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Episode 277: Allison K. Williams Talks Planned Practice, Living a Writer's Life, and Her New Craft Book 'Seven Drafts'
238 Plays3 years ago
Allison K. Williams returns to talk about her new book Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book (Woodhall Press, 2021). She's @GuerillaMemoir on social media.
Thanks to West Virginia Wesleyan College's MFA in Creative Writing for the support.
Social Media: @CNFPod
Patreon: patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
The Importance of Storytelling
00:00:00
Speaker
It's part of my job as an editor to give people my full attention and it's part of who I am as a person to treat everybody like their story matters.
00:00:09
Speaker
From the depths of the backlog, that's Allison K. Williams. She emerges. She rises. She's from episode 119, and she's back for episode 277. That's like three years. Let's talk about a new book. A gift of a book titled Seven Drafts, self-edit like a pro from blank page to book.
00:00:32
Speaker
It is published by Woodhall Press. Oh hey, this is a creative nonfiction podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories.
Meet the Host and Guest
00:00:42
Speaker
I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going? Producer Hank, cue the riff.
00:00:54
Speaker
Oooh, Allison is the standard bearer in the writing community. Nobody is a greater contributor and purveyor of the mighty word than Allison. It's why she was named the literary citizen of the year at this past Hippo Camp. Shout out. And it's not because she's coached so many writers and celebrates so many writers, it's also because she's a damn good writer herself.
00:01:17
Speaker
Sport for the Creative Non-Friction podcast brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan College's low residency MFA in creative writing. Now in its 10th year, there in 10 years, I'm in year 9. This affordable program boasts a low student-to-faculty ratio and a strong sense of community.
Academic and Community Engagement
00:01:33
Speaker
Recent CNF faculty include Random Billings Noble. I have a book on my shelf right now that she edited. We'll get to that at some point in the future. Not today though.
00:01:42
Speaker
Jeremy Jones and CNF pod alum Sarah Einstein. There's also fiction and poetry tracks. Recent faculty include Ashley Bryant, Phillips and Jacinda Townsend as well as Diane Gilliam and Savannah Sipple. No matter your discipline, man, if you're looking to up your craft or learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia. Visit mfa.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment.
00:02:08
Speaker
Hmm. Hey and consider supporting the show via patreon patreon.com slash CNF pot shop around See what you like and support the community. I just paid out the writers of issue two of the audio magazine You make that possible. The show is free, but sure as hell ain't cheap submission guidelines for issue three on the theme heroes or at Brendan Amera calm hey
00:02:34
Speaker
Go shop around at the Patreon window, the Patreon shop. Membership gets you transcripts, sometimes coaching, access to the audio magazine, you name it. I'm a little behind on cramp trips. I'm really sorry. I'm working on it. Working on it. In any case, give it a shot. Shop around. Those dollars go right into the pockets in the coffers of the show to make the show better, make it possible.
00:03:01
Speaker
and also payout writers. Not a lot of literary magazines can say that. You might also need someone to edit and coach your workup, and I can tell you I'm 100% better at what I do after having read Allison's book. I like editing and coaching to when you need a personal trainer. So I'm gonna hold you accountable, something to keep you on pace. Watch your form. Don't want you slipping out of disk. Keep you on track and to see things you can't see. If you're ready to level up, I'd be honored to help you get where you want to go.
00:03:31
Speaker
email me and we'll start a dialogue. And you can keep the conversation going on social media at cnfpod or at Brendan O'Mara. Better yet, head over to BrendanO'Mara.com for show notes to this and a million other interviews, at last count, and to sign up for my monthly reading list newsletter. We had our first writing group this past cycle and you only get the code if you're on the list. Rage against the algorithm, man. Once a month. No spam. Can't beat it.
00:04:00
Speaker
Okay, so Alison can be found at Guerrilla Memoir, and that's Guerrilla, like Guerrilla Warfare, on Twitter and Instagram. She's an editor, she's a writer, she's a contributor to the community and a leader, and a wonderful person to boot. Stay tuned later for our parting shot, but for now, get out of notebook, and it's time to hit it. Here's me and Alison K. Williams.
A Journey to Dubai
00:04:36
Speaker
I and they're very gravelly. Yeah. How long have you been in Dubai?
00:04:44
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I've been here since 2015. I moved here, actually it might even be 2014. I moved here because it was one of the last places I was performing as I was getting out of performing and into writing. And I met the guy who is now my husband who's British and is here as a consultant.
00:05:09
Speaker
And I was like, oh, you know, this is great. I like this guy. My boss in Dubai at the time, like the person who was coordinating the entertainment was like, hey, you know, I know you do event management, too. Why don't you come to Dubai for like a six month contract? See if you like it. We'll get you sorted out with a work visa and a place to live and all that. And, you know, it'll be lovely. And I'm like, oh, this will be great. You know, I can pursue the relationship with this guy. I can
00:05:33
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you know, do stage management, which I really enjoy. And my boss was like, and all you have to do is set up the stage in the morning, sit in the coffee shop next to the stage at the mall and write all day and just be there if there's an emergency. It was like, this is perfect.
00:05:48
Speaker
Then I didn't have a contract, which is not unusual in the Middle East. And then seven days before I was supposed to come over and I had already purchased my one-way ticket, my boss calls and he's like, the contract with the mall fell through. You don't have a job or a work visa or a place to live.
00:06:04
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And I'm like, okay. And I called up Alf and Alf said, well, I guess you better move in here. And it's all just been kind of nice from there. But yeah, I had been putting out to the universe for quite some time that I wanted more writing time and to, you know, kind of transition out of circus. And I'm like, well, the universe has just granted me a whole lot of time.
00:06:28
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That's amazing. Has Dubai been what you thought it would be in terms of being a great hub for you to work out of since you travel so much for retreats and conferences? Has it been conducive to that for you?
00:06:46
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Well, it's been great because it's halfway between Europe and a big chunk of Asia. And I had never seen very much of Asia before I moved here. And now I've been to Nepal. I mean, I had been to India before I came here, but now I've been eight or nine more times. We've been to Thailand and Cambodia and Myanmar.
00:07:05
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That has been really lovely to get to see so much of that side of the world. But it's also really far away from the U.S. and a lot of my work before the pandemic was in the U.S. So you get used to flying and you find ways to make it pleasant.
00:07:24
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It's a really good place to be a writer because there are a lot of women who do not have work visas here. And so there's a fairly decent writing scene of women whose husbands are consultants or their husbands are in the oil industry or their husbands are in the hospital industry, which is very big here.
00:07:47
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And there's a ton of coffee shops because it's a coffee shop culture and nobody cares if you come in and have a cup of coffee and sit for five hours and type. So it's a good place to be a writer.
Crafting and Editing Stories
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Speaker
In what ways was being a stage manager a great way to pivot and transition into editing and writing?
