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#155 - Audrey Burges
421 Plays1 year ago
Novelist, humorist and satirist, Audrey Burges chats about her adventures in writing from shorts and essays in publications like the New Yorker to her debut from last year and the follow up coming this year!
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Transcript
Introduction and Subscription Information
00:00:00
Speaker
To listen without ads, head over to patreon.com slash rightandwrong.
00:00:04
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Ooh, a spicy question.
00:00:07
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I love it.
00:00:07
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Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
00:00:09
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You can fix plot holes, but if the writer... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
00:00:15
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So it's kind of a gamble.
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello
Meet Audrey Burgess: Writer and Essayist
00:00:19
Speaker
and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
00:00:21
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Today I am joined by a writer and essayist from Richmond, Virginia, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and McSweeney's, as well as many other outlets.
00:00:31
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Her debut novel came out last year and her second novel is releasing later this year.
00:00:36
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It's Audrey Burgess.
00:00:37
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Hello.
00:00:38
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Hi, thanks so much for having me.
00:00:41
Speaker
Thanks for coming on.
00:00:42
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Now I normally start these with whatever the kind of current publication is, but it feels like you're right in the middle of your first and second one.
The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone
00:00:52
Speaker
In fact, the paperback of your debut novel, The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone will be out by the time this airs.
00:00:59
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I'd love to start off with you telling us a little bit about that novel.
00:01:04
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Sure.
00:01:05
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So the minuscule mansion of Myra Malone is about a reclusive 34 year old woman who kind of has been housebound since she was a child in her house in Arizona.
00:01:18
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And she's kind of devoted her life's work curating this minuscule mansion.
00:01:24
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She really takes offense when people refer to it as a dollhouse.
00:01:28
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She inherited that from her step-grandmother.
00:01:32
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So her best friend has been trying to convince her to put it online for quite some time.
00:01:37
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And when she finally manages to do that, not long after that, they're contacted by someone who lives across the country and who lives in a full size version of the house right down to the furniture.
00:01:50
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And so the book kind of unwinds how that could possibly be true.
00:01:55
Speaker
Yes, it's a very interesting and sort of peculiar tale of, would we say magical realism?
00:02:02
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Yeah,
UK Cover Art and Evolution of the Novel
00:02:03
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I would say so.
00:02:03
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Yeah.
00:02:04
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Just a little bit of, it's kind of near, near world, just a little bit of magic with a world that we recognize.
00:02:10
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Yeah.
00:02:10
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Yeah.
00:02:11
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Yeah.
00:02:11
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And absolutely beautiful cover.
00:02:13
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I've seen both the US and the UK one.
00:02:15
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They both look great.
00:02:16
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I have looked, I've really lucked out with covers generally.
00:02:19
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Yes, I have.
00:02:20
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I can claim absolutely no credit for it, but I, every time I get one, I'm like, Oh, this is perfect.
00:02:26
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Yeah, they are.
00:02:26
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They are.
00:02:27
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They are great.
00:02:27
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And I think very representative of the, of the book as well.
00:02:31
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Well, the interesting thing, I don't know if you know this or not, but the UK cover, both the hardback and the paperback, those miniatures on the front and the back were actually commissioned by the publisher, by a miniaturist called Hannah Lemon.
00:02:47
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And they're the miniatures from the book.
00:02:49
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So she actually read the descriptions of the furniture and made those for the cover.
00:02:56
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Oh, that's so cool.
00:02:57
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It's very cool.
00:02:58
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Do you know where they are?
00:02:59
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The actual physical miniatures?
00:03:02
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So she kept them.
00:03:03
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She actually started doing a kind of a promotion for it and showed how she had made it and everything like that.
00:03:10
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Interestingly, one of the pieces on the back, when they were first sending me the pictures of the pieces in progress...
00:03:16
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There's a picture of a bed, Alex's bed.
00:03:20
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And that actually, that was one of the few, there were a few pieces of furniture in the book that were from real life.
00:03:26
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And that was one of them.
