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Episode 51—Jessica Lahey on Hidden Monsters, the Gift of Failure, and Keeping Your Butt in the Chair
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Jessica Lahey, author of the essay "I've Taught Monsters" and the NYT best seller "The Gift of Failure," came by the show to talk about teaching and getting the work done. "The work of being a writer means you get words on the page. It's as simple as that. I means you read, you write, and get words on the page." We talk about her approach to teaching and language, and also how Stephen King's "On Writing" influenced her style. We also talk about what it means to work hard as a writer. Dig the show? Give the podcast a nice review. You won't be alone. Several people have done it, so join them! Thanks for listening!
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Transcript
Introduction: Jessica Leahy and 'The Gift of Failure'
00:00:00
Speaker
So before we start this week's episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, I need to... I need to first get an oil change and there's this place down the road. What's it called? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Riffy Lou. Yep, they just keep on coming. I'm afraid I've got a couple more. Just roll with it.
00:00:26
Speaker
So this week's episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is with Jessica Leahy, episode 51. She wrote this great essay in the latest issue of Creative Nonfiction called, I've Taught Monsters. And it's great. It's what prompted me to reach out to her.
00:00:42
Speaker
And let me read you a little bit of her bio right out of the magazine. It says Jessica Leahy is a teacher and the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Gift of Failure, How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go, So Their Children Can Succeed. Her writing on education and child welfare appears regularly in the Atlantic, Vermont Public Radio, and the New York Times. She lives in New Hampshire and teaches in Vermont.
00:01:11
Speaker
And this was a great conversation about the craft of writing, even podcasting, as she is a co-host of the Am Writing podcast. Great Nuts and Bolts podcast, can't recommend it enough.
00:01:24
Speaker
That's about it, lots of great wisdom chopped up and served up in this episode, so I really hope you dig it. If you do, share it with a friend. If you really dig the whole show, by all means leave a review in iTunes or wherever you tend to listen to your podcasts. Those reviews are trickling in and they help the rankings, they help the visibility and help this thing grow. And the more writers and artists and creatives in the genre of creative nonfiction, we can inspire and reach
00:01:54
Speaker
the better off we'll all be. So without further ado, let's get right to it. It's Jessica Leahy, Episode 51 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
The Power of Words: Influence and Sensory Details
00:02:04
Speaker
When you were little to sort of living inside the language and words and wanting to wanting to like, you know, to be a writer and have your work read. I think I've always known that words were really powerful and I've also known
00:02:21
Speaker
how powerful it is to, not powerful, that's the wrong word, but how devastating it can be when you don't use words correctly. You know, if you, I remember one time we had a really close family friend and I was trying to come up with a joking insult for him, I was really little, and I remember thinking that the word Aphrodite sounded really dirty, because it has diety at the end, I think, and so I just screamed at the top of my lungs that he was a real Aphrodite.
00:02:49
Speaker
People just thought this was hysterical and I realized I was being laughed at because I had used a word incorrectly and that was humiliating to me. And there's also just this incredible power of having. I've always loved the idea that there's so many different ways to say something and the trick is to pick the right word so that the person who's listening or the person who's reading
00:03:13
Speaker
gets the clearest vision of what you're trying to say. And to me, when those things slide into place or when you know you have just the right way of saying something, that is such a rush to me. I have my English teacher from high school, one of my two English teachers in high school that I really see as mentors to me. When I was in, I think I was a senior in high school, I had this, I was writing a descriptive essay and I specifically remember the passage I wrote about
00:03:41
Speaker
the sound it makes when you click your foot into a, um, a bicycle racing pedal. And I remember on the side of the page, he wrote, Oh, I can hear this. And I was, that was it. I mean, as far as I was concerned, that's, that's what I wanted to do was make people see or hear things the way I saw or heard them. And, and that's, you know, partly it's about, I guess there's a little bit of narcissism there in the sense that you want people to experience what's in your head, but at the same time, there's also this, this, um,
00:04:11
Speaker
need to reach out and figure out a way that someone else will hear you. It's an incredible challenge. And I love that challenge. So how do you approach or reach that point when you have like the perfect sensory detail? And when does that sound right to you? The ones that tend to be the truest are the ones that just come and lay themselves down on the page. And I don't even remember. I remember I was looking at, excuse me, someone quoted
00:04:39
Speaker
part of what I'd written for Creative Nonfiction, the I've Taught Monsters essay. And I was texting with her through Facebook. She's also a writer. And she said she really liked this one passage. And I said, how weird is it that I have to tell you I have no memory of writing that particular passage? Sometimes they just, these things just happen and I don't know where they come from. Partially, I think it's because I'm playing with language all the time with my students. I'm constantly talking to them about
00:05:09
Speaker
ways to say things. Many of my students tend to be fairly rudimentary writers. They tend to be a little bit behind in terms of skills just by nature of where I teach, which I'm happy to go into.