00:08:09
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Well, I mean, I thought I was going to get this job where I got to sit quietly all day and just deal with emergencies as they arose. And I love stage managing, like in a way that as a performer, you always kind of look at the stage manager and think, oh, how sad. They have to be responsible for everything and they don't get any of the applause.
00:08:32
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And then when I started actually stage managing, I love that element of taking care of people. I love that element of trying to make the conditions, the absolute best, the dressing room, the stage, the sound, the lights, how can everything be in place so that the performer can show up and do their very best job without being distracted or
00:08:56
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have their show thrown off by anything. And I still do a little bit of event management here and there, mostly in shopping malls, because here in the Middle East, you can't really have an outdoor festival. They're not the kind of events where I can just sit in a coffee shop with a view of the stage, but I love that too, because I get to see all my street performer friends from around the world, people come in from Australia, people come in from the US. I mean, this is pre-pandemic and hopefully post-pandemic.
00:09:23
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I was working in a mall in Kuwait where I was walking 17 or 18 miles a day because the mall was a mile and a half long and I had things I needed to cover at both ends. And so it's this great exercise. I love, I like malls. I mean, I'm not a shopper, but I like the people watching elements and I like crafted environments.
00:09:48
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And I think, to bring it back to writing, that's what I love about working as an editor, is I get to look at your book and go, okay, what element here is stopping you from doing your very best job? Is your problem that you don't know how to handle the past perfect tense? And that's going to distract the reader from your beautiful story.
00:10:10
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is your problem that your story has a giant plot hole around the middle of the second act, and that's going to distract the reader from enjoying your story. And so it's that same thing where I'm working with the writer, just like I'd work with a performer, to create the smoothest and most immersive environment for the audience or the reader to enjoy the show.
00:10:34
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What I always admire about our interactions and interactions I've seen you at conferences and whether that can be in person or even in your writing and how you engage with people is that you show up for everything. You're very present and you're engaged and
00:10:53
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super energetic in a way where it's kind of like the old adage of I think was Joe DiMaggio way back in the way back in the fifties or something he said something like he plays as hard as you can every single game because there might be somebody seeing him for the first time or maybe it'll be somebody
00:11:12
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who is only going to see him once that year and he owes it to that person to give him his very best. And I get that vibe from you that every time you're speaking, you could be speaking to two people or a room of hundreds of people and you're showing up in the same way. You know, is that something you're very conscious of? Because it's something I definitely noticed.
00:11:32
Speaker
Thank you. I have a giant smile on my face right now because that is just one of the nicest compliments you could ever, ever give me. You know, there's a beautiful piece in a Robertson Davies book. I believe it's called Fifth Business. It's part of a trilogy and I'm pretty sure Fifth Business is the book and the trilogy that this is in.
00:11:52
Speaker
But there's a guy, no, World of Wonders. It's World of Wonders. So Robertson Davies has this book, World of Wonders, that's part of a beautiful trilogy. He's a Canadian author who's passed on now. And in it, there's a carnival, and the woman who reads the fortunes at the carnival
00:12:09
Speaker
She tells the young boy who's learning about being a part of the carnival, people just want you to listen to them. People want to feel seen. Everybody's got problems. Everybody's got things they're struggling with. They just want someone to give them their full attention.
00:12:25
Speaker
and have them be seen.
The Emotional Power of Memoir
00:12:27
Speaker
And that's been my experience. I mean, as a performer, the audience wants to see you see them. That's the value of live performance. When I'm working with a writer, I want them to know that, oh, hey, I had this thought in the car this afternoon that reminded me of your book, or, oh, hey, here's this newspaper article I read that I think is going to inform the thing you're working on. Because I love getting so
00:12:54
Speaker
involved in what they're doing right at that moment because you never know what's going to be amazing and incredible and all they needed was a little encouragement at the right time. And I find that at conferences too because I mean there's conferences that feel very competitive like oh we're all going to try to pitch to agents or
00:13:13
Speaker
you know, oh, the people in charge are, you know, up there and the attendees are down here. And there's conferences that are more level where I think like Hippo Camp, there's more fluidity between the speakers and the attendees. And it's so incredible.
00:13:30
Speaker
to be entrusted with people's beautiful, imaginative dreams. And particularly with memoir, people have something they want to get off their chest. They have something they want to share. The gift of memoir is you're not the only one who feels this way. And I think fiction works kind of the same way in that you have a story that you have to tell. And it's part of my job as an editor to give people my full attention.
00:13:59
Speaker
And it's part of who I am as a person to treat everybody like their story matters. And with memoir, a lot of people, and I'm sure you've come across this through the countless people you've coached up and edited, is that they have a weird or a wild or traumatic thing that has happened to them, which is their truth. And then they start thinking, well, this weird, wild, traumatic thing happened. I need to write a memoir about it.
00:14:28
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there still has to be a story. So what becomes the challenge for you when working with this person who really feels like they just had this kind of quirky thing happen, but then shaping a story around that?
00:14:40
Speaker
Yeah, because that's the thing. Not every wacky experience is a major turning point in your life. And part of writing memoir is going, okay, the reason that doing this wacky thing, the reason that I jumped a car over the Grand Canyon was because I spent my life trying to bridge the gap and the love between my parents and me. And this was, you know,
00:15:08
Speaker
And and there's like there's ways to look at how did this One event come out of the rest of my life, but I think also We place so much emphasis on publication and not everybody's book is going to to get published I mean to quote the wonderful jane freedman Everyone has a story to tell not everyone's story is worthy of a commercial publishing deal and
00:15:34
Speaker
It's so valuable for people to write their memoir even if they are the only person who ever reads it or even if they share it with just a couple of friends or even if they leave it for their family as a legacy book.
00:15:47
Speaker
But it is very challenging to, you know, I wrote about this for brevity a while ago. I wrote a blog called Nobody Cares About Your Dead, which is a really callous way to put it. But nobody cares about your dead kid unless there is something of value for their journey. What did they learn reading your book?
00:16:09
Speaker
Nobody cares about your dead parent except if there is something in that book for them to cling on to. And it's very much like performing to come all the way back to that again, which is that
00:16:23
Speaker
You can't do it just for yourself. You have to be aware of the audience. And I mean, that's a later draft thing. By all means, write your first draft in your personal secluded privacy. Don't share it with anybody until you feel like you're ready. Or heck, if you have a friend who you're sharing chapters with and that encourages you guys as you keep writing, do that. But keep that precious, secret place.
00:16:48
Speaker
to get the story down and then step back and go, okay, what do I want to do for the reader? What's the reader going to get out of this?