00:03:28
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That was a piece, that was a bed that I actually slept on that I inherited from my great grandmother when I was a small child.
00:03:34
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And I don't have it anymore.
00:03:36
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So when they sent me the picture, I actually burst into tears and I sent it to my grandfather.
00:03:40
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And I'm like, this is your mother's bed that I used to sleep on when I was a kid.
00:03:44
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So yeah, so she still has them.
00:03:46
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And she still, I see them in little tableaus that she puts together on Instagram and stuff from time to time.
00:03:52
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And it always gives me a little thrilled.
00:03:53
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Oh, that's from the cover.
00:03:56
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That's so cool.
00:03:57
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What a cool kind of physical memento of the story.
00:04:00
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Yes, absolutely.
00:04:01
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Yeah.
00:04:01
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So
From Romantic Comedy to Magical Realism
00:04:02
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you've been writing and publishing short stories and essays for a long time and for a number of big publications.
00:04:11
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I'd love to know if this novel, The Miniscule Mansion, was this your first kind of go at a full length novel?
00:04:20
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It wasn't, actually.
00:04:21
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And the way that it came about was because the humor and the essays.
00:04:26
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I'm so sorry if you can hear my dog in the background.
00:04:28
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He's very upset with me.
00:04:31
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The first book that I wrote was a kind of a dark and twisty mystery that was completely different from this one.
00:04:39
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Um, and when I wrote it, one of the things that I started reading, you know, everywhere I could find about what do you do when you write a book?
00:04:47
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How do you start getting this book published?
00:04:49
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And one of the things that all of the articles advised was start building a platform, you know, start, start getting an audience.
00:04:56
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And that's when I started writing short stories and essays and short humor.
00:05:01
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And it kind of became its own thing.
00:05:04
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But it also became completely inconsistent with the tone of this first book that I'd written.
00:05:09
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And so after a while trying to find that one a home, it dawned on me that maybe what I needed to do was write something a little lighter hearted, a little more fun.
00:05:18
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And so originally, The Miniscule Mansion was intended to be a romantic comedy.
Inspiration for the Second Novel
00:05:24
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There was just, you know, she was building these miniature kits.
00:05:27
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I was following a lot of people online who were buying books.
00:05:31
Speaker
these book nook kits that would slide between books on your book.
00:05:35
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And some of them have lights and fireplaces and all that kind of stuff.
00:05:38
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I thought, okay, well, I'll have somebody who builds those for, you know, online sales and she doesn't leave the house.
00:05:44
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And somehow one of them makes their way to, you know, some guy and they have a meet cute and fall in love.
00:05:50
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And instead, as I started writing, I didn't get very far into the book at all until I got, I was probably only a couple thousand words in.
00:05:59
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When the scene in the book that I think is now in the second or third chapter about Myra as a child seeing her eye wink back at her in a mirror in the house and not knowing how to wink herself, that scene kind of jumped into my head fully formed.
00:06:17
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And as soon as it happened, I went, oh, this is a different book.
00:06:20
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This is not
00:06:21
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this is not a romantic comedy.
00:06:22
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This is something else.
00:06:23
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And I knew exactly where that wink came from.
00:06:25
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And from that point on, I started writing that book and tried to keep up with kind of what I realized had happened with that, that blink of an eye.
00:06:37
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Oh, that's so interesting.
00:06:38
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So it really did start out with something else and then moved into something else and then became something else entirely.
00:06:44
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Yes.
00:06:45
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Yes.
00:06:46
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It was the, the characters were really, um,
00:06:53
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They had their own voices in my head right away.
00:06:57
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And I could really I could hear the way Myra and Gwen talked to each other and I could hear the way, you know, Lou talked to Myra.
00:07:05
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And so it really that really kind of helped inform how these characters interacted, where their history was, that sort of thing.
00:07:15
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Okay.
00:07:15
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Okay.
Finding an Agent and Writing Journey
00:07:16
Speaker
Did you have an agent when you were writing this book or did you go out on submission?
00:07:21
Speaker
This is the book that got me an agent.
