:11
Speaker
But if you can't find a way to articulate that in a way that people can connect with it, it still isn't going to work.
00:17:18
Speaker
So it is a balancing act.
00:17:19
Speaker
It's getting lots of things to line up and work all together.
00:17:23
Speaker
Um, I love to talk a bit about you as, as, as a kind of creative in a more general sense, because you do have a lot of, do a lot of kind of other disciplines and things like that.
00:17:33
Speaker
Um, I mentioned you, you, you're a musician.
00:17:37
Speaker
I was wondering if in terms of writing songs and music, is there a kind of familiarity with the creative process when you're creating a song versus writing, you know, a sentence or a paragraph?
00:17:53
Speaker
That's a good question.
00:17:55
Speaker
And I am a multidisciplinary artist.
00:18:01
Speaker
And the thing that's interesting, I also just I'm throwing this in there.
00:18:05
Speaker
It's relevant.
00:18:06
Speaker
I also paint and draw.
00:18:08
Speaker
And I would say that my experience doing painting and drawing is more
00:18:17
Speaker
has influenced my writing a lot more than the singing and the songwriting.
00:18:21
Speaker
I think like songs are more, I've done so many different kinds of writing and so many creative things.
00:18:28
Speaker
I have also done comedy and like songs are more like comedy or like onstage storytelling or even poetry in the sense that it's a more of a, I mean, even screenwriting, you know, cause it's like this puzzle.
00:18:42
Speaker
It has to be super tight and,
00:18:44
Speaker
every time you were like, just in terms of lyrics for a song, like every time you revise it, you're losing something, you know?
00:18:50
Speaker
And you're like, it's like you're turning a corner.
00:18:53
Speaker
And when you turn that corner, everything that you put a lot, you know, you narrowing it down and narrowing it down.
00:18:58
Speaker
And comedy is that way too.
00:18:59
Speaker
It's like comedy is so interesting because when you're writing comedy,
00:19:04
Speaker
your audience is your editor in a way.
00:19:06
Speaker
So you get up on stage and you tell a little story or you do a little bit.
00:19:10
Speaker
And if people laugh, you keep it.
00:19:11
Speaker
If people don't laugh, you throw it out.
00:19:13
Speaker
And you hear someone like Jerry Seinfeld talk about writing jokes.
00:19:17
Speaker
He'll go out on the road for a year and
00:19:19
Speaker
he'll maybe have, you know, as he narrows it down to the jokes that are working, and then he just starts performing those jokes over and over and over to make them better.
00:19:28
Speaker
And in a way, songwriting is like that.
00:19:29
Speaker
Like you're just trying to box everything else out so that what you have left is like a diamond.
00:19:35
Speaker
It's like a perfect song.
00:19:37
Speaker
I feel like a novel writing is a totally different kind of writing.
00:19:42
Speaker
At some level, yes, things are getting boxed out, but you have much more territory.
00:19:49
Speaker
much more territory.
00:19:50
Speaker
And so it's very, it's really different.
00:19:52
Speaker
And then as far as the musical stuff, you know, singing and playing music and the instrument and everything.
00:19:57
Speaker
I mean, the only thing that's for me that's similar is that it's a practice.
00:20:00
Speaker
And so like the more you practice the guitar, the better you get at it, the more you play it, the better you get at it.
00:20:04
Speaker
So that does actually kind of line up with what we're saying about writing.
00:20:08
Speaker
I just thinking of writing as a practice and being dedicated to the time spent
00:20:15
Speaker
and not so worried about what comes out of it, like what the product is.
00:20:19
Speaker
And so a lot of times with playing music, you're just playing it for the love of it.
00:20:22
Speaker
And every time you play, you get better.
00:20:25
Speaker
And I think a lot of writers would benefit from that attitude about writing that like, you know, you might spend a week writing something and you enjoy it and then you end up throwing it away and that that's okay.
00:20:34
Speaker
Cause you're getting better at it.
00:20:35
Speaker
So in that sense, it's, but it's very hard, at least with the writers that I know, especially if you're trying to make a living as a writer,
00:20:43
Speaker
It's very hard to throw shit.
00:20:44
Speaker
I mean, sorry, you can edit that out.