00:16:58
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's in my experience with writing this baseball sort of child of divorce memoir, and I had, a while ago, it's in the ether just shopping around at the moment, but when I handed it to my father just for him to read it, and he was all kinds of pissed off or whatever, but I told him, like, hey, listen, Dad, some of this stuff might sound harsh, but
00:17:25
Speaker
The reader isn't going to judge you or judge me or give a shit about you or me. If I've done my job well, which I think I have, that reader is going to overlay their own experience on top of this story, and it's going to be a vessel for them to experience it and maybe not feel as alone and to relate to it. And at the end, they're going to feel what they're going to feel, but they're not going to really remember who you are.
00:17:47
Speaker
or I am, it's all about their story. But like you said, that all comes from the second, third, and fourth, and fifth, and God knows how many dozens of drafts. But that's having that empathic mindset of, okay, I got this out, but now I have to shape it for an end user. But yeah, it all comes down to the reader's relatability with the story.
00:18:10
Speaker
And that's a beautiful way to put it, Brendan. And I want to give a specific example because I know we talk about the so what factor a lot, and we don't give a lot of really specific examples. There's a book coming out next year by veterinarian Karen Fine. It's called The Other Family Doctor, a veterinarian's look at love, loss, and mindfulness.
00:18:32
Speaker
And basically, it's a dead dog book. It's a book about how Karen's most beloved forever dog slowly died over a period of years while Karen learned these interesting veterinary treatments. She now does animal acupuncture. She does special food for animals. And my dog died and I was sad about its story. And yet, she's woven this in
00:18:58
Speaker
with how did she make the decisions to get this medical care, but not that medical care? How did she counsel other people who came into her veterinary practice with animals that were sick? And she talked to them about, do you fix it? Do you not fix it? What's your financial consideration? How long have you had this pet? And when I gave that manuscript to a beta reader for feedback, because I was working with Karen on developing the manuscript and developing the proposal, and one of the beta readers said,
00:19:28
Speaker
I don't have to feel bad that I put my cat down. And by reading Karen's decision-making process, the people who read the book get to go, okay, I can decide that I'm sorry, I'm not gonna be able to get fluffy another kidney, and it doesn't make me a horrible person.
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's so well put in. Yeah, the person who might be harboring guilt or dealing with an ailing pet, they're going to pluck out what they want to pluck out. This brings up an interesting point when I was reading Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic. I guess someone had
00:20:10
Speaker
ready pray love and came up to her and said something like oh you know when you wrote about this it helped me through this part and she's like and Liz was like I never wrote about that and he prayed love so it's like the reader just brings their experience to this and if the book and the writer have done their job well it can be like this arm around the shoulder saying like this it's it's okay you're gonna get through this and that's that's the mark of a good craftsman or crafts person
00:20:36
Speaker
I absolutely agree. I absolutely agree.
Navigating the Publishing World
00:20:40
Speaker
And that's the joy and the challenge of being a writer. How can you pour your true self out on the page and then focus it on someone else?
00:20:50
Speaker
And part of your new book, which I thought was really smart and valuable, is how you... Thank you. Yeah. The whole thing beginning to end, I think it has so much to offer early career people and also people who are very skilled at this and can certainly improve, but there's just so much. It's kind of like it graduates to a really good master level.
00:21:17
Speaker
craft and editing and writing and i thought what was really smart about it to was talking about the the ins and outs of the publishing industry and not not many writers know how publishing works. So you know knowing that you know your book lays out some of that foundation so people can.
00:21:34
Speaker
know how to navigate that terrain and then maybe they can better position their talent in the right place. So how important was it for you to include those sort of behind the curtains of how the machine works so you're not wasting your time as a writer maybe?
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, no. And I really appreciate you saying that about the graduated level because my hope and what I've been hearing from readers is that not only is it useful for people writing a book, it's also useful for other editors and teachers. I've had a number of people writing teachers I really respect and admire who have been doing this for a long time. And they've gotten back to me and said, oh my goodness, that's what I keep trying to teach. And now these are the words that I can put it into.
00:22:20
Speaker
You know that the stuff that they didn't know they knew is being confirmed for them But it was really important to me to include a whole chapter on publishing because I work with so many authors who Like I I do work with some authors who get traditional publishing deals but very often i'm also working with people who are either going with a hybrid press
00:22:43
Speaker
or they're going for independent publishing. And most people when they first start have no clue at all about
00:22:54
Speaker
the general etiquette and conventions of querying and publishing, and no clue at all about how much labor and effort and work it is to put out a book and then to sell that book. I have a footnote near the end of the book that says, did you know that the average self-published book sells fewer than 100 copies? And I repeat that statement, I think, like six times in different places in the book.
00:23:21
Speaker
because people really do not wrap their head around the idea that you don't know 5,000 people, you're not going to sell 5,000 books, and you don't necessarily want to be selling them to just your friends anyway, which brings it back to how do we get out to the reader.
00:23:36
Speaker
But I'm seeing more and more publishing scams in the world. And I would recommend that all writers read the Writer Beware blog. Victoria Crispin is just super smart, super on point. And if you read back through her archives where she breaks down different, okay, we got this solicitation email and here's why it's a scam and here's what you should be looking out for.
00:23:59
Speaker
We heard about this new, oh, we're going to set up a website and you're going to upload your manuscript and then agents are going to come to you. And she'll tell you again, here's why that's a terrible idea. Here's why it's never going to work. And once you've read enough of the archives, you'll be able to recognize common publishing scams, even if it's not the scam you just read about. You know, people are getting, there's these
00:24:23
Speaker
agent factories, and I use agent in quotation marks here, in the Philippines who have these scams where they pretend to be coming from a real publisher. They have people who are now trying to spoof themselves as if they are actual agents who are out there. There's a scam right now where people are getting in touch with writers and saying, oh, we've heard about your unpublished manuscript and we want to make a movie deal with you. And it's just going to cost you $5,000 for us to write the treatment.
00:24:53
Speaker
And so many people get sucked into that because we as writers, we need validation. We need to be heard. And it is so gratifying that you feel like someone is saying your work is valuable, your work is good. And unfortunately, those are not the places we're going to get validation.
00:25:16
Speaker
It made me think of how chefs on, say, on cooking competition shows or whatever, and they can talk about the ins and outs of all kinds of food and the chemistry, and this is how this is supposed to be, and this is how this is supposed to be.
00:25:34
Speaker
they have such a body of knowledge even about things that might not be in their purview and so in reading your book it really felt like this is a way to just kind of build that kind of reservoir of this is the industry you're playing in whether you're writing memoir or YA or whatever this is the big sandbox and knowing it inside and out is going to make you a better
00:25:59
Speaker
contributor, a better artist, and a better citizen of that whole community. And so knowing those ins and outs, I thought it was just such a valuable sort of passport and entree into the world. And so I thought that was just another valuable gift of what you've written here.