00:07:23
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So this book, I went out to a few people who had had the first book and had been complimentary about it, but hadn't wound up ultimately picking it up.
00:07:36
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And, uh, and I also had some, some friends who referred me to some other agents who were interested in magical realism.
00:07:42
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And it was in the process of sending this book out that I wound up getting my agent.
00:07:47
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That's interesting to know.
00:07:48
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Cause I was wondering.
00:07:49
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through your other writing, your short stories and things, if you'd already found an agent or something like that?
00:07:56
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But it's interesting to know that you did it with this.
00:07:59
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No, I actually had had a couple of times, because I'm not nearly as active as I was anymore, but I used to be very, very active on Twitter as part of my humor writing.
00:08:12
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And I had had a couple of agents reach out to me and say, you know, hey, this was really funny.
00:08:17
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Have you thought about writing a book?
00:08:19
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And I was like, well, actually, since you mentioned it.
00:08:23
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The ones who read that first book were kind of like, oh, yeah, no, not this.
00:08:29
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And when I had the mansion done, I had a couple of agents who reached out that way, too.
00:08:34
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And they were very nice.
00:08:36
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One of them didn't wind up going forward, but also had kind of commented, you know, I really wanted to see more detail.
00:08:43
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I'd love it if you described in greater detail what the mansion looked like and where the rooms are and how it's been.
00:08:49
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And I kind of resisted that.
00:08:52
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And I'm glad that I did.
00:08:53
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Because in my head, one of the things that I like best about this story, one of the things I like best about stories that I enjoy is when there's just enough detail to kind of give you a skeleton of
00:09:04
Speaker
But you put on all the muscles yourself.
00:09:07
Speaker
So I love the idea that there's as many versions of the mansion in the world as people who have read about it.
00:09:15
Speaker
And I've had people... I had someone stop me once in a meeting and say, just so you know, the mansion has a pink roof.
00:09:23
Speaker
But I just loved that.
00:09:24
Speaker
I was like...
00:09:26
Speaker
I'm so happy to hear that.
00:09:27
Speaker
I'm glad your version of the band has a big group.
00:09:30
Speaker
So it was a fun exercise to kind of find a good match for someone who really kind of shared that vision for what that world could be.
00:09:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting as well, because it's sort of along that school of thought.
00:09:44
Speaker
And there's a lot of authors who try not to describe the characters too much.
00:09:48
Speaker
They'll sort of give them one trait, like this character had spiky hair, and then they'll just do nothing else.
00:09:54
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Yeah, absolutely.
00:09:56
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So that you just let, you become sort of participatory.
00:10:00
Speaker
Exactly.
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:01
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Join in on the creation.
00:10:02
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Right.
00:10:03
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And that's actually why, you know, I think we've all had that experience where, you know, we, we have a book that we love and it gets made into a movie or a series and you see who they've cast and you're like, no, no, that's not who that is.
Writing Style and Minimalism
00:10:17
Speaker
I have always really liked that because I love talking with people about books that they they have read and I have read and we've both loved and how differently we experienced it.
00:10:27
Speaker
I just that's to me, that's one of the most fun things about reading is is the fact that the story on the page is really pretty distinct from the story that winds up in that in that reader's head.
00:10:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
00:10:44
Speaker
It's a different experience for everyone that reads it, which is what's kind of so great about reading.
00:10:49
Speaker
It's not just the author, it is collaborative with the reader.
00:10:52
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:10:54
Speaker
So let's talk about the second novel.
Themes of Identity and Place in Second Novel
00:10:56
Speaker
And I noticed that while we were talking about Minuscule Mansion, that you mentioned it sort of started out a bit darker, a bit more sinister.
00:11:05
Speaker
I feel like A House Like an Accordion
00:11:08
Speaker
I read a bit of the blurb.
00:11:10
Speaker
It sounds immediately more sinister than the first one.
00:11:14
Speaker
Yes, it is.
00:11:15
Speaker
It does have a bit of, it has some more darkness to it.
