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Episode 97—Jeff Geiger on Oral Storytelling, Failure, and Fear as Feul
135 Plays7 years ago
"If you're not doing something that scares you, at least a little bit, then you're wasting your time artistically," says Jeff Geiger. So, imagine a candle and it has two wicks, one on the top and one on the bottom. Now picture me lighting the candle at both ends. Do you see this fresh imagery? It’s almost as if this candle will burn out before its time. I only wish this represented something. What’s this? It’s not Friday! What is the meaning of these CNFin’ shenanigans? Well CNFers, I’m going to try and kill myself and do two episodes a week. Is this sustainable? The short answer is, of course, no, but if it can be managed that’s twice as many CNF buddies, twice the reach, twice the insights and double the insanity. This Taco Tuesday I bring you the one and only Jeff Geiger, jcgeiger.com, j.c.geiger on Instagram. Jeff recently won a Moth Grand Slam event, a five-minute oral true story. Unfortunately you won’t hear that story, but his winning that event is what opened the door to have him—a novelist by trade—on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. What is this podcast wayward listener? It’s the show where I speak to the world’s best artists about creating works of nonfiction or tellers of true tales: leaders in narrative journalism, documentary film, essay, memoir, and radio where I tease out origins, habits, routines, and debilitating self-doubt so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. Jeff’s book “Wildman,” was named a 2017 YA book of the year by Amazon and is one of those great coming of age books that is fun and illuminating to read. This episode is chock full of good and tasty nuggets. Jeff talks about his: Failures Transformation Oral story telling Not getting sucked down into the sunk costs of writing years in a different genre. Bonus: Jeff is one of those amazingly energetic and energizing people, so I think you’ll get done with this episode and want to do your best work. So go ahead and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. It’ll be on Spotify soon as well the normal places (iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher). Share this with a friend if you think they’ll dig it. Share it across you social platforms to spread the word. CNFers, this is what we do. Enjoy episode 97 with Jeff Geiger! So, we hit the 40 rating/review mark and I wanna thank all of you for taking the time, but let’s not stop there. Let’s get to the 50s, because reviews and ratings will help this little corner of the internet gain a bit of traction so we can reach and empower more tellers of true tales. Head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes, but also to subscribe to my monthly newsletter where I hand out my nonfiction (and sometimes fiction) recommendations for the month as well as tidbits from the podcast. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat that. Got a question or concern? Ping me on Twitter @BrendanOMeara or @CNFPod. Like the Facebook page @CNFPodcast or send me an electronic mail gram. As always, thanks for listening. Good bye till next time.
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Transcript
New Ambitions and Potential Burnout
00:00:00
Speaker
So imagine a candle and it has two wicks, one on the top and one on the bottom. Now picture me lighting a candle from both ends. Do you see this fresh imagery? It's almost as if this candle will burn out before it's time. I only wish this represented something. So what's this?
00:00:24
Speaker
It's not Friday. What is the meaning of these CNF and shenanigans? Well, CNFers, I'm gonna try and kill myself and do two episodes a week. Is this sustainable? The short answer is, of course, no it isn't. But, if it can be managed, that's twice as many CNF buddies. Twice the reach. Twice the insights. And double the insanity.
Introducing Jeff Geiger
00:00:52
Speaker
This Taco Tuesday I bring you the one and only Jeff Geiger, jcgeiger.com, j.c.geiger on Instagram, that's Geiger, G-E-I-G-E-R. Jeff recently won a Moth Grand Slam event in Portland, Oregon, a five minute oral true story. He took the crown, the blue rim, the gold medal. Unfortunately,
00:01:21
Speaker
You won't hear that story because I can't find it and I doesn't have a file. But his winning that event is what opened the door to have him a novelist by trade on this creative nonfiction podcast. And I should say that going to the twice a week thing kind of scares the the shit out of me because each episode takes in the neighborhood of if you include the reading time and research about 15 hours per episode. So per hour. So now signing up for
00:01:50
Speaker
30 hours of extra work. So that's all well and good. So what is this podcast? Wayward Listener. It's the show
Challenges of Podcast Production
00:01:59
Speaker
where I speak to the world's best artist about creating works of nonfiction or tellers of truth tales.
00:02:05
Speaker
Jeff's book
00:02:25
Speaker
Debut novel Wildman was named a 2017 YA Book of the Year by Amazon and it's one of those really fun books, those great coming of age books that is just fun and illuminating and I suggest you go find it wherever you like.
00:02:42
Speaker
So this episode is chock full of good and tasty nuggets. Jeff talks about his failures, transformation, oral storytelling, of course, because that's the true story component of this episode, and not getting sucked into the sunk costs of writing years in a different genre and feeling like you lost all that time. Because Jeff definitely genre jumped and didn't feel like it was a waste. So I think that was really
Balancing Writing and Family Life
00:03:09
Speaker
valuable bonus Jeff is one of those amazingly energetic and energizing people so I think you'll get a lot out of this episode in terms of just pure energy and want to go ahead and do your best work and write a hundred words or 500 or 1000
00:03:27
Speaker
So, go ahead, subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, it'll be on Spotify soon, as well as the normal places like iTunes, Google Playage, and Stitcherage. Share this with a friend if you think they'll dig it, share it across your social platforms to spread the word, see an effort, this is what we do, to quote track four from Metallica's seminal album, Kill Em All.
00:03:55
Speaker
Let's jump in the fire. Enjoy episode 97 with Jeff Geiger. The sun is down but it's usually in the morning because most of the people I talk to are of course on east coast time. So this is like a weird sort of circadian vertigo.
00:04:24
Speaker
I know it was interesting. I was just thinking about having the ability to meet with somebody, actually meet with somebody face-to-face when you're so used to
Writing Habits and Embracing Unproductive Periods
00:04:36
Speaker
communicating with people who are states and states away and how it's funny how that even the face-to-face meeting can kind of be confounding, especially technologically when you are used to doing things long distance. That's another kind of inverse thing that's very interesting. Yeah.
00:04:55
Speaker
Yeah, and that's a it would have been really cool and I hope to someday do the the face-to-face Podcast too because it'd be real interesting to sort of be in the to be without where there isn't well for one eye contact and all that stuff and to know when when people are talking when people are done talking because sometimes when you want to
00:05:16
Speaker
Talk to someone like this. You might be processing something and I'm not sure if you're ready to say something. It sounds like I can cut people off and it's not because I want to cut them off or because I feel like I have something important to say. It's like I don't know if they're done talking yet.
00:05:36
Speaker
Yeah, the thoughtful pause or the I'm done talking and just with audio can become difficult to discern for sure. It is. Yeah, it's a very gray area there. But yeah, so it's given that it's the nighttime and so forth, I wonder, do you operate best at night? Is this when you can get most of your creative work done or are you more of a morning person?