00:20:48
Speaker
It's very hard to throw pages away.
00:20:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:52
Speaker
Cause with writing, I guess the difference is, you know, a song or like a joke or whatever, there's those kinds of very short form things, you know, a song is, is you can fit all the lyrics on one page.
00:21:04
Speaker
Whereas you talk about writing a novel, we're talking about like 70,000, maybe a hundred thousand words to throw even like a third of that away represents a significant
00:21:14
Speaker
amount of time but i'm totally agree with you i think i know writers who maybe once or twice a week they literally just sit down they don't think about the manuscript they're working on right now they just write like a short story or a new idea and they just write they have no intention of keeping it it's literally just a kind of moment of kind of fun practice where they can just be free write whatever they want practice the craft hone the craft and
00:21:39
Speaker
And then they know that nothing's going to happen with it.
00:21:41
Speaker
So there's no pressure.
00:21:41
Speaker
And I think that's a really useful practice to get into for authors.
00:21:48
Speaker
I'm laughing because I, you know, I do that too, but then of course I end up sneaking it in somewhere.
00:21:55
Speaker
Or I try to, I mean, I'm like, oh, but that's pretty good.
00:21:58
Speaker
Like I'm sure I could use it somewhere.
00:22:00
Speaker
Wait a second.
00:22:01
Speaker
I could fit this in.
00:22:02
Speaker
I just changed the name.
00:22:04
Speaker
It just works perfectly.
00:22:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:07
Speaker
With your, so with your writing, and I can maybe guess based on that comment, are you someone that plans out the novels or are you someone that kind of has an idea and you run with it?
00:22:21
Speaker
I think it's, I think my process has really changed after the daughtership.
00:22:26
Speaker
So I would have to answer for what I'm doing right now, because I'm working on a book right now.
00:22:33
Speaker
I am definitely planning it out, but it's been planned out in a very different way.
00:22:37
Speaker
I've probably been working on this book now for four years and I
00:22:42
Speaker
I had themes when I started and I had, I would call them prongs almost or paths that I wanted to run through the book.
00:22:52
Speaker
And so I started by doing research and a lot of free writing.
00:22:55
Speaker
And as the novel has, and then I took an old novel that I had written that never got published.
00:23:01
Speaker
And I decided to use that plot and that framework as a starting point, just because
00:23:08
Speaker
I had done a lot of world building and I was pretty happy with a lot of the world building.
00:23:14
Speaker
I wasn't happy with the book and not really much happened in the book.
00:23:18
Speaker
So in a way, I wasn't really finished.
00:23:20
Speaker
I mean, like we were talking about, I was developing as a novelist.
00:23:24
Speaker
And so I had done all this world building and all this character development, but the plot was very kind of hack.
00:23:31
Speaker
I would call it kind of hack, just a little bit predictable and a little bit...
00:23:35
Speaker
Didn't know what it was.
00:23:37
Speaker
It was almost a genre novel, but it didn't quite fit the formula for one.
00:23:42
Speaker
And so I just, I took some of the world building and I, and I melded it with these ideas, these themes I was working on, which have to do with human feelings, like the emotions and
00:23:54
Speaker
So I'm playing.
00:23:55
Speaker
It's playful.
00:23:56
Speaker
But it's definitely more intentional than The Daughtership.
00:23:59
Speaker
But it's almost as if I learned how to do this technique when I was writing The Daughtership.
00:24:04
Speaker
And now I'm using the same technique starting from the beginning rather than figuring it out as I go along.
00:24:09
Speaker
And it's working pretty well, except it's a little bit... I don't know if you have this experience, but every now and then I feel like my novel gets so big that I can't reign it back in.
00:24:21
Speaker
And that's sort of where I'm at now, where I just am like, I feel like I'm...
00:24:25
Speaker
just buried underneath all these drafts and all these ideas and all these words.
00:24:29
Speaker
And I don't know how to like, it's like gotten away from me, you know, and that happens with novels because they're just so big.
00:24:37
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:24:37
Speaker
There's so many files and there's so many folders and I have boxes of drafts and I'm like, what is going on here?
00:24:43
Speaker
I know in the end it's going to come out all right.
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah.

Desert Island Book: Why Jane Austen?