00:11:20
Speaker
That book, so A House Like an Accordion is about a woman who is middle-aged and realizes one day that she's starting to literally disappear, starting to fade away.
00:11:30
Speaker
And as she's trying to figure out how that could be happening and what could have caused it, she realizes it must be tied to a peculiar talent that her father, who had disappeared decades before, had.
00:11:44
Speaker
And then she kind of has to track him down to figure out how to stop it.
00:11:48
Speaker
But that book, I didn't mean to write two successive stories.
00:11:53
Speaker
magical house books in a row.
00:11:56
Speaker
Um, and it's not a house, like an accordion, the house is not really as central to the story as, um, as the mansion is, but it's, um, it started of all things, that book started with a tweet and it actually started with a tweet that a friend of mine had posted, um, asking, you know, if you, if you had a, in your life that money was no object, you, you know, you,
00:12:21
Speaker
You had endless money and you could do whatever you wanted with it.
00:12:23
Speaker
What is the thing that you would do that would make your life feel more complete?
00:12:29
Speaker
And I love seeing all of the replies, but I was also really surprised that the answer that I came up with popped into my head immediately.
00:12:38
Speaker
And it was really weird.
00:12:40
Speaker
It was that I would...
00:12:42
Speaker
track down and buy all of the houses that my dad had built when I was growing up, all of the places that we lived.
00:12:50
Speaker
Because my parents were builders in addition to teachers.
00:12:56
Speaker
And they...
00:12:58
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there wasn't a single place that I lived growing up that was not a construction scene at some point.
00:13:03
Speaker
And usually when the house was finished, that's when it was time to leave.
00:13:07
Speaker
And so when I had this idea that, you know, that's what I would do, I thought that's kind of interesting.
00:13:11
Speaker
There's kind of a story there.
00:13:12
Speaker
Why would someone do that?
00:13:14
Speaker
Why, you know, why did they move so frequently?
00:13:17
Speaker
Why do they want all these houses?
00:13:19
Speaker
And the story kind of started to spin its way out from, from that central conceit and turn really into a story about, um,
00:13:29
Speaker
The fact that, you know, how much of who we are as people gets defined by the people we came from and how much we have to wind up defining and anchoring ourselves.
00:13:42
Speaker
Okay.
00:13:42
Speaker
That's so interesting.
00:13:44
Speaker
Cause I was going to say there's definitely a theme here with sort of real estate being at the focus of your stories.
00:13:51
Speaker
And I'm wondering if it's because growing up, you sort of, all of your houses were sort of semi-permanent.
00:13:58
Speaker
So that's why you kind of gravitate towards these stories of people being attached to certain homes.
00:14:03
Speaker
I think, I think it is, you know, I'm, I'm one of those people that I have certain recurring dreams.
00:14:08
Speaker
And one of them that I have from time to time is I'll have a
00:14:11
Speaker
I'll have one of those places that for some reason it turns out we left something behind and I've got to find it and I've got to, you know, get it back.
00:14:18
Speaker
And that kind of sense of, of being unfinished or having something that I have a connection to out in the world that I've got to get back to.
00:14:25
Speaker
I think, you know, to a certain extent, the fact that I had that as kind of a foundation that, all right, I didn't mean that as a pun, but the foundational concept that, that, you know, that I had kind of had this background, um,
00:14:40
Speaker
there's kind of an inherent magic in building, right?
00:14:43
Speaker
So, you know, my father never was without a book that had graph paper in it.
00:14:48
Speaker
And he was never not sketching rooms or, you know, additions or things like that.
00:14:54
Speaker
And there's a, I think there is a kind of, especially when you're a small child, the fact that you can go from this very two dimensional concept to something that's real and that you can step into and live in and have as part of your life.
00:15:09
Speaker
That is magic.
00:15:10
Speaker
I mean, that doesn't seem like anything other than magic when you're small in particular.
00:15:15
Speaker
So I think that just kind of burrowed its way into my brain and does wind up.
00:15:20
Speaker
I'm one of those people that always notices architecture.
00:15:23
Speaker
I always notice the feel of a building.