00:06:01
Speaker
You know, I became a morning person by complete, it was a very torturous and slow process to kind of move my natural rhythms to morning, but I had to do that because I have two kids and my normal rhythm and I revert to it very quickly is
00:06:27
Speaker
I was kind of a second shift worker in previous years where 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. is kind of my high productivity time naturally. And then after 11, I want to go out and have a beer or two, talk to people, and then sleep till 9 or 10. That's my natural rhythm.
00:06:48
Speaker
it became pretty obvious after having kids that they don't care what your natural rhythm may be. They don't understand weekends or holidays. They get up whenever they want to get up and then you're kind of up with them. So yeah, it took, I would say, I mean, it took longer than I feel like it should have. I mean, it took me probably two or three months of just getting up
00:07:15
Speaker
And I had to walk. I used to have to get up and walk for a good 20, 30 minutes just to wake my brain up. But I became a morning writer completely through circumstance. And I always kind
Embracing Failure and Artistic Growth
00:07:29
Speaker
of railed against the morning writers saying, oh, people wake up early in the morning. They feel like they're more productive. There's this whole superiority complex about people. They get up earlier. They feel like they get more done.
00:07:40
Speaker
And, you know, now I do a lot of, I do most of my writing now in the morning, but I still love the nighttime. So conversationally, nighttime is great. Yeah. How do you set up your morning so you feel like you can win the day with your work? You know, it's a lot easier now because writing is my full time gig. But so now I get to, I get up and
00:08:07
Speaker
cook with the kids and then get them off to school and then I've got this luxurious block of time basically from 830 until you know until I have to start kind of thinking about picking them up or doing logistics but it's always at least three or four hours so I feel completely spoiled now but before the book sold and before I was able to leave the day job I
00:08:33
Speaker
You know, I just got up early. I mean, and people scoff at what is early for me. Early for me is 530. That's early. Like, that's really, that's inhumane, actually. I kind of returned to the refrain, man was not meant to rise before the sun. But yeah, I would get up at 530 and I would actually just force myself out the door to walk.
00:08:57
Speaker
for about 20-30 minutes and then I would come back and I would work until 8. So I was only getting about an hour and a half to two hours of writing a day at that time. And that was how I won the day because by the time I would get home from work at 5 o'clock, cook dinner, get the kids to bed, it's 8-39 o'clock and my brain was shot. I just didn't have much left.
00:09:21
Speaker
Did you find that sometimes in that 90 minutes to two hours, because it was so concentrated, you could actually get sometimes more done in 90 minutes to two hours than you might get in like, say, four to six hours? That is like the great mind game of the writer because it's so impossible to know. I mean, I gave up on word count a long time ago as any measure of success for writing because
00:09:48
Speaker
you can be just as successful cutting words as adding words.
00:09:53
Speaker
It's really, it's a real challenge as a writer to figure out how are you most productive because it's such a, you know, writing differs per project, it differs per day, what is quality. I mean, someday I could write three amazing sentences that I never have to touch again and maybe that's a perfect writing day. You know, other days I can write 4,000 words but I end up deleting them all three months later.
Writing for Young Adults
00:10:20
Speaker
So it's hard for me, I think,
00:10:22
Speaker
I think I can feel when the groove is good and I can feel when it's not good. I think it took me a few months of being out of that cycle to be back in a good groove, but I feel good now. I feel like the time I'm spending is as disciplined as it's ever been. Whether it's as effective or productive is a really tricky question.
00:10:47
Speaker
Yeah, how how do you measure that feeling of a good that good groove versus the bad groove? And then how do you, you know, try to maximize the amount of the the good times, you know, the good rhythms so you feel you feel like you've accomplished something that's gonna stick?
00:11:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I think for me, it's kind of you work with the variables you can control. And for me, it's creating an environment in which I most frequently thrive. It's almost this amazing kind of experiment on your own work habits. You are the subject and the scientist at the same time. So it's kind of like, well, I tend to do well if
00:11:38
Speaker
I have big blocks, you know, this is for me, if I have big blocks of time that are uninterrupted, if I can close the door, if I can, if I can be in a private place, because, you know, as my wife will point out, when she's home with me, I don't write quietly, I, you know, I'm laughing, I'm banging on my desk, I'm, you know, it's like, it's, it's, it's, it's funny, because you would think that writing is quiet. But for me, it's really not. I mean, I, I have,
00:12:06
Speaker
a theatrical background, a performance background, and whether or not that's chicken and the egg. But I don't compose work quietly. So for me, being in a private place where I can really just not worry about who's in the house, who's in the room, that's really important for me because I'm pretty emotional when I write. So I'll cry, I'll laugh, I'll sing along to whatever music I'm listening to. So that for me is a huge measure of how deep I can go on a story. So I found that
00:12:35
Speaker
Above all, being away from other humans is really good for me when I'm writing. And big blocks of time. A friend of mine is a painter, and he said something to be effective. It takes four hours to get one good hour of painting done. And I don't know that that's true for me as a writer. Sometimes I can sit down, and it's a lightning bolt, and I'm just off and running. But if I'm on a tight clock,
00:13:03
Speaker
It helps me as much as it hurts me. It helps me sometimes because I can dive right in and say, to your point, I've got an hour, I've got to make it count, right? But other times that's really limiting because I remember so many days I had to tear myself out of my chair to
Facing Fears in Storytelling
00:13:19
Speaker
go to my day job and I was deep in a scene and I don't think that was helpful at all.
00:13:26
Speaker
I guess that was a really long way to not answer your question, but that's kind of the best I got. It's really a lot of trial and error. I've been doing this kind of work too for upwards of 15 years, and it's like I'm still trying to find the best way to feel almost like you've got that runner's high, so to speak. You felt like you've had that productive block of time, and then
00:13:55
Speaker
Everything else afterwards like you don't feel like you're you're pirating your creative time or your chores are not pirating into your Into your writing time. So yeah, it's always it's it's amorphous trial and error thing And like you said, you're you know, you're experimenter and guinea pigs. So it's it's all this every evolving thing so I always love hearing how you and people like yourself check in with yourself to try to have the maximize the time you have and
00:14:23
Speaker
Yeah, I love what you said there about the runner side and I like to run a lot too and it is that whole flow state and I think and I kind of skipped over that in my previous talk but that is when it's working. It's working when time gets slippery and I don't check my phone and I don't
00:14:45
Speaker
don't realize how much time has gone by. I stopped even basic sensory needs like hunger and thirst kind of evaporate and I'm just in the zone. And, you know, I don't know that I've been in the zone more effectively with shorter or longer periods of writing time. But what I can say is for me, the more time I spend writing, the more frequently I'm in the zone. And to me, it's kind of a numbers game. It's like if I spend one hour writing,
00:15:15
Speaker
a day, then I might be in the zone twice a week. And if I spent four hours of writing a day, then I'm probably going to be in the zone four or eight times a week. And that's held pretty steady. So for me, it kind of factored out too. I don't know that my process is more effective, but I'm doing it more hours every day. And that ultimately results in more quality work.