00:26:13
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, when I first started looking towards publication, and this would have been in like 2003, 2004 maybe, and I started reading agent blogs, and I started doing publishing research, and I got a subscription to Publishers Weekly, and I was reading I think 15 or 20 different agent blogs, and I would read their new posts every day, and then also every day I would read back a little further in the archives until
00:26:43
Speaker
with these 15 or 20 agent blogs, I had read everything they had ever posted. And many of them had been writing these blogs since blogs were a thing. So I've gotten to see since then, how has publishing evolved over the past 10 or 15 years? What's changed? What's still the same? And I'm really hoping that the publishing section of Seven Drafts is a distillation
00:27:09
Speaker
for all of the people who don't have time to read 15 or 20 blogs every single day. What you're saying really underscores, and what the book underscores too, is that there is significant investment in terms of time, sometimes money, in bringing a book to fruition.
00:27:28
Speaker
And I think you don't pull any punches of how arduous that journey can be. And I wonder if maybe you can speak to the significant investment that it takes, because a lot of us, a lot of people are, they write every day, whether that's in journals or just emails or whatever. So they think writing is maybe easier than it actually is.
00:27:52
Speaker
You pull no punches when it comes to how much rigor it takes and the investment of time and a lot of times money too to bring this thing into fruition.
00:28:04
Speaker
I think it really does. And I mean, don't get me wrong. There are plenty of people who are quite fast writers. There's a wonderful writer named Sophie Hannah. She's a British writer who's actually carrying on the Agatha Christie books. She's the person who's licensed to write her Kiel Perot now. And she does these 60 or 70 page outlines for her books, scene by scene, moment by moment, where everything is very clearly spelled out.
00:28:33
Speaker
And then she really only needs a draft or two to get it all down on the page, polish it up, make it great. But the outline takes her five or six months to put together. And there's genre writers who are cranking out e-books on Amazon in categories that are big seller. And some of them are writing a book a month because they've got a formula that works for them. They sit down, they crank it out.
00:28:57
Speaker
But that is the discipline like that of a professional chef. They've learned their tools. They know exactly what flavors their readers want. They put it together in a different combination, put a different garnish on it, and boom, it's another book. When we're looking at serious, creative nonfiction,
00:29:15
Speaker
It takes a really long time because we're trying to figure out what we really think about what happened and then put it on the page and then figure out what it's going to do for the reader and then polish it up to be as absolutely perfect as it can be. It took me about 300 hours over the past two years to assemble seven drafts.
00:29:41
Speaker
But I would say like 40% of that material started as brevity blogs. So there's probably another 100 hours or so in there. And now comes the publicity time when I try to get the word out there and find out if anybody is interested in what I have to say.
00:29:59
Speaker
The difference between the writers who succeed and the writers who don't is that the writers who succeed keep pursuing and revising and writing after they feel entitled to be done. I mean, I know you've done it, Brendan. You've done that draft where you're like, ah, heck, I thought that last draft was my final draft and now I realize that it's not.
00:30:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I liken it when I started working with an editor for the baseball book, Tools of Ignorance. I thought when I first started with him out, I was in the red zone. I'm like, all right, I just need a few little buffs and polishing, and this is going to score, and we're good. What I realized was I was pinned up against my own goal line.
00:30:43
Speaker
And I was just like, oh boy, I've got to go 99 yards instead of the 19 yards I thought I had to go. And so it was just a very eye opening. And it definitely revealed a lot of faults in my own craft that I've, of course, is always developing. But it's one of those things where unless you get someone who can see what you cannot see, you start to realize, oh my god, this is built on really faulty foundation. I have a lot of work to do.
00:31:13
Speaker
And if you are really going to be a serious writer, there's that moment where you go, oh, now I see the giant pile of stuff I need to fix, but you're too invested in your work to not fix it.
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah. And it was great. I saw in a footnote in the book too about retyping the entire manuscript. And I actually did that for this draft, my later draft, because we were thinking about this might have to be novelized. And so I started typing it out and just as if I was going to novelize certain things. And it turns out I just kept
00:31:55
Speaker
I just kept it almost the same. I just couldn't novelize it, but I did retype the entire 75,000 word thing, just not word for word, but I was fixing as I was going. It's a hard exercise to do, but I almost can't recommend retyping an entire manuscript over again enough for anyone out there. It's an incredible exercise.
00:32:21
Speaker
It is so daunting and yet so helpful. And I say in the book, every single author I have ever told that to looks at me like I am bug nuts crazy. And most of them come back and go, you were right. It really changed my outlook on the book.
00:32:38
Speaker
You know, because it gets you in the flow to retype everything. And if you get to a section, your body tells you if it belongs because you start to feel reluctance to type that section. And if it's too boring for you to type, nobody wants to read it.
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah, 100 percent. But also to that point, when you've reread the thing a hundred times and rewritten it a hundred times, you can sometimes lose the, I don't know, the perspective or the distance. You might also, you know things from things that you've cut out that the reader doesn't know. How have you navigated that as a writer and an editor when you feel like you've
00:33:24
Speaker
you've provided the the bottom of the iceberg but what we really need we actually still need to see some stuff above the water. Yeah and I think that's where it's useful to decide are you a person who wants to be a writer or are you a person who needs to tell this one story because if you need to tell this one story then you know give it six weeks
00:33:52
Speaker
Come back to it with fresh eyes. Hire an editor to help you if that's cost prohibitive because professional editing can be very expensive. Go to a workshop or just get your synopsis and your first 25 pages edited because very often that will shake something loose.
00:34:09
Speaker
But if you're a person who wants to be a constant ongoing writer, there's plenty of other stuff for you to do while you take a break from your manuscript and come back to it. Maybe you start the next manuscript. Maybe you work on essays that will support the publication of your memoir eventually. Maybe you work on connecting with readers through social media or through podcasting or whatever way you like to connect with readers.
00:34:35
Speaker
There are plenty of jobs to do that are not hatcheting away at the book you're sick of.
00:34:42
Speaker
I love this moment in the book too where you write about planning to practice and you cite... I love that so much that you cite the musicians practicing their scales or whatever. But I also think that as writers, if you're in creative nonfiction, it might do you some good to on the side just write some short stories or poetry or screenplay.
00:35:05
Speaker
And it just break you out of a certain cycle, but just use it as a way to practice scales. And I love that. So how did you arrive at that? Because it's such a valuable exercise in the discipline.
The Writing Process and Practice
00:35:20
Speaker
Thank you. I do like this idea of planning to practice because I've worked in a bunch of different arts. I've worked in circus. I've worked in theater. I've watched other kinds of artists, visual artists. I've watched musicians. I have a lot of friends who are visual artists or musicians. And every single one of them makes a ton of stuff that they throw away.
00:35:43
Speaker
My artist friends have hundreds of pages of sketches that go in the garbage at the end of a sketching session. My musician friends noodle with each other and jam and improv and don't record it and never get that song back again.