00:15:24
Speaker
And I think that that's because it was such a big part of my life growing up.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:30
Speaker
And totally makes sense why you do seem to be very much interested in the place as a theme in your books.
00:15:40
Speaker
So House Like an Accordion is out 21st of May.
00:15:45
Speaker
Remarkably fast follow up to your debut.
00:15:48
Speaker
As you said, you alluded to, you didn't really intend to write two books almost simultaneously.
00:15:54
Speaker
Am I right in thinking that it's actually being published by a different imprint to the first book?
00:16:00
Speaker
So it's being published by the imprint that was the first imprint for the Minuscule Mansion.
00:16:07
Speaker
So the Minuscule Mansion came out in the U.S.,
00:16:10
Speaker
almost a year ago, January 24th, with Berkeley, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
00:16:17
Speaker
And they are also the ones that they actually, at the time that they contracted for the mansion, they also contracted for a second book, which was actually accordion.
00:16:28
Speaker
And I was about halfway through writing it when that contract got signed.
00:16:33
Speaker
And so, um, so there it's coming out there, the same publisher, although a different imprint.
00:16:40
Speaker
So it's actually coming out on ACE, which is the kind of fantasy imprint for, um, for Penguin Random House, uh, because it is a little more, it is, it is still, I would say closer to magical realism than full out fantasy, but it definitely has a lot more fantasy, a lot more fantastical elements to it.
00:17:02
Speaker
Um,
00:17:03
Speaker
And so that's why it kind of, it was a slightly different fit than Berkeley, which tends to focus a lot more on romance, plus a little something else.
00:17:11
Speaker
And this has some of that, but not as much as the mansion did.
00:17:16
Speaker
Oh, I see.
00:17:16
Speaker
So it was more of a genre reason why it's on different interests.
00:17:21
Speaker
You're tiptoeing the lines of different genres.
00:17:24
Speaker
Correct.
00:17:24
Speaker
I was fortunate enough to work with the same editorial team and everybody was exactly the same.
00:17:31
Speaker
It's just a different picture on that final page.
00:17:35
Speaker
Okay.
00:17:36
Speaker
Okay.
00:17:36
Speaker
That's really cool.
00:17:37
Speaker
That's really interesting.
00:17:38
Speaker
And I'd wager that you're probably already working on something new.
00:17:45
Speaker
Does it involve a connection with some kind of homestead?
00:17:49
Speaker
It doesn't actually.
00:17:52
Speaker
I'm actually
Balancing Writing and Life
00:17:53
Speaker
currently working on my seventh book, but I have two others that are kind of on submission right now.
00:18:02
Speaker
And one of them does the
00:18:04
Speaker
does have a house as part of it.
00:18:06
Speaker
But again, it's not central to the story.
00:18:08
Speaker
Uh, and it was totally by accident.
00:18:10
Speaker
I got to the end of my first draft of that book and went, Oh, and there's a, there's another house.
00:18:15
Speaker
Look at that.
00:18:15
Speaker
But the, um, but those are really, uh, I would say those three are the only kind of, um, building centric books.
00:18:23
Speaker
The rest are, um, kind of funny, um, sort of, uh, right.
00:18:29
Speaker
Same kind of thing.
00:18:30
Speaker
I really love, um,
00:18:32
Speaker
reading stories that seem plausibly here, but there's just a little bit of an element of something other.
00:18:43
Speaker
And, you know, I love that in Neil Gaiman books.
00:18:46
Speaker
I love it in, um, Aaron Morgenstern books.
00:18:49
Speaker
I love, uh, you know, that kind of sense that the world that we're walking through every single day might have something more to it that only certain people can see.
00:19:00
Speaker
And so that element kind of works its way into everything that I write.
00:19:06
Speaker
I'd say probably a little bit, even in my, in my humor writing, there's always a little bit of the surreal.
00:19:12
Speaker
And that's because I just, I find that so interesting myself.
00:19:16
Speaker
The books that I'm working on right now is actually a funny, I believe the genre is cozy horror, which has been a lot of fun because I've been able to just kind of throw myself into a completely different feel, which is, which is a lot of fun to explore.