00:15:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of the favorite phrases that I've come across lately and I credit it to Seth Godin, the great creative mind, thought leader and marketing mind. It's like what separates bad from good and good from great writers or artists of any kind is the willingness to put up and to produce bad work to get to good work.
00:16:06
Speaker
Oh, gosh, yeah. Yeah, it is like an endurance game. I think the best artists are the ones who are most comfortable with slogging through the bad sentences, the bad paragraphs, the bad 4000 words that might get chopped out. But it's that grind because maybe on word or sentence 3000, it's like, oh, that's when it's really starting to hum, but you have to have the tenacity and the rigor to put in that bad work to get to the good stuff.
00:16:39
Speaker
So it's great. I don't know what your cursing rules are on this show. Let them rip. Okay, so I want to read you just I just I have my phone here and I want to read you a text that just happened today that is a perfect it's just such a great.
00:16:57
Speaker
kind of it just it just brings everything you said to bear in a single text message. So my friend texted me we've been right we've been we did blogs together we've been writing it for a long time he's just he's having this book come out right now it's getting all these great start reviews so I kind of I sent him a message it said congratulations and he basically asked me so how's your next book coming which is just this amazing question to get so I texted him back
00:17:24
Speaker
It's like I pulled myself out of a bloody car wreck of a draft and I'm standing on an embankment throwing a match down at the smoking engine like so long, motherfucker. So that's, you know, that's like, you know, that's kind of the, that's my intimate self when I'm really going to be honest with somebody about how the draft is going. But I'm okay with that and that's what's amazing is that, you know, before I wrote
00:17:53
Speaker
Wildman, I feel like I hit bottom before I wrote that book. And I kind of came to the point where I said, you know, I want to write a good book more than I want to write, you know, a book that's good to me. And the journey of writing Wildman, I mean, it was failure after failure after failure. And it emboldened me in a lot of ways to kind of finally, I'd been aspiring to see failure as a necessary step to success because every
00:18:23
Speaker
you know, inspirational quote you read kind of emblazoned on like, you know, a poster hanging in someone's office is all about, well, you have, you know, Einstein and, you know, you have to fail to succeed. You read it a million times, but the reality is social feedback that you get is not conducive to that kind of philosophy because, you know, and I've only lived in this culture for my entire life, so I'm not going to pin it down to American culture, but I
Failure as a Path to Success
00:18:50
Speaker
very much felt that,
00:18:52
Speaker
early on especially that success is rewarded and failure is not. And it can create this strange pressure to make the short gains and win the short victories as opposed to really locking in and doing the hard work of failure and that hard work of facing your own failure and doing it with your chin up and then coming through and ultimately coming out with something that's worthwhile or maybe not.
00:19:22
Speaker
Maybe the project is a total loss, but it's just one project and life is long and you come back and you do something more amazing because of it. But I feel like if you're not doing something that scares you, at least a little bit, then you're wasting your time artistically. I have no desire to just kind of be screen printing the same book a million times. I wrote Wildman because it was terrifying for me to write a book that was
00:19:51
Speaker
that had no fantastic elements. It was purely literary. And the book I'm writing now, you know, the draft I was staring down at while it was smoldering in the ditch, you know, it combines a lot of nonfiction elements. It's a much more ambitious story in terms of scope and scale. But for me, that's the only way forward. You know, I have to keep pushing myself or else what am I doing artistically?
00:20:15
Speaker
What did that rock bottom as a writer look for you? Look like for you, I should say. You know, it was it was it was it was really once I got to the point of actually hitting bottom, it was a Zen moment. I mean, I'd gone through all sorts of of angst and and jealousy and comparison and kind of frustration with my own
00:20:44
Speaker
I guess it would be commercial success, though the term commercial seems way larger than it was. In my mind, commercial success at the time was just selling a few stories. And I felt all those things that you feel when you're not having that reciprocity with the commercial process that you want. You feel like you're doing good work and you feel like maybe your work isn't being recognized. But when I actually hit bottom, when I actually just said,
00:21:14
Speaker
This is it. You're never going to sell a book. It's never going to happen the way that you thought it was going to happen. It was actually incredibly freeing. But at no point before, absolute bottom wasn't that way. Everything before that was frustrating and hard and challenging. But when I actually hit bottom, it was actually really liberating because I had to answer a simple question. And the question was, will you still write if you never sell a book?
00:21:44
Speaker
the answer to that question was yes. And that felt so good to me. I felt so validated as a human. I felt this kind of cathartic moment as an artist where I said, wow, I've been true enough to this thing that I care so much about that I've gotten to this point of frustration and anger and jealousy
00:22:13
Speaker
grieving all these previous books. And I still love writing enough to want to do it, even though I've given up hope of publication. And that felt really good. And it wasn't it really wasn't something where it's like, well, I'm going to show them I'm gonna write the best book, it was more, it was very personal. It was like, you know,
00:22:37
Speaker
I worked at this a long time and I'm not going to stop. I'm going to keep working. And there's so many examples that you can look at of other artists who have never had any commercial success in their time and lived on because they believed in their process and their work. And so I kind of took heart in that.
00:22:57
Speaker
And, uh, but it wasn't in a dramatic way. Like, oh, they'll love me when I'm dead. It was more just like, you know, it was like, do I love this enough to do it? And the answer is yes. And there can be, um, let's see, cause you were, you were writing kind of like fantasy sci-fi before you took the spur towards the YA, correct?
00:23:20
Speaker
Yeah, so you were doing that for a long time and I think a lot of people I know this is kind of true with me and the journalism I've done I'm not to use myself as an example but it kind of helps illustrate the point like I've been a sports writer for a long long time and it's a real crowded
00:23:38
Speaker
area to be in.
Transition from Fantasy to Realistic Fiction
00:23:40
Speaker
And so sometimes I suspect other writers they have their sort of be in their discipline, but they might not want to jump to a different genre, whether that's science writing or something else, because they've sunk so much time. And so you get into that sunk cost thing, like you put in all this time in something else. So it feels like a waste to jump ship, like all that time is wasted.