00:36:00
Speaker
writers are very different. We're almost like oil painters in that we have this one thing and we're just going to keep tweaking and fussing and moving around until it's done and it's good and it's finished. And it's like, when do we practice? You know, everybody's had the experience of getting to the end of the draft and then realizing, oh, I'm a much better writer than I was 200 pages ago. Better go back to the beginning and, you know, bring it up to my new skill level. And
00:36:29
Speaker
We've got this idea with writers that it's somehow this like this badge of shame if you write a book that's not ending up in the world as a published thing, whatever, you know, published means to you. But you're teaching yourself how to write a book. And it's OK if your first book or even your first three books are practice. It's OK to write stuff that doesn't make it into the world. And like you said, you know, pick up another style of writing or another genre and just do it for fun.
00:37:00
Speaker
Yeah and I always go back as to sport metaphors and analogies and just having played baseball for so long is if you wanted to be a better hitter you know what did you do you spent hours in your basement hitting off a tee and you're just hitting sometimes you make great contact and you're working on little different things you know positioning the ball in such a way so you're like alright if the pitch is a little deep you know hitting to different parts of the field and you're just working working working nobody sees this and
00:37:28
Speaker
But when it's game time, or when it's a showcase time, it's like, okay, now all that work is put into, I don't know, on the field as it were. And it's like, writers are often very, they're too, think every word is precious. And I think we just need to be less precious with what we're doing. And then it's like, okay, we can be more unbridled and be able to throw some things in the bin and then just keep moving.
00:37:55
Speaker
I agree. And I think one of the things that makes it hard for writers is 90% of our work takes place in solitude. You know, even when we're workshopping other people's stuff, we don't stand over their shoulder and watch them write stuff. Whereas you as a baseball player, you got to watch other people practice. You got to watch people you admired and respected with ball after ball after ball until they figured out, this is what's wrong with my swing today and now I'll fix it.
00:38:24
Speaker
You know, as a circus performer, I trained in gyms where I was, you know, training across the room with people from Cirque du Soleil. And I watched them try to get a new trick and fall and fall and fall and fall until they got the trick. And I watched them make these, you know, minute adjustments. Oh, you know, tuck a little harder. Okay, whip that arm a little bit faster.
00:38:47
Speaker
And with writers, we don't get that kind of peer modeling or mentor modeling of how the process actually works. And I think that's one of the things I'm trying to do with Seven Drafts, is I'm trying to cut open the process and go, there's the intestines, there's the liver, there's the lungs, and here's how you're going to stitch it all back together again, because we just don't see that.
00:39:12
Speaker
Yeah, and to that point of seeing these performers routinely fail in practice and looking to fine tune various things, you know, obviously all we do is we as the consumer, we see the final product and we're like, wow, they're perfect. And then I'll just- They better be. Cirque du Soleil tapes the show every night and if you mess up, they call a rehearsal.
00:39:36
Speaker
My god, yeah Unbelievable. Yeah, and I think so much of and social media foments this in that we just see we what we see the final performance we see the successes and we don't see the the batting average or the
00:39:55
Speaker
So I always come back to this, like in baseball, if you're a 70% failure, you're basically a Hall of Famer, you're a 300 hitter. And so we see that up on the scoreboard. And we know what failure and success is and what is good and bad based on those statistics. So if we see somebody hitting 200, we're like, okay, they're not so good. They're failing 80% of the time versus 70.
00:40:16
Speaker
As writers, we don't know what a good batting average is. And so often when we get a rejection or 5 or 10 or 15, we're like, oh my god, what am I doing right? Or what am I doing wrong? I feel like I'm doing everything wrong. And having an idea of what a good batting average is is just so valuable, but we don't see it very often. So I don't know. That's how I try to articulate it. And if you're probably batting 5% or 10% in writing,
00:40:42
Speaker
You're doing pretty damn good, but nobody knows what that level is.
00:40:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, for people who want numbers, what I usually say is when you first start, you're learning the literary magazine venues, you're learning the mass media venues, you're learning how to pitch a story or an essay, or you're learning how to write a story or an essay in a way that suits a particular venue. When you're first learning those things, getting one acceptance in 100 rejections is a freaking red letter day.
00:41:14
Speaker
As you get more skilled, as you read hundreds of literary magazines and know what they're looking for, as you attend workshops about how to pitch, as you practice these skills and go, oh, that's what was wrong with the last essay I wrote. I need to fix it like this.
00:41:31
Speaker
then you're probably going to get closer to one in 10 or one in 20. But even then, a full-time professional writer who is excellent at what they do is still getting rejected 90% of the time.
00:41:46
Speaker
And that's just how it is. And I would say that's true for circus performers learning a new trick. You know, if you want that, you know, double twist, double salto, you're going to probably fail at it 90 times before you get it once.
00:42:02
Speaker
And there is no publishing without rejection. It just doesn't work that way. Either you're going to get rejected by agents, you're going to get rejected by publishers, or you're going to get rejected when readers don't click by. And if you're not able to be the kind of person who hears no and is able to go, OK, not for you today. That's all right. I'll catch you another time. Let me move on to the next person.
00:42:28
Speaker
then selling your art may not be your best hobby or your best job. Yeah, and you write later in the book, too, in this piggyback from what you're saying, you say, in fact, the better you get, the more awful failure feels because you can't let it go with, oh, I wasn't ready. You start to feel like you've paid your dues, you've put in your time, and when is success going to show up? Please, because it's getting late.
00:42:52
Speaker
Yep. Yep. You know, Seven Drafts is my fifth book. It's my second book that's published. I've published a bunch of play scripts, but they're such a completely different genre. They don't feel like they count, you know, in this venue. I have a memoir that got agented and shopped and didn't sell. And later I looked at it and it was like, oh, it's not good. That's why it didn't sell.
00:43:15
Speaker
And I've got a young adult novel that I've queried three times and rewritten three times. And I've got another young adult novel that's about halfway through and I'm stuck in the middle and I can't figure out the heist. So there is a lot of
00:43:30
Speaker
practice. And I think if we stop looking at, you know, Ooh, I've been rejected. I failed and start looking at it as, okay, didn't hit the ball this time, but I'm going to try again. I'm going to swing again. And it's practice. It's all practice.
00:43:47
Speaker
Yeah, and to the point of getting all those rejections for people who feel like they might be in a slump, if you really look at or set up a spreadsheet or see where you're submitting stuff, you might only realize that you've only submitted maybe five things in a year. It's like, well, how do you expect to? It is kind of a numbers game.
00:44:10
Speaker
And so it isn't until maybe you really push yourself and say, maybe I submit twice a month and that's 24 a year. And okay, now you're building it up. And Lisa Romeo, who I think we both know, she aims. Oh, she's wonderful. Yeah, she aims for like the, aim for 100 rejections in a year, which is really ambitious, because then you're thinking you're pitching two things a week. I mean, it might be the same thing you're pitching elsewhere, but that's still a lot of submitting.