00:19:34
Speaker
Okay.
00:19:36
Speaker
So did I catch that correctly?
00:19:38
Speaker
You're currently working on your seventh book.
00:19:41
Speaker
That is correct.
00:19:42
Speaker
Okay.
00:19:43
Speaker
So is this, is Minuscule Mansion was book number one, two is coming out.
00:19:49
Speaker
So you have five.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah, it was technically, so Minuscule Mansion was the second book that I wrote, first book that got published.
00:19:57
Speaker
After A House Like an Accordion, which was book number three, I wrote two more in fairly quick succession books.
00:20:03
Speaker
Um, and then, uh, wrote, I actually started putting together a, a kind of an anthology with new material of the humor pieces that I'd published.
00:20:14
Speaker
Um, and then I, uh, started writing two additional novels, uh, one of which was actually a sequel to the mansion.
00:20:22
Speaker
Um, and so, um,
00:20:23
Speaker
we, uh, I've, I've kind of got all of those in the wings.
00:20:27
Speaker
I'm somebody who I, I, I tend to do better when I have several projects underway at once.
00:20:34
Speaker
And I use them as kind of palate cleansers for each other.
00:20:38
Speaker
So if I hit a wall on something that I'm writing, I can switch to, you know, a short story or something funny or another, you know, plot elements in a, in a outline for a book I'm working on or that sort of thing.
00:20:51
Speaker
So I tend, and I also, I write,
00:20:54
Speaker
I write really, really fast.
00:20:55
Speaker
I've always written really, really fast, largely because of my career.
00:21:00
Speaker
I'm an attorney and I always did a lot of litigation where you have to
00:21:04
Speaker
write accurately and persuasively and quickly.
00:21:09
Speaker
And that lends itself a lot more to creative writing than I ever would have imagined.
00:21:15
Speaker
You know, when you've got to convince a judge to go your way on something, it's not all that different from trying to convince a reader that this world that you've put in front of them is worth their time.
00:21:26
Speaker
I always, I have described it as my hamster brain.
00:21:29
Speaker
I kind of have, my brain is going all the time, like a hamster on a wheel.
00:21:35
Speaker
And, you know, I let it run all through work, all through the day.
00:21:39
Speaker
And then I come home and I put it on the mom wheel.
00:21:42
Speaker
And then I get the kids into bed and I take the hamster off and I put it on the fiction wheel.
00:21:47
Speaker
And just right and right and right until I can't anymore.
00:21:50
Speaker
And then I do it all again.
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:53
Speaker
Wow.
00:21:54
Speaker
That's incredible.
00:21:56
Speaker
The amount that you are fitting in to 24 hours of daylight.
00:22:00
Speaker
It's, it is, uh, it's sometimes a little exhausting because I've never been able to turn it off.
00:22:07
Speaker
Um, and it's one of the, frankly, it's one of the ways I, I stay sane.
00:22:12
Speaker
Um, I just kind of have
00:22:13
Speaker
have a story going or a few stories going at any given time.
00:22:17
Speaker
I also learned that because I have things tend to weird, I'm the type of person that I'll notice a detail and I, I can't let it go.
00:22:26
Speaker
I can't, you know, it can be something as simple as a necklace I see on the street and I ain't
00:22:30
Speaker
I can't just be like, oh, there's a necklace on the street.
00:22:33
Speaker
And so my brain is like, oh, who dropped that necklace?
00:22:35
Speaker
Was that a precious necklace?
00:22:36
Speaker
Did they get it from their great grandmother?
00:22:38
Speaker
What happened?
00:22:38
Speaker
Like, was there a tragic accident that made this necklace fall off?
00:22:42
Speaker
Did somebody break off?
00:22:43
Speaker
And I can't, it's like that all the time.
00:22:45
Speaker
I've described it to people and they, a lot of them look at me either like I've grown two heads or like, you poor thing, that must be exhausting.