00:24:05
Speaker
Did you have that sunk cost moment having spent so much time writing in one genre and then jumping to the other I? Didn't because to me the measure is always you know do Do I care am I enjoying what I'm doing as a writer more than? stocking shelves You know working whatever, you know scrubbing plates, whatever it is, you know I comparing it to
00:24:36
Speaker
day jobs that I've had or that I was doing. And to me, I don't want to treat writing that way. Writing to me, as soon as you start treating it as a commercial enterprise while you're in the composition phase,
00:24:57
Speaker
You you start to mitigate your own success and your own ability to go deep and and hit a vein and and and to be in that flow state of pure joy and You know, I think it's Ursula K. Le Guin said You know writing to make money is a damn fool idea and I think and I think That that's true. You know, I'm really happy that that I'm able to to do this full-time now, but but
00:25:26
Speaker
If the sacrifice, I mean, if you think about it, right? It's like, you're sacrificing what you really want to do for what you think can make money. And I think, I don't think that's ever a good choice. I think you've got to chase, you're going to be better at whatever you're doing if you've got the fire. And especially with art, whether it's writing, or visual art, or acting, or whatever it is, I think
00:25:51
Speaker
what people want, what they resonate with is that pure emotional connection. So anything you can do to make that connection sound and authentic is in your service. And I felt that way for a long time. So for me, it was more, you know what it was? It was more realizing, oh, this is actually what I care about. It wasn't like, oh, I've put in all this time. It was more like,
00:26:21
Speaker
It was like coming out of the woods in this clearing and saying, oh, I actually don't want to write fantasy. I thought I did, but I don't. I actually want to write realistic fiction.
Influences on Writing Passion
00:26:34
Speaker
And it just took me a really long time to figure that out. How did you learn to love the work itself and have that fire that you speak of? You know, I feel really lucky. I've always really liked writing. I remember I was in
00:26:52
Speaker
sixth grade. And I remember sitting in my bedroom and looking between a computer. And I had this really kind of cheap knockoff fender Stratocaster like leaning against the wall in my bedroom. And I thought, you know, even at that even at that age, I remember thinking, okay, you can be really good at one of these things.
00:27:15
Speaker
And it's really funny to think about that in like sixth grade, me being like, I can either be a musician and spend all my time playing guitar and trying to get good at that, or I can go this writing route. And I just kind of took temperature inside myself as to what I really felt more inclined to do. And I think writing for me,
00:27:45
Speaker
it's reliant on a language that I most enjoy and that I feel most fluent in. And I like that. And I also like to be alone. I've discovered as I've gotten older, I think I could come across as very extroverted, but when you really pick apart what I do all day, that whole you're just an extrovert thing falls apart pretty quickly under scrutiny because I spent
00:28:11
Speaker
so much time alone. I mean, I love people. I love being out with people. I love talking to people. And I need that too. But, but I think, you know, the reality of, especially with music, you know, of having a band and having to be around people that much, you know, I, I think I was smart at that age, intuitive with myself and thought, you know, what I really like is I like to kind of writing is meditative for me, it's, it's time alone, it's time to
00:28:40
Speaker
kind of pour myself into a project and I feel fortunate that I didn't have to kindle that fire. I think that fire was kind of there and I just kept, but I did feed it. I did intentionally feed that fire for a very long time. Who at a young age gave you some of that permission to pursue that and to keep going and to lean into that passion?
Authenticity and Inner Motivation
00:29:08
Speaker
You know, I think there's a few people, you know, I don't, but it's interesting. It's kind of fragmented. I didn't have one mentor who was kind of my Obi-Wan figure who kind of led me through and shepherded me through the ways of a writer. But, you know,
00:29:31
Speaker
There there was a guy who and it's it's funny. I was a huge comic book fan right and I it's huge comic book reader and To the point where they they called me the Batman kid and they put my comics away on layaway for me You know before before I came in and I had a paper out to pay for my comics
00:29:52
Speaker
And there was a guy who worked at that shop. His name was Matt Brown. And he was this great creative guy. He was a writer. He wrote his skateboard to work. He was like every cool thing that I could imagine as, you know, a 10 year old, 10 year old kid. And yeah, he, you know, I mean, he probably more than any individual teacher or family member. And I think that's, I think that happens sometimes, especially
00:30:19
Speaker
you know, when you're when you're a kid growing up is sometimes the influence is kind of outside of your, your sphere of daily interaction. You know, he was a writer and, and he wrote these, these really cool, really cool stories for he was, you know, he's attending a local college and, yeah, and he, he basically told me like, this is this is viable, this is something you can do, this is, this is something you should really kind of pour yourself into, you're so into these comics, and you're reading
00:30:47
Speaker
He basically kind of did this great thing where he affirmed my taste. He was like, you're only 10 and you're reading really good titles. He's like so, and I've heard this, Ira Glass said something to this effect. And Austin Kleon who wrote Steel like an Artist, where it's kind of like, you know, having good taste is kind of the first step. And then you feel the painful gap between
00:31:14
Speaker
that what you're consuming and what you can produce. And that painful gap is where growth happens. And I feel, for whatever reason, what he did and what a few other people did is they recognized I had good taste before I had any kind of ability to produce that work.
Crafting Impactful Stories
00:31:32
Speaker
But I was reading good work. And I feel fortunate that I've kind of always felt that pull
00:31:38
Speaker
And of course that's subjective, but to me, you know, I feel this very dramatic connection with certain writers where I feel like, oh my gosh, this, you know, this is the person who I want to sit down and talk to. This is, this is me. This is like, this person, I would be like best friends. Meanwhile, they would have nothing to do with it. But it's like, but I felt that from a young age.
00:32:02
Speaker
And so I think the fire was encouraged by the fact that I was reading these writers. I wanted to be more like them. I wasn't. But I felt optimistically that it was only a matter of time before I could get to a point where I was hopefully somewhere near as good as these people who I was reading.
00:32:25
Speaker
Was part of the pull to create the kind of stories that you've written and currently write kind of a way to elicit a similar feeling in readers that the writers you were reading were eliciting in you at that young age? Yeah, I would say so. I think it gets really embedded. It becomes interesting the longer I do this because
00:32:53
Speaker
I think that that was a really concrete ambition of mine early on was to produce work that would elicit a similar response. I think that that is kind of in the soil now. It's not something I think about, but it's foundational to what I do. And as part of why I write for young adults is that was a decision like the fender
00:33:21
Speaker
Squire leaning in the corner versus my computer. It was kind of like this choice I made where you know, I love to read adult, you know, quote unquote literary fiction but I don't want to write All things equal if I've equal fire for both which I feel I do you know, I'd rather write for a broader audience and rather I don't want to write for people who are
00:33:45
Speaker
you know, only degreed and of a certain, you know, cultural strata, who are reading these books that
Influential Books and Authors
00:33:53
Speaker
are marketed primarily to, you know, people within that kind of income, cultural, whatever mix, you know, I don't, I don't like that, that, that, to me, you know, what I want is I want, I want people, I want my books to be widely appreciable, even if they are widely read, I want them to be accessible, like widely accessible. So, and I also
00:34:16
Speaker
maybe selfishly, I want my books to strike people at a point in their lives where they still have a lot of decisions to make. I don't know that I'll ever escape from the themes of kind of grab life by the horns, follow the current of life, do what makes you sing, what makes you hum. That to me is kind of the central theme of what I love to write.