00:24:47
Speaker
I think that's very relatable for lots of authors.
00:24:49
Speaker
I think that there's often a point and it comes sort of in the, towards as you near the end of the kind of whole process where you just have to push through and eventually you get through and you look back and you're like, oh no, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.
00:25:02
Speaker
I, you know, I got through, the novel's great.
00:25:05
Speaker
I'm really happy with it.
00:25:06
Speaker
Oh, that's nice.
00:25:07
Speaker
I hope so.
00:25:08
Speaker
That's very positive.
00:25:09
Speaker
You hope so?
00:25:11
Speaker
I hope so too.
00:25:12
Speaker
And that brings us to the desert island question.
00:25:16
Speaker
So Boo, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book do you hope that it would be?
00:25:23
Speaker
I'm going to go with, and I'm sure other people have answered this, I'm going to go with Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
00:25:29
Speaker
I don't know if Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, yes.
00:25:32
Speaker
I don't think anyone's actually taken Pride and Prejudice.
00:25:35
Speaker
Really?
00:25:37
Speaker
They have other favorites?
00:25:38
Speaker
I'm shocked.
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:40
Speaker
Oh, I mean, Jane Austen's got such a great back catalog.
00:25:43
Speaker
That's true.
00:25:44
Speaker
I mean, it is a hard question because obviously I love a lot of books and it's difficult to think about what kind of mind space I'd be in if I was stranded on a desert island.
00:25:57
Speaker
My other thought would have been something spiritual, something to kind of keep me from losing my mind.
00:26:03
Speaker
But, you know, just in the spirit of boosting fiction, just a novel that has a lot of different characters that are rich and deep that you can spend time with.
00:26:15
Speaker
Because I think I'd probably want company.
00:26:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:18
Speaker
More than anything.
00:26:19
Speaker
So I just think anything, you know, and also, I mean, you can, I also enjoy Jane Austen's sense of humor.
00:26:26
Speaker
And I also enjoy the sort of variety of all the characters.
00:26:30
Speaker
And there's also a certain female sensibility that is very relatable for me.
00:26:34
Speaker
So I don't have to strive to meet her.
00:26:37
Speaker
I'm right there with her all the way.
00:26:40
Speaker
No, I love Jane Austen.
00:26:41
Speaker
Obviously, Pride and Prejudice is the most famous, I would say, of her works.
00:26:48
Speaker
But a great choice.
00:26:48
Speaker
I also like it because I think it took her like 30 years to write that book.
00:26:51
Speaker
I think she was working on that book for decades.
00:26:53
Speaker
And that makes, that's very comforting.
00:26:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:56
Speaker
You feel the struggle.
00:26:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:00
Speaker
Amazing.
00:27:01
Speaker
Well, I've got some questions coming up about submitting and agents and publishing deals, but we are now at the end of the regular episode and into the extended cut exclusive to Patreon subscribers.
00:27:11
Speaker
So if you haven't yet joined the Patreon, please do think about it.
00:27:13
Speaker
It goes a long way towards covering the cost of running this podcast.
00:27:18
Speaker
That's great.
00:27:19
Speaker
I think that's an amazing thing to have got from all this.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah, painful, but big piece of humble pie.
00:27:28
Speaker
My favorite dessert.
00:27:30
Speaker
Amazing.

Conclusion and Social Media Shoutout

00:27:31
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Boo.
00:27:32
Speaker
It's been so fun chatting with you and great learning about your kind of writing journey and experience and everything that you've been up to.
00:27:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's been awesome having you on the show.
00:27:40
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:27:40
Speaker
Thanks, Jamie.
00:27:41
Speaker
Great to be here.
00:27:42
Speaker
Thanks for having me.
00:27:43
Speaker
And for anyone listening, if you want to keep up with what Boo is doing, you can follow her on Instagram at Boo Trundle.
00:27:49
Speaker
To support the podcast, like, follow, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and follow along on socials.
00:27:55
Speaker
Join the Patreon for extended episodes ad-free in a week early and check out my other podcast, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes.
00:28:00
Speaker
Thanks again, Boo, and thanks to everyone listening.
00:28:02
Speaker
We'll catch you on the next episode.