00:22:54
Speaker
And it is actually kind
00:22:57
Speaker
that I can't kind of let those details go.
00:22:59
Speaker
But it's hugely helpful for stories, because I have kind of learned to never let one of those details go.
00:23:07
Speaker
If one of those things catches in my brain, sort of like a fish hook, I immediately get out my phone and, you know, jot a note to myself, or I have a long text thread of voice to text that I send to myself when I'm driving.
00:23:23
Speaker
Accordion actually started that way.
00:23:25
Speaker
Um, and, uh, where I just kind of spin out those details so that I, I have something written down that I can go back to later.
00:23:33
Speaker
Uh, and sometimes when I go back, it's nonsense and I don't, I don't pursue it any further.
00:23:39
Speaker
And sometimes I go back and I go, Oh no, yeah, that could really be something.
00:23:43
Speaker
Um, and it's kind of fun to see which of those things wind up playing out into something bigger.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:50
Speaker
Wow.
00:23:50
Speaker
That's really, that's really cool.
00:23:52
Speaker
And it feels like sort of any one tiny thing that happens to you in a day could spin out into some kind of wild story.
00:23:59
Speaker
Yes, absolutely.
00:24:00
Speaker
And what's your, if that's your kind of inception of the stories, how they begin, are you the kind of person that then takes that and then plans and plots out the whole thing?
00:24:12
Speaker
You know, I've, I started out as a pure, almost a pure pantser.
00:24:19
Speaker
where I would have some kind of overarching idea of where the story was going.
00:24:24
Speaker
And then I would kind of outline as I went, you know, I'd put little, I used to use brackets a lot where I would kind of put an open bracket and then write, write something brilliant here later, close bracket, and then go on to the idea that I had, that I had to get out on the page.
00:24:41
Speaker
And so I used to jump around a lot.
00:24:43
Speaker
And as I've, as I've continued to develop as a writer, I've,
00:24:48
Speaker
I've become a lot more linear in the way these stories come out.
00:24:54
Speaker
And I don't know if that's just...
00:24:57
Speaker
by virtue of the types of stories and the way I have to make sure they're constructed so that I don't drop details.
00:25:04
Speaker
Or if it's just my brain has got, I think I had such a backlog of stories when I started writing that it all kind of, you know, it was like a overfilled balloon that just started, you know, pushing out in a cascade for a while.
00:25:18
Speaker
And now that I've been doing it for a while, I'm a lot better at kind of being like, no, we're going to, we're going to direct this train of thought into something that makes a little more sense than just, you know,
00:25:27
Speaker
you know, spray painting onto the page.
00:25:29
Speaker
And so I, I definitely, what I will sometimes do, the first book I ever wrote was kind of a math exercise.
00:25:36
Speaker
It was sort of convinced myself that I could do it.
00:25:39
Speaker
I outlined the plot points and then kind of told myself, right, how many, how many words would I need
00:25:46
Speaker
to tell this part of the story.
00:25:48
Speaker
And I was doing that because the first book I ever wrote, I wrote a National Novel Writing Month.
00:25:53
Speaker
And I wanted to convince myself that I had 50,000 words worth of story there.
00:25:59
Speaker
It turns out I had 87,000 words worth of story there.
00:26:02
Speaker
After that, that kind of exercise sort of informed what I do with every story as it starts to unwind.
00:26:10
Speaker
I sort of have a... I've started... The other thing that I built into my practice...
00:26:17
Speaker
after the first couple of times is I write the synopsis first and I give myself permission to deviate from it but having that skeleton written down when you actually do have to have a synopsis and a blurb and that sort of thing is so much easier than trying to kind of...
00:26:36
Speaker
you know, come up with that, that encapsulation of the story later.
00:26:39
Speaker
So with a kind of a kind of a roadmap, and sometimes a few words for each chapter to just kind of remind myself what I have to achieve before the next one.
00:26:50
Speaker
That tends to be my process writing books now.
00:26:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:26:54
Speaker
So there's, there is a sort of roadmap, but you're more than happy to go off road.