00:34:44
Speaker
And I think it's less effective if someone, you know, the later someone is in their life, the more decisions they've made, the more calcified they've become in their routines, you know, as a population, not individually, people can change whenever they want to change. But as a population, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22-year-olds, even 25-year-olds are more likely, I think, to be impacted significantly by a book on a life scale than someone who's in their 50s or 60s who's
00:35:14
Speaker
already has a lot of road behind them. And, you know, they're going to read my book with a different lens. I mean, certainly me at the age I am now, like I read books differently than I did when I was 17 or 18. So so I think that to your question, you know, that that really that kind of thinking really motivated where I focused my energy. But when I'm sitting down writing,
00:35:39
Speaker
you know, I think it would be poison for my books for me to be thinking about is this going to change someone's life? You know, I don't think I can't, you know, I, to me, it's kind of like I aim, I aim the ship, kind of very generally in this direction of this age, this period of an age, and then I write a book that speaks to me, and then I hope that it speaks to the person who reads it.
00:36:02
Speaker
So what were maybe three to five influential books that struck you in a way that really resonated with you in a sense that that's the kind of work that you're trying to put
Oral Storytelling Lessons
00:36:16
Speaker
out? Maybe these are books you also reread from time to time because you're like, oh, they turned your world from black and white into color. Yeah, good. Good question.
00:36:27
Speaker
You know, the first one was probably when I was, you know, fourth grade. James and the Giant Peach blew my mind when I was in fourth grade. Like, I was just that book. I mean, I specifically remember reading that book and just being mesmerized by the language, the imagination, the characters. You know, that book really took my breath away kind of at that younger age. As I got older, there was a book by Willa Cather in college, The Professor's House.
00:36:55
Speaker
that is just a remarkable book. And it, it really hit me at the right point in life. It was a book that that I remember saying to a friend, this would be the worst book to read when you were 50 and regretted your life choices. And it's the best book to read when you're, you know,
00:37:17
Speaker
19 and you're still having a lot of choices to make. It's almost horrific, this situation where you have an aging professor who's, and I don't know what age he is in the book, but he's looking back on these missed opportunities in his life. That book had a huge impact on me. Also, Ayn Rand is hugely controversial because of political
00:37:47
Speaker
different political things, but honestly Fountainhead, I would be dishonest if I failed to mention that the book Fountainhead definitely impacted me and not because of the the capitalism overtures that some people kind of really latch on to, but because that book to me was about being unapologetically creative and artistic
00:38:11
Speaker
And it felt really empowering to me to read that book because, and I will give that book a lot of credit for kind of relighting that fire of damn the torpedoes, I'm going to write what I want to write, I'm going to do what I want to do. And not because I want to make money, which again, that's kind of how Rand gets extrapolated, but more like because that's what I feel called to do. And so that book affected me a lot. Ray Bradbury.
00:38:40
Speaker
I had a lot of impact on me kind of throughout my life. I can't pick a single book, but, you know, The October Country, Dandelion Wine. I just love the way that Bradbury marries poetic language with high concept storytelling. And I really, I value that. I value a story that moves and has a plot and things happen, but that also takes time in certain scenes and doesn't gloss over the poetry of language. And I think Bradbury does that really well.
00:39:10
Speaker
And then I gotta give the crown to Tobias Wolf. I mean, Tobias Wolf, my son is named Tobias. The night in question, our story begins, this boy's life. There's something about the writing of Tobias Wolf that is just hauntingly evocative. You know the way that poems kind of
00:39:37
Speaker
They get at you in this dreamlike way. A good poem is not on the nose that's kind of subterranean in the way it works on you. And I feel like Tobias Wolf and Truman Capote, I'm a huge fan of Truman Capote, too. I feel like they have this kind of dreamlike quality to their writing. They're about mostly realistic things, but they kind of bend the corners of reality enough that
00:40:04
Speaker
that it becomes something more than just a straightforward story. And I'd say probably
00:40:10
Speaker
more than any other writers, the ones who have kind of influenced the way that I actually approach my sentence by sentence craft, I would say Tobias Wolf and Truman Capote are right at the top. And are there any particular examples of like oral storytellers that really, you know, grab your ear or does oral storytelling factor into the way you craft the written word?
Preparing for the Moth Grand Slam
00:40:38
Speaker
You know, I
00:40:40
Speaker
need to become more familiar with that world. Obviously, as human beings, we're all very attuned to oral storytelling, but it's an area that in terms of the great artists within that particular field, I have not familiarized myself with. I help run, which is an important point. It's very much a team effort.
00:41:08
Speaker
help run a theater group in Eugene that does a lot of storytelling. And so I kind of hear locally, I hear those stories, but in terms of seeking out other storytellers the way I would seek out an author or a filmmaker, I haven't done that, which I really should because it's such a pleasing way to, it's such a human way to experience a narrative.
00:41:38
Speaker
So, yeah. So if you have tips, friend, you have to let me know after the podcast. Yeah, well after, yeah, I don't know, I'm not as familiar either, but given your skill for telling and spinning a yarn in front of an audience and that whole experience that you had with the moth, I was like, I wonder if you had some examples or models
00:42:05
Speaker
Because you know you were able to do something pretty special in the last couple months Yeah Yeah, I think you know I think it's kind of in service to that whole ten thousand hours thing more than a specific mentor. I think it's it's it's uh it's that through the through the theater group no shame Eugene you know we have a
00:42:28
Speaker
15 five-minute pieces every month and we have workshops every week where people are working those pieces. I've been doing that for nine years. Every week for nine years, I've been listening to people try to truncate a narrative into a five-minute block of time.
00:42:48
Speaker
And we are unapologetically vicious with our time. I mean, if you hit five minutes, a buzzer goes off, the lights go off, your mic cuts out. I mean, you're done. You're done. You know, it's like there's no, there's not even the grace of the slow-moving hook that, you know, quirks you by the neck and whips you off stage. You were just, you're finished. Yeah, the orchestra coming up at the cutoff and Oscar's speed.
00:43:15
Speaker
Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. It's not nearly as elegant as that. It's way more brutal. It's just medieval. It's awful. So so I think that and I still get buzzed. I still get I get buzzed all the time. But but again, because I've embraced process, it just teaches me. It's like, okay, you know, you know, don't take four minutes to get to the point in your story. You know, get there faster. And so I think for me, that has been an amazing training ground for me just to kind of
00:43:45
Speaker
tell and retell and retell and retell stories.
Condensing Stories for Performance
00:43:49
Speaker
So I really am grateful for that. So when you qualified for the Grand Slam Moth event in Portland about a month ago at this point, maybe a little more.
00:44:04
Speaker
You had you know you had qualified and you were put in touch with with a moth Storytelling coach and you had what a what amounted to about a 24-minute Piece that had to get down to five minutes
00:44:20
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about that because talk about the work isn't going to be generative in a sense. It's going to be completely gutting something. What was your story? What was that experience like of forming that story? Then, of course, having to cut that marble down into something that would be stage ready.