00:44:39
Speaker
You're bound to get something. I think Ray Bradbury said, like if you write a short story every single week, you have no choice but to get better because you're just going to keep doing the repetition. So I think it's very important to just kind of play the numbers game and realize if you have more at bats, you have a better chance of getting hits and home runs.
00:44:58
Speaker
And the less any individual at bat is going to crush your soul. I used to do a yearly thing with a friend of mine where we would pick a month that was usually October, and we would submit all the things. And every single day we would submit at least one thing. So at the end of the month, we had submitted at least 31 things.
00:45:21
Speaker
And, you know, before the end of the month, you're already getting the quick rejections and the first rejection hurts a lot. And then the second rejection hurts a bit. But by the time, you know, rejection number 20 rolls in in like next January, you're like, oh, wait a sec. Who did I send this to? Let me check my chart. Oh, I send it to them. Oh.
00:45:43
Speaker
And it just makes each individual submission so much less important when you do a bunch of them.
00:45:54
Speaker
And you write, too, the most successful and published writers I know are not waiting around for the wave to lift them up. They're carrying buckets every day.
Defining Success as a Writer
00:46:03
Speaker
I love that because it puts the agency in the writer's lap. And how can writers, especially those early and maybe even the mid-career frustrated writers, take better agency over their writing career?
00:46:18
Speaker
Well, I think a lot of it is deciding specifically what you want to do. I mean, there's going to be a stage early in your writing where you're like, huh, I wonder where this book is going to go. But then there's got to be a draft around draft two or three where you start thinking to yourself,
00:46:36
Speaker
I want this to be a literary publication and I need to write better if this is going to be seen as literary. So I need to go take a workshop. I need to go take some classes. Maybe I need to get an editor who specializes in literary fiction. Or maybe you realize to yourself, I want this book to sell as many copies as I possibly can.
00:46:57
Speaker
So I'm going to make sure there's some sex in it and I'm going to write some better sex scenes, you know, or like Ashley Renard wrote this wonderful memoir, Swing, a memoir of doing it all. And it's all about how she and her husband brought their marriage back together after they became the world's worst swingers. And there's some quite sexy scenes in the swingers clubs.
00:47:19
Speaker
And Ashley is beautiful. And so there's a picture of a beautiful, partially naked lady on the cover. That helps sell books. And it's not that you have to be calculating when you first start, unless you are a genre writer who would like to crank out a book a month.
00:47:36
Speaker
But there comes a point where you have to calculate which audience is this aimed at? Who do I want to read my book? And for memoirists, where do those people hang out already? How am I already connected to the people who want to read my book? And if I'm not connected to them, how am I going to get connected to them? And then I would say backing it up way back to the beginning of the process,
00:48:00
Speaker
My biggest challenge as a writer is ass in chair. I have a really hard time sitting down. Once I sit down, once I get started, I can type 1500 words in an hour. I can write a book in like two weeks checked up in a hotel room, but it's really hard for me to get past that initial sit down. And so I know
00:48:23
Speaker
That's my problem. How do I fix it? I sit at cafe tables with writing buddies and we write together working on our own projects because it shame-courages me into keeping going. And if you identify, you know, what's your issue, then you can actually solve your issue. And you don't have to feel embarrassed like, you know, oh, you know, Alison is a big deal and has a published book, but she can't sit down and frickin' start writing without this trick of sitting down with another person.
00:48:52
Speaker
You know, maybe other people, they finish their draft and they don't feel brave enough to share it with another person. So they got to start thinking about, okay, what is the smallest, gentlest way that I could practice sharing part of this with someone I trust to be reasonably nice to me?
00:49:09
Speaker
And don't feel embarrassed about your hurdle or your handicap or your difficulty. And it's okay to need a trick, to need a game, to tease yourself into being able to do what you need to do to move forward, whatever it takes.
00:49:26
Speaker
I love when you write about showing versus telling and then parlaying that or into how challenging this can be in memoir, in the trap that we can get into of trying to over explain an action in a way that
00:49:43
Speaker
It defends us as the narrator or the main character, but it also, it does, in terms of story, it does little to the mechanics of the story if you over explain something, it takes people out, it undercuts the narrative, but there's such an inclination or a desire to explain away something, but it's so necessary to just let the actions speak for themselves.
00:50:13
Speaker
I agree. I mean, you don't have to identify who the quote unquote bad person is in your memoir, because if you show their behavior, we'll know. And if you're brave enough to show your own bad behavior, it will be a much, much better book. I find too that memoirists want to put in a lot of backstory, like, oh, you have to know this about my family. You have to know that about my family.
00:50:37
Speaker
We're not as unique as we think we are, thank goodness, because that's why people want to read our memoirs and they identify with them. When I was doing a one-woman show many years ago on the Fringe Festival Circuit, I had a really specific story that I told in the show about hitchhiking and being picked up by a trucker. I was maybe 17, 18 years old, I think.
00:50:58
Speaker
This guy was super nice and at one point he had to unload his cargo and wasn't supposed to have a passenger in the truck. So I like curled up in the bed section in the back of the cab, just kind of you know waited there for an hour or whatever. And he came in and he asked me if I would hold him just because it had been a long time since he had had a woman hold him.
00:51:18
Speaker
And for me, this story is so specific and so like, you know, how many people hitchhiked in the snow across Michigan in the middle of the night. But every time I told that story, every city I went to and did that show, there was always at least one girl who would come up to me and say, oh my goodness, that happened to me. You told my story.
00:51:41
Speaker
And the more specific you get, the more other people are going to recognize what they know about themselves, what they know about their family. And you don't have to tell them what it's like because you're going to remind them that they already know what it's like.
00:51:56
Speaker
You know, when you do that chapter where your dad comes in from the car and he's so mad at you, he doesn't even speak, he just flings the car keys to the floor because he's so mad that he had to go track you down when you were trying to run away and you couldn't even successfully run away.
00:52:11
Speaker
You don't have to explain the whole backstory of the relationship with you and your dad and the kitchen floor is made of tile and the car is a Lincoln Town car. Because everybody's got that moment when their parent came in mad at them and they'll be able to feel their own history of emotion associated with that kind of moment when you tell them yours specifically and in detail. And that's what makes showing better than telling. You are inviting
00:52:41
Speaker
the reader to feel with you. When I was a theater teacher, we used to say to actors, it's not your job to cry on stage. It's your job to make the audience cry while you do your best to deal with your character's situation on stage. And with memoir, it's not our job to, oh, poor me. It's not our job to, oh, my alcoholic parent was a horrible person. Oh, my abusive spouse was a horrible person.
00:53:08
Speaker
It's our job to show their behavior, to include as much of their life as the audience needs to know to, you know, give a hint of like, why did they think this behavior was OK? And then leave it there as beautifully expressed as we can for the audience to decide who are they going to cry for. You write to writers or seldom original, but we can always be rare. So how so?