00:26:59
Speaker
Yes.
00:27:00
Speaker
And sometimes I do.
00:27:01
Speaker
A lot of times, you know, particularly if it's a plot point that has to originate with the character having a conversation, those tend to go all sorts of places that I didn't expect.
00:27:12
Speaker
And, you know, someone will say something that is a huge revelation that even that surprises me.
00:27:16
Speaker
I'm like, oh, that happened.
00:27:18
Speaker
Wow.
00:27:20
Speaker
I have to build that back in.
00:27:21
Speaker
And so so that's kind of fun, too, is that, you know, I give myself the highlights, but I also give myself permission to play.
00:27:29
Speaker
So I don't feel like I'm, you know, having to be too regimented, slogging through.
00:27:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:35
Speaker
Well, it sounds like you've really, you've really kind of honed that process and you've really found a, a good rhythm that works, that works for you.
00:27:42
Speaker
And that brings us to what is always the final question of every episode.
00:27:47
Speaker
And
Desert Island Book Choice
00:27:48
Speaker
that is Audrey, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book would you hope it would be?
00:27:55
Speaker
So I had to think really hard about this question.
00:27:58
Speaker
Um, and I know that you probably ask it anticipating that someone is going to tell you a novel and I have a million favorite novels.
00:28:05
Speaker
But when I was thinking of the thing I would want on a desert island, I have a really strange answer.
00:28:10
Speaker
And that is I have a 1950s edition of The Joy of Cooking.
00:28:14
Speaker
And it's huge.
00:28:17
Speaker
It's massive.
00:28:17
Speaker
And it was before the days that, you know, people wrote big stories before a recipe.
00:28:24
Speaker
But it was also from the days where the writers assumed that you would have occasion to know how to break down an entire deer carcass and turn it into dinner.
00:28:33
Speaker
And I just, but at the same time, you know, the same book has, you know, chapters about fancy dinner parties and how to, how to lay out your fine silver.
00:28:41
Speaker
And I just love the juxtaposition.
00:28:43
Speaker
Again, to me, it's, there's, there's so many different stories there about, you know, the type of assumptions that result in this huge compendium of every possible circumstance under which you might need to prepare food and all of the weird ingredients you might have close to hand to do that.
00:29:00
Speaker
And so,
00:29:02
Speaker
Because, again, I'm the type of person who spins out stories from details like that, I would have an endless font of fun thought experiments if I had something like that close to hand.
00:29:13
Speaker
Oh yeah, that's an amazing choice.
00:29:14
Speaker
That sounds like a truly fascinating book from another time.
00:29:18
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:29:20
Speaker
And you're so on the money back before people put their biographies.
00:29:25
Speaker
Exactly.
00:29:28
Speaker
You can fill in the details yourself.
00:29:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:31
Speaker
Amazing.
00:29:31
Speaker
Well, that's an awesome choice.
00:29:32
Speaker
Very unique as well.
00:29:34
Speaker
Thank you so much, Audrey, for coming on the podcast and telling us all about your books.
00:29:39
Speaker
The one that is about to come out on paperback, it's been out since last year, and the new one.
00:29:43
Speaker
I'm amazed at how much you are writing, how much you are putting out and looking forward to hearing more of your name as more of your books come out.
00:29:51
Speaker
Thanks so much for coming on.
00:29:52
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me.
00:29:53
Speaker
It was delightful to talk to you.
Where to Follow Audrey Burgess
00:29:55
Speaker
And for anyone listening wanting to keep up with what Audrey is doing, you can follow her on Twitter at Audrey underscore Burgess, on Instagram at Audrey Burgess, on Facebook at A Burgess Writes, or on her website, www.audreyburgess.com.
00:30:10
Speaker
To make sure you don't miss an episode of this podcast, follow along on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
00:30:14
Speaker
You can support the show on Patreon.
00:30:16
Speaker
And for more Bookish Chat, check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes.
00:30:20
Speaker
Thanks again to Audrey and thanks to everyone listening.
00:30:22
Speaker
We'll catch you on the next episode.