00:44:47
Speaker
So the story, the theme was fired up. That was the theme of the Grand Slam. So you had to write a story to that theme. And I really only had one story that truly fit. And it so happened that it was a really big story that had to somehow squeeze into a roughly five minute time frame. And so I kind of had a choice early on, which was,
00:45:17
Speaker
to not pick my best story was to pick a smaller story that could fit in a smaller box or
00:45:25
Speaker
do this wild, I picture like a stuff sack like the size of a Ziploc bag, and you know, a tent the size of Detroit, you know, how do you fit this thing into this tiny little bag. But again, that scared me more. It was scarier, it was more ambitious. And so
00:45:48
Speaker
my artistic philosophy is kind of, well, then that's what you have to do. So I just decided, okay, I have to tell this really big story. And I have to tell it in five minutes. And so the story coaching was incredibly helpful. But here's the thing, Brendan, to your point about failure, I mean, this is this is where I've really grown artistically in the last, you know, four or five years is that
00:46:13
Speaker
I mean, I'm talking to this guy from The Moth. I mean, it's New York City. I'm on a Skype call to Manhattan, like Manhattan. Like, I don't know. I mean, this is like, I grew up in like small town in Illinois. I mean, Manhattan is like, it's a drink. Maybe it's a place you watch a movie about by what do you, I mean, I don't know. But it's not, you know, it's not a place I would ever, like the area code, it still gives me shivers. Like, I don't, I don't ever call this man. So, so I'm talking to this guy,
00:46:42
Speaker
you know, from the mall. And I think even five years ago, but certainly 10 years ago, my number one goal, which I would not have admitted to myself would be to impress the hell out of the story coach, right? Like, I want to impress this guy, I want to prepare for my story coaching, and I want I want him to think I'm good. I want him to see me and say, this guy, he stands out, he's a great
00:47:07
Speaker
He came to this coaching session. He didn't even need my coaching. And I really would have gone after it that way. But now, it was the opposite. I was like, I'm going to give this guy
00:47:21
Speaker
the sloppiest biggest story that I can give him. And I want him to earn his keep as a story coach. That takes a lot of confidence to put bad work in front of someone who's very accomplished with the end goal of it becoming very, very good. So that's amazing that you had that assurance in your own ability to be like, here's a story that's got potential.
00:47:50
Speaker
It's crappy now, but let's make it great together. Yeah. And I think it's an important point of distinction that it wasn't like I didn't work on the story. I don't want to ever put something that's bad in front of somebody, but it was more like there's this interesting difference between bad work and work that's just not good yet. And this story that I gave him was authentic. It was passionate. It was thought out.
00:48:19
Speaker
but it was certainly not ready. And, but it's like, it's malleable clay. It's like, once something's been through the kiln, it's a lot harder to shape it, you know? So it's like, I think the clay was good, good quality clay. I put a few licks on it. I mean, it looked okay, but it was not ready. And I think that, and editorially with, you know, now having worked through a novel and now working through a second novel with my editor,
00:48:49
Speaker
I feel the same way. It's like I will have a better final product if my first product that I put in front of this person is not ready
00:49:01
Speaker
but it has all the seeds of what's going to make it great. So it's got to be seeded with the greatness, but it can still be sloppy and sprawling and just gross in some ways. And so this guy, he said, so Jeff, your story, his story was 24 minutes long. That's the first thing you said.
00:49:26
Speaker
And he said, I know, I know, Larry, I know. And he says, but it's a great story. And we're going to get there. And he was. And the other thing is that when you're working with someone who's that good, you know, I want them to bring all their good tools to bear on the project. And if you bring something that's too good to somebody who's that much of an expert, they're not going to bring all their tools out. So I wanted I, you know, selfish or not.
00:49:55
Speaker
I wanted to see what he did.
Refining Stories for Competition
00:49:59
Speaker
I wanted to see how he... I love to watch mechanics work on my car. I might never be able to replace my serpentine belt or whatever, but I like to watch them do it because I feel like the process of what they do, maybe I won't be able to replace serpentine belt, but maybe I can take my battery in and out of my car. And so watching the story mechanic
00:50:22
Speaker
go to work on my sprawling, ugly story, I learned so much that I would not have learned if I had come to him with a more polished but less authentic piece of work.
00:50:37
Speaker
So what specifically about your piece needed, what brought out his skill set that you were just sponge and just learning be like, Oh wow, what a good, that is such a brilliant point. What was, what were some of those takeaways as you threw at him something that was, that had the potential and then you watched him make it great. Yeah. So, so the story was, uh, about how I went and worked on this.
00:51:06
Speaker
voter registration campaign in Jacksonville, Florida, which is the county where the Bush v. Gore election was basically decided. And in my mind, decided in a very corrupt fashion. And the story is about how four years after the Bush Gore election, I went down to that same elections office that was this pivotal
00:51:31
Speaker
spot for Bush versus Gore and I went to work on the next election, which was George Bush versus John Kerry. So it was a story about that election and specifically about that elections office and how I confronted that office. And the nuggets, the pearls of wisdom I got from the story coach Larry Rosen was, you know, I'll tell you two things. One was he said,
00:52:02
Speaker
Think of a story as like a trip in your car, and you have so many miles to travel, but you only have so long to get there, but you control when you speed up and when you slow down. So you may have three months to tell about, but you as the storyteller
00:52:30
Speaker
can decide you're going to whip through the first two months. You're going to drive like 80 miles an hour through these first two months. And then you're going to stop next to this field that's a beautiful field and you're going to describe it and you're going to show it and you're going to slow weight out of five miles an hour through this field because it's really important to you and it's really valuable to you. And then you stop on the gas and you go toward the last five miles. And that was really good advice. Just as a storyteller in general is that
00:52:59
Speaker
You've got to cover all the territory of the narrative, but the speed with which you cover it and the attention you give it is a matter of choice. It's something that you should think very intentionally about how much time you spend there. The other thing he said was within a five
00:53:24
Speaker
He had so many great things. He really did. But he said within a five, six minute story, you have to think about how many moments you can really slow down for. And he posited that you have one, maybe two key moments to a five to six minute story.
00:53:46
Speaker
And you really need to figure out what that key moment or those key moments are and then build the rest of your story around those key moments. And the last thing I'll say, so this is three, I'm kind of cheating, but he said, she said, that 24 minute story was great. That's yours. You still own that.
00:54:15
Speaker
You own that experience. You can tell a 20 minute story, a 50 minute story, a three hour story about that experience. It'll probably be great. What you need to figure out is the best five minute version of that 24 minute story. So just great, you know, great. I learned like, you know, a master's program worth of storytelling in this really brief, but important, uh, experience.