00:53:39
Speaker
Originality is overrated. There are so many people who think, you know, oh, well, you know, what if what if my story is not not unique? What if my story is not original? Sometimes very beginning writers, they want the agent to sign an NDA because they're afraid that their story is going to be stolen. And stories are almost never unique. You know, there's there's a bunch of important big books about, oh, my mom died and I went on this quest.
00:54:05
Speaker
There's a bunch of big, important books about, oh, I was in a terrible relationship until I got out, or I was an alcoholic until I fixed myself. And it's not the plot that makes your book unique and beautiful and rare. It's how you personally deliver the material. There's room in the world for Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, the 1960s version, and West Side Story, the 2020 version.
00:54:34
Speaker
You know, they're all different ways of telling pretty much the exact same story, but it's the way they express it that brings us in, that makes us want to go, oh, tell me this story again. I want to hear how you're going to tell this story.
00:54:51
Speaker
I love how you bring in very contemporary, fresh examples of books to get into the bones of it, like Hunger Games, Hilary Mantel's work. She's great. Yeah, and several other books too, because when you illustrate the point of, all right, this is what I'm getting at, and then you're able to distill Hunger Games into like,
00:55:16
Speaker
25 words. And it's like, oh, okay, this is what happens when you reread something over and over again, you get into the bones of it. So it's when it comes to deconstructing work that you want to emulate, how important is it to find that model book and to reread the thing over and over again, the way a four year old will rewatch Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin over and over again?
00:55:41
Speaker
I think it's really important to read with that eye of, okay, I read this book once for pleasure already. Maybe I even read it two or three times for pleasure. Now I'm going to read it and notice how did they do that.
00:55:56
Speaker
Where did they first introduce the idea that this person might not be a good guy? Where did they first show us, oh, we can trust this other person? And what do they do that shows us we can trust them? And watching for the way those mechanics work, it's like if you're a cabinet maker, and instead of just looking at the cabinet and going, hey, I bet I can build that, you take it to bits.
00:56:20
Speaker
And maybe you use it as a pattern, or maybe you're just inspired by it. But you know the mechanics of how it all fits together. And I always advocate that all writers should take a playwriting class. Number one, it's going to make you a lot better at writing dialogue. And number two, playwriting focuses on dramatic structure of the work as a whole in a way that I've found that most
00:56:44
Speaker
fiction and nonfiction writing classes do not focus on dramatic structure. You know, why is this character here? What do they want? Why are they present in this scene? What is the goal that we're all fighting towards and how's it going to feel when we get to the goal?
00:57:01
Speaker
You know, and if you're a playwright, you walk into the rehearsal hall and there will be an actor who will stop and go, I'm sorry, I still don't know why my character is in this scene. And you've got 24 hours to rewrite those pages or the same actor will stop in the same place tomorrow night and ask the same question.
00:57:19
Speaker
We don't have that kind of fast turnaround and memoir, but I think that it is so valuable to take a look at a book you love and go, okay, why do I love it? What about the hero's journey through this particular book appeals to me? Why do I like them?
00:57:36
Speaker
and then try to use those techniques in your own book. I find actually it even works at the sentence level. There are some beautiful sentences out there that I've used in exercises where you use the exact same structure, but you use your own words in the sentence. You know, you use it like a mad libs, you know, so if the original sentence is, you know, noun, noun, verb, noun,
00:57:59
Speaker
I'm going to look at my memoir and go, OK, what sentence might flow like this? Because just trying on the garments of other people's sentences can help you develop your own craft.
00:58:10
Speaker
Well, it's kind of like the old computer hackers of the late 70s and 80s, the Woz and Steve Jobs just breaking open computers. And there are tinkerers that will break open a television just to see the guts and then put it all back together, or maybe even reassemble it in a way that's somehow even better than it was before. And I guess it's, I don't know why it is, but as writers, for some reason,
00:58:37
Speaker
It that doesn't occur to us in some ways maybe and maybe i'm wrong but i just i feel like we can rewire our brains in ways that like okay yeah. The cabinet maker analogy is great is just like okay will break down how these hinges work out what about this dovetail did the what kind of glue are they using.
00:58:54
Speaker
It's like there's so much craftsmanship that I think sometimes is right as we discount, but there really is no shame in going into the Great Gatsby word for word and maybe, you know, just peeling out what's going on here. How can I do this without copying, but how can I break this down and put it back together in my own way?
00:59:14
Speaker
Exactly, because originality is usually not originality of structure or originality of dramatic, you know, the events, the way the events unfold. It's almost always the writer's voice and the characters that we identify with. But we do have, I think, that fear of copying as writers. You know, I've heard people say, you know, oh, I don't want to read another book in my genre while I'm writing because I don't want to be influenced by it.
00:59:40
Speaker
But why not be? Why not let what the musician is playing in the next practice room make you think of a new tune? And I've gone as far as I go to library sales and buy old beat up copies of books that I really like and then mark them up in the margins and go, OK, this is the first turning point. This is where we suddenly realize he's the bad guy and this is what tells us that. Just because it's so helpful to see the craft in action by someone further along in their career than me.
01:00:10
Speaker
Yeah, I love marking up books with different color pencils and everything, underlining things, writing smiley faces in the margins. And I almost like it as this book here. All it is is paper and ink. It's not precious. And I'm going to be writing things in it. I'm having a conversation with the writer, but the writer doesn't even know it. And to me, I kind of think it's like a journal in a way.
01:00:39
Speaker
We're going to be, I am, I'm slipping into the DMs of this book. I love that. That's a beautiful example. Yeah, engage with the work of the masters or whoever your masters are and be inspired by it. And every now and then pick up a book that is not something that appeals to you right off the bat and go, okay, what can I learn from this book?
01:01:04
Speaker
I love how you end the book by talking about the writer's life and cultivating a writer's life. So for you, what does it mean to live a writer's life?
The Financial Reality of Writing
01:01:19
Speaker
Well, right now, two days after my book has published, it means staying up late and saying thank you a hundred times on social media to people who are in the Eastern time zone.
01:01:35
Speaker
For me, at a philosophical level, I would say that being a writer is recognizing that I have been lucky enough to start with talent and have a life with enough privilege in it to be able to develop that talent and be helped by people along the way.
01:01:56
Speaker
And because I have reached a point where I am able to have interesting experiences and I am capable of telling the story about them, it is my moral compulsion that I have to come back and tell the story of what happened for the people who can't or don't go on the adventures themselves or who can't tell their own story. Those of us who have talent and ability
01:02:25
Speaker
have a moral obligation to use that talent and ability to help the people who can't do what we do. On a practical level, it means that
01:02:37
Speaker
And this sounds really callous, but it means that I track how much money I make by writing and by teaching and by speaking and doing webinars and selling books. And it genuinely makes me happy that I can contribute to my household on some of the money from my writing. And I want everybody to know, too, that the smallest part of that income is writing actual books.