Validation from Storytelling Success
00:54:44
Speaker
Well, it's kind of like what Hemingway always said, that when you write whatever it is, whether it's your five-minute story, yeah, that's what came out of your mouth on stage that night, but it was imbued with the 24-minute draft. So that was the iceberg below the water thing that Hemingway talks about, that if you've done the work,
00:55:10
Speaker
it's actually there, even though in the listeners in that case, or the readers will feel it. Right. I firmly believe that. Yeah, I mean, it makes me feel a lot better as I torpedo yet another draft of a book. Just say, well, that's gone. You know, it's like, it's this amazing, it's this amazing experience. It's kind of like just
00:55:35
Speaker
You just submerge enough draft until finally you stack up above the water line and walk out and just say thank god that book is done now. One of the one of the great takeaways that I love in a blog post you wrote that that talked about this this experience that you had of winning this the slam
00:55:54
Speaker
Well, the grand slam was that and I'll just kind of read a little bit of it here and he said like but here's what matters about the wind It's incredibly validating for the artistic process. I've never worked harder on a story and it paid off and
00:56:10
Speaker
But the thing and then you go on and it's like you know the work of an artist is often this way being alone the public wrestling with process the attention to almost imperceptible detail everything so strange human and eccentric until the moment of delivery when it works.
00:56:25
Speaker
And I just love that because it was like this moment of like it was effort in and effort in and results out. And so what was that? Maybe speak to that point of what it was like to put in that work to see it then manifest itself. It was such a great result. It's always a surprise, you know, because it's delightful, and it shouldn't be surprising.
00:56:51
Speaker
I mean, that's how the book, that's how Wildman worked. It was all process. I didn't expect to sell or publish. I never expected to publish that book. And yeah, it's amazing to me that kind of these things that I heard as a young writer became so true. Your point to Hemingway,
00:57:20
Speaker
is one of those kind of chestnuts that eventually makes sense, but only once you've done the work. But for me, story time is new. I mean, relatively new. The Grand Slam was the second time I'd done the moth, even though
00:57:41
Speaker
I'd been doing for nine years, this other format, but I wasn't, I wasn't doing it or seeing it specifically as a storytelling exercise. It was more of like a theatrical exercise. So I didn't know if it would translate. That's the reality is for fiction, I kind of knew I kind of, you know, Wildman was kind of the litmus test where wow, I really just cared about how this book was written. And then it became a great book, you know, for me, and
00:58:10
Speaker
But with storytelling, I was like, Does this make sense? I mean, I'm telling you, you know, what the blog post says, I mean, I, I told this story to myself 100 times, I mean, over and over and over and over just, you know, it is like in the shower, walking down the street, in the car on the train on the plane, just over and over. And then I started timing myself. And
00:58:36
Speaker
Yeah, it seems you really just have to be so invested in the process and not the product to even go through that because what's worth that? Nothing. Nothing is worth that. I mean, if the process itself isn't worth that, then nothing is worth that. I mean, it's not worth it to give that big of a piece of your mental real estate over to one story for a month. I mean, they couldn't pay me enough to do that.
00:59:05
Speaker
unless the work itself was rewarding. And it was because I was teaching myself and with my, you know, with Larry, his help as a story coach, I was developing my skills as a storyteller. And so that makes it worth it. And then it becomes really validating when the story works. Because it does feel like, you know, I could not have possibly invested more time or energy in telling this story.
00:59:33
Speaker
And then to have it resonate with an audience, it feels like you're on the right track. So, yeah, it's great. I mean, and as I said, you know, public opinion is always somewhat capricious and difficult to pin down. And I don't think any writer or artist, musician should stake too much in, you know, the winter of the day because it's very arbitrary in a lot of ways.
01:00:02
Speaker
There's no argument that it still feels great when it happens. You know, it does. It feels great.
01:00:06
Speaker
And I think why it resonated with people ultimately is because there were some stakes involved, and the story was important
Managing Artistic Jealousy
01:00:16
Speaker
to you. And it's only when those sort of things intersect that you can really sort of broadcast the magnitude of what that story meant to you, and that can move people. So why was that story of those election cycles?
01:00:35
Speaker
strikes such a chord with you that here we are nearly 20 years after the first Bush v. Gore that you brought it on stage 18 years after that election and it still moves you and it moved an audience. I think it's great advice. It's been given by a lot of different sources that ultimately all great stories were about transformation. Personally,
01:01:05
Speaker
the arc that my personal lived experience to those four years was tremendous. As I divulge in the first 10 seconds of the story, I didn't even care enough to vote in the Bush v. Gore election. I didn't even vote. And then four years later, I've given up everything in my life to go down and register voters in a completely foreign
01:01:36
Speaker
city where I don't, you know, know anybody and I'm making very little money sleeping on the floor with cockroaches and mice and other stuff. And I think that that, you know, it resonates with me because it was a period of life in which I experienced this tremendous amount of change in growth. And it was such a visceral, powerful experience for me. Maybe the first
01:02:05
Speaker
or at least the most dramatic time that I kind of really put, put my, I threw myself into what my beliefs were, where I said, I believe this, I have this ideal for what people should do. And I think that was probably the first time I lived up to my own expectations of what humanity should be. You know, I said people, people should care enough about these things to give everything they've got to do it. And I had not lived that. And then I did. And
01:02:36
Speaker
Yeah, so there's still there's still a lot of fire there. I mean that experience can in a lot of ways continues to shape the way And as a as a writer, you know You've been alluding to how you learn to love the process and not the outcomes which is the in my opinion the perfect the perfect way it's the only way because that's what you have control over and
01:03:00
Speaker
I wonder how you deal with sometimes the writerly jealousy things that creep in, you know, comparing yourself to others, you know, trying to run your own race and not look over your shoulder at someone else who might be younger and nipping at your heels or younger and ahead of you and this, that and the other. I wonder how you process that so that you are running your own race and focused on your own process.
01:03:28
Speaker
Yes, great question. And yeah, those things that mean they don't go away. I mean, there's there's no, you know, as a human being, you're never going to escape. You're never going to escape that. I think what I've learned and and I mean, being being early in my, you know, I've only I've only had one novel published at this point. So I may change my thinking on this. But right now,
01:03:59
Speaker
My observation, I have a lot of friends who are farther along in their careers. They've published more books. Some have been huge New York Times best sellers, some have not. And I feel more and more like the success, success in the eyes of others, commercial success, popular success, is a zero sum game. I feel like
01:04:26
Speaker
no matter what you're given in that arena, it is going to be taken away from you at some point. And that's been a really interesting realization is that if you have the number one New York Times bestselling book for five straight months, you are like, you're it. Everybody wants to talk to you. Everybody wants your book. Everyone wants to interview you. So then then you release your next book and your next book
01:04:54
Speaker
maybe is still in New York Times, but it's like number nine. And it's on this list for a week, and then it's off. Whereas, you know, if you if you've never been on the list, then all of a sudden, it's the biggest deal in the world. But now you're excruciatingly disappointed. You know, can you ever live up to your first book, you know, or alternately, you can, you know,
01:05:15
Speaker
have your first or second or third book not sell very well and say, I have a failure. I'm ruined. I didn't have the number one book. It's this interesting thing. And I've seen this on a person by person basis. It's not just like I'm kind of conjecturing this. But I truly feel like if you choose to ride that wave,
01:05:44
Speaker
And that's kind of where you anchor your self-worth or the quality of your product in reviews, in commercial success. It giveth and it taketh away. And I think that it becomes this impossible win because you're never going to be the top
01:06:10
Speaker
forever. You might be, if you're, if you're, if you're extraordinarily successful, you might be for one book for a while. But then that day comes where your book gets knocked down off that list. And it's like, of course it does. So I feel like, for me, I've gotten, you know, because I hit bottom and kind of decided I was never gonna have any success at all. It's all gravy to me at this point. It's like, you know, any anything, anything commercially successful that happens to me,
01:06:37
Speaker
I'm grateful for it because I would still be doing this even if nobody cared.
Future Creative Challenges and Excitement
01:06:44
Speaker
But that said, I'm not trying to say I've reached this Zen Master level. Of course.
01:06:53
Speaker
if, you know, when other books are getting, you know, picked for awards or if other books are doing better, you know, I'm not going to say that there's never a sting. Like, there is a sting. Like, that happens. But I think it's important to kind of think about the reality of the down slope of every win. It's the what comes up must come down thing. And I think the more that you can stay at equilibrium,
01:07:19
Speaker
with your own process and make each day that you have as a writer. I mean, that's my focus is like, how is my daily life? Do I have a great daily life? That's what I want. And if I keep having a great daily life and a good relationship with my work, then I'll keep doing it longer. And the longer I do it, the better I'll get and the better I get. Hopefully the more people will read my work.
01:07:41
Speaker
So yeah, and I guess before I let you get out of here Jeff You know you alluded to earlier about you know if things aren't scaring you general you It's probably not worth doing so at what is scaring you now as you're creating your your next book and and whatever storytelling you're you're doing what's
01:08:08
Speaker
Oh my gosh, you're gonna let me go? There's just the list is so long. I mean, you know, I mean, there's a lot, a lot of things. I mean, you know, this next book is, is, is, is, is a lot. It's, it's, it's an ambitious book and it's, it's got a lot of different threads. It deals with, with a lot of different issues. You know, I, I, with wild man, I had one location. It was like one place.
01:08:35
Speaker
This book is even geographically just a lot different. I guess what scares me the most though isn't any specific mechanics. I just try to lean into what I feel like I can't do yet.
01:08:51
Speaker
You know, I mean, I so I don't have a lot of confidence in my singing voice at all. And I'm definitely not going to share it with you now. But but but yeah, there's no it's true. That's the too scary category. But it's like so I was I thought, Oh, I'm scared of this. I'm scared of singing publicly. And so then I had this I did this this presentation and I did it because I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to sing a song. I'm going to sing the song. I sing my kids.
01:09:21
Speaker
When I put them to sleep, you know, I'm going to sing this, you know, and it works thematically. I'm like, I'm going to sing it to this group. And it was, I'm sure it was awful. I mean, I don't have the training to pull it off, but people responded really well and they were, you know, sympathetic.
01:09:42
Speaker
But the great thing is I realized I want to be a good singer. And that fear a lot comes from the worry that you won't be able to get the thing you want. That you're not good enough.
01:09:56
Speaker
you know, you're not strong enough, you're not perseverant enough, you don't have the natural ability. But but the fear is that you actually want it. If you didn't actually want it, it wouldn't be scary. And so, for me, you know, I try to lean into the fear, you know, with Wildman, the fear was, I realized that a lot of my high concept books were because I didn't think I could I could hold a reader's attention without a really big high concept book, that I needed some kind of
01:10:26
Speaker
major, you know, like world ending hook to keep people interested. And when I kind of gave that up and said, you know what, I'm really scared to just get the quality of my writing and my characters can keep a reader interested. And that was that was scary to me. So that's what I leaned into. And with this book, you know, it's different elements that are scary that I'm leaning into. But it's
01:10:50
Speaker
For me, usually what I really want is on the other side of fear. I try to pay attention to what scares me, and then I try to see behind the fear to what it is that I really want and what I want to accomplish. Then I have to say, well, I'm going to have to go through that fear.
01:11:14
Speaker
Again, use the Dan the Torpedoes philosophy and just do my best. If nothing else, I'll learn from it. That's amazing. Jeff, where can people find you online and get more familiar with your work if they're not already? The best place is jcgeiger.com. I've got a fun slider that has different things I'm doing and things that are going on. I've also started doing this Instagram
01:11:42
Speaker
experiment where I've had a very love-hate relationship with social media. And on Instagram, I've started only posting about the process, none of the product. So I get really sick of seeing every book cover, every award ceremony, every accolade, every review. It just gets really boring. And so I've decided on Instagram, I'm not going to post anything that's remotely victorious or celebratory. I'm only going to post
01:12:08
Speaker
the kind of dregs of process. So I'm excited about that. That's been fun. And that's, yeah, that's cool. A low light reel instead of a highlight reel. Yeah, exactly.
Community Engagement and Creative Journeys
01:12:18
Speaker
That's what it is. Yeah, it's an app actually really enjoyed it. Like I look forward to doing it, you know, and it's and that's a j.c.geiger on Instagram. So, so yeah, that'll be fun. That's fun to do. And yeah, those are the two best places to find me.
01:12:34
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Jeff, this was a ton of fun. I had a lot of fun talking to you here, getting to know you a little bit about your process and your approach to the work. I'd love to have you on for a part two in the future at some point, because I think we can dive into a lot of other cool advice and habit-based, ritual-based, process-based stuff. But I think this is a wonderful first round. So thanks so much for coming on the show.
01:13:01
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. It was great, and I could talk process all day. Thanks for having me on, Brendan. I really appreciate it. Fantastic. Keep up the great work and we'll be in touch. Okay. Thank you. Bye, Jeff. Bye.
01:13:16
Speaker
like I said I don't know how sustainable this is friend but I hope I can do it because how great did your day just get because of Jeff so we hit the 40 ratings and review mark on iTunes that's incredible and I want to thank all of you for taking the time to do that
01:13:37
Speaker
let's not stop there let's get to the 50s because reviews and ratings will help this little corner of the internet that we've been digging our little trench in gain a bit of traction so we can reach and empower more tellers of true tales so
01:13:56
Speaker
Head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes, but also to subscribe to my monthly newsletter where I hand out my nonfiction and sometimes fiction recommendations for the month, as well as tidbits from the podcast. Once a month, no spam.
01:14:15
Speaker
You can't beat that. Unsubscribe anytime, it'll hurt my feelings, but I get it. Got a question or concern? Ping me on the Twitters, at Brendan O'Mara or at CNFpod.
01:14:27
Speaker
like the facebook page at cnf podcast or send me an electronic mail gram either way i'm an open book i'm not flooded with too much stuff go ahead and ask a question or express a concern as always thank you for listening goodbye till the next time we say hello
01:15:32
Speaker
Thank you.