01:03:02
Speaker
More of it is teaching, speaking, webinars. And the books are a long, slow trickle of royalties that are a nice small check every year. And so part of living the writer's life is understanding. Getting paid to write is getting paid to have written. And you got to do the writing part first before you get paid.
01:03:27
Speaker
Well the book is an incredible gift to writers and editors and it's a book I think you can revisit every year or every two years or in a pinch and it'll give you the juice you need and also just be a kind of continuing education no matter where you are on that arc of a writer's career.
01:03:48
Speaker
So I have to just commend you on an incredible book and an incredible gift to the writing community at large. So, Allison, just thanks for the book, thanks for the work, and thanks for all you do in the literary world.
01:04:00
Speaker
You're so welcome. And thank you, Brendan. I have discovered so many incredible authors from listening to your podcast. And it's just such a lovely education to hear everyone talk about their work. So thank you for letting me contribute to that conversation. Fantastic. And where can people find you online who might not already be familiar with you?
01:04:19
Speaker
I am active on Twitter and Instagram at Gorilla Memoir, spelled like Shay Guevara, not the ape. You can also find my book at 7drafts.com and all of your major and independent booksellers. And you can get in touch with me through idowords.net. And I also lead retreats and do classes and all kinds of fun, cool stuff.
01:04:45
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, thanks again for the time, Allison. And I'm just so glad we were able to do this. So welcome. Thank you for having me.
01:05:04
Speaker
Well, as I want to say that was a toe tapping good time my toe is tapping I need to tell you that seven drafts is a great addition to your craft collection as someone who edits people's work this book was Incredible and it was what I was most excited about when I was when I was handed the book because He wanted to up my editing game and to level that up so I can level you up and
01:05:33
Speaker
And of course, this is a great book to consider as a writer, but it is definitely a book that honors the craft of editing. So I often donate or raffle the books I get, but I'm gonna keep this sucka. So thanks to Alison K. Williams for coming back on the show and to West Virginia Wesleyan Colleges and the Thane Creative Writing for the support.
01:05:57
Speaker
This past Labor Day, the Mrs. and I went to Hella Mega Tour in Seattle, and we saw the Interrupters, Weezer, Fall Out Boy, and Green Day. There were thousands of people there, most masked, hopefully mostly vaxxed, can't guarantee any of that, and it was a little weird being around all those people, but it was an amazing show.
01:06:21
Speaker
Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer of Green Day, is out of his mind. He might be the most manic front man I have ever seen, and I think he's a sober guy now, and he's still that insane. It was intense. Loved it. Great show.
01:06:37
Speaker
Couple takeaways. This is part of the parting shot. One, I hadn't heard of the interrupters. And in a way, it was a mistake that we were at the stadium so early to see them, because we thought they weren't playing, and then Weezer was going to go on early, and when Weezer followed up with Green Day. And we didn't want to miss Weezer, because Weezer is like one of our favorite bands. And Pork and Beans is our wedding song, believe it or not. Go listen to it. Pork and Beans.
01:07:04
Speaker
So we were there and the interrupters go on and at first you're like, oh shoot, you know, these bands you never hear of. And of course they have to be good to be on the bill, but still, you know, like, I don't care about them. I want to see Weezer. But they were great. They were punky and kind of ska.
01:07:19
Speaker
And the lead singer, Amy Interrupter, has a very Courtney Love kind of voice, but great energy. I love women with scratchy, husky voices, especially singing voices, and she's got that in spades. It was great.
01:07:34
Speaker
And even though they were playing well below the headliners, almost a footnote on the poster. If you look at the Hella Megatore poster, it is a Green Day, Fall Out Boy, Weezer, and then in the lower right-hand corner, it's like in the interrupters, quite literally a footnote.
01:07:53
Speaker
and they made me a fan. They were that, well the headliners, but they showed up and they made a fan out of me and I've been streaming the hell out of them this week. They don't have a huge body of work, but still, great fun punk music. Punk rock.
01:08:10
Speaker
So you never know who is gonna see you for the first time. As I brought up in the interview with Allison, Joe DiMaggio and a lot of other players have piggybacked on this. It's like that you don't know who's gonna see you maybe for the only time that year or maybe for the first time ever and you want to impress those people and put on a good show for them.
01:08:31
Speaker
Let's say you have a chance to publish something, but it's not your A, B, or even C to your publication, but you're on the stage. You need to write the hell out of that piece as if it's gonna be in The New Yorker or McSweeney's or Granta. Pick your magazine.
01:08:49
Speaker
Because you never know who will see it or what impact it could make. You might get the attention of a coveted gatekeeper, or you might make a true fan out of a reader who stumbled across your piece. You might even change someone's life. You never know.
01:09:06
Speaker
The other thing that I was so impressed by watching all those bands was how great they all were in their own ways. I was watching them and it made me just want to be good at something as good as they are at guitar, bass, or drums. I was just so impressed with the skill of what they were doing and pulling off.
01:09:27
Speaker
Like I said, I was just very impressed, but what we don't see is the incredible rigor in time and hours and hours and hours of focus and singular focus it takes to reach that kind of level. It takes a lot of planned practice, a lot like what Allison was talking about. Musicians and illustrators, they play scales and make doodles that end up in the bin, all for the sake of practice.
01:09:52
Speaker
That's the big takeaway, at least for me. With my skill set as a writer and producer, what's the practice going to look like? Not the practice in terms of the discipline and the day-to-day rigor, but actual practice, going down in the basement and hitting balls off the tee.
01:10:07
Speaker
going in front of a wall and hitting tennis balls off the wall or throwing a ball there and fielding the ground balls. It's what I used to do all the time. Is it doing some doodles? Is it copying word for word, the opening paragraphs of Great Gatsby to get into that groove? Is it finding a book of writing prompts and tooling on those? I've got a book of 300 of them. I bought at Target. And there's space for roughly 100 or 200 words to write below each prompt.
01:10:35
Speaker
That seems like practice to me. That's practice to me. I wouldn't share that shit, but I would consider it an exercise in getting better at crafting words or building scenes and getting better at what it is, whatever the hell this is, whatever we're doing here.
01:10:54
Speaker
You know that book that you've written that you can't sell? I know I have, right now, I've written three, two of them have not sold. It might not be published, they might not be published, but it was practice. I finished three books, I know I'm resurrecting one as a, I don't know, it might just be practice, resurrecting this book. If it doesn't publish, fine.
01:11:19
Speaker
If it comes out decent, I might give it away for free. Or who knows? It could end up on a bookshelf somewhere in your local bookstore. Now, I'm just going to say this. Now get going on that next one. If that book you just finished doesn't get published, so what? It was practice. It was time in the gym and you got better. Yes. So what are you going to do? I know what I'm going to do. So stay wild, CNF-ers. And if you can't do, interview safe.
01:12:03
Speaker
you