Teaching Through Writing: Monsters and Breakthroughs
00:05:22
Speaker
So I'm constantly looking for ways to show them how to show not tell.
00:05:29
Speaker
And that requires me to go through many iterations of how to describe a summer day or how to talk about the way your dog feels when you pet it. So I love that, and I'm constantly playing with it for them. And that, I think, helps me be a little more facile with language.
00:05:47
Speaker
And yeah, in this essay you alluded to, I've taught Monsters is a wonderful piece about teaching and how you transition from teaching very privileged people to people who come from more backgrounds where there's a bit more turbulence. And I wonder, where were you or what place were you in for word one, draft one of this essay?
00:06:14
Speaker
I knew that I wanted to talk about this particular assignment that I give on a fairly regular basis. It's based on a bit of Stephen King's On Writing. I talk a lot about Stephen King's On Writing mainly because I use it in my classroom so much. That book is not only incredibly informative and really helpful for kids when they're talking about, when they're trying to learn how to write, but also
00:06:39
Speaker
He's an addict himself, and so that automatically catches the kid's attention. He's been through a lot. He's been poor. He's been, as he says, dog patch poor. And the kids respect that. Plus, they like Stephen King. I mean, you know, when I'm trying to get them hooked into reading, and some of them are really reluctant about their reading, at least Stephen King is someone that I can pull in a little bit just because, you know, they've at least heard of him. Many of these kids haven't heard of a ton of authors.
00:07:10
Speaker
So I use on writing a lot and in that book he talks about before his conscious brain knew he was an addict and an alcoholic his subconscious knew and it was coming out in his writing and so I encourage my students to as he talks about Annie Wilkes from misery or the the Tommy knockers from the book the Tommy knocker the Tommy knockers he talks about these creatures that arise from his self-conscious subconscious that are about that are
00:07:36
Speaker
His addiction, the only way his brain can convey his addiction to the page is through these monsters. And so we conceive of our addiction, and I say our because I'm a recovering alcoholic myself, we conceive of our addiction in the form of a monster. And we talk about imagery and we talk about the fact that every good monster has to have some
00:08:00
Speaker
vulnerability somewhere. And so actually, there is a second part to this assignment in which we conceive of the hero that can conquer the monster. But I knew this assignment was something I wanted to get down on the page at some point, and I just hadn't had a chance to do that. There wasn't, I'd written some little paragraphs about it, but I was really excited about the opportunity when the theme about how we teach came up on the website on the Creative Nonfiction website, because this seemed like the perfect opportunity.
00:08:28
Speaker
What's it like for you when you see the light bulb go on and when you just see the light bulb hovering over their head like when something clicks? What's that what's that like for you when you give them this kind of prompt? Well, I have to say it doesn't often happen when I give a prompt. The light bulb thing is an amazing moment and I get to see it a fair amount mainly because I used to teach middle school.
00:08:53
Speaker
middle seventh and eighth grade and in middle school two of the books I taught in seventh grade I taught Great Expectations and in eighth grade I taught A Tale of Two Cities. Two books that for middle school students can be tough because their brains are still developing and metaphor and symbolism is not something that that most middle school students are fully ready for. But the nice thing about these two books is that they offer it up so constantly they offer it up in every chapter and so
00:09:19
Speaker
You give it to them and you hope at some point that the little connections in their brain happen and at some point they're going to say, oh my gosh, that's the thing she's been talking about this whole time. I understand this metaphor now. He's not talking about prisoners. He's talking or he's not talking about plants in a greenhouse. He's talking about prisoners in a prison. And that moment, it's their eyes get big. Their faces get flushed. They get this look of excitement of almost like they're seeing they can see it and you can
00:09:48
Speaker
I can see it happening to them. And it's just it's magic. I mean, there's no other way to describe
Writing in Rehab: Emotional Narratives and Responsibility
00:09:56
Speaker
it. It's just magic when you get to see that happen. And, you know, with the students I have now, it happens occasionally. The time that I love to see this happen is I play this game with them called Etymology Jeopardy. I was a Latin teacher as well, and I love etymology. So I'll put words up on the board.
00:10:13
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And I'll show them how those words evolved. Like the word dandelion comes from dandelion, the teeth of the lion. And I try to, I put the evidence for the word up there, the roots of the word up there, and we try to guess what that English word would be, whether it's dandelion or corduroy, which means the cord or the fabric of the king, or a word like calculus. A calculus in Latin means a small pebble, but it's the thing that Romans used to calculate with.
00:10:44
Speaker
calculus or calculate comes from the word for a small pebble. And I don't think that many of them have ever considered the story behind the words that we use all the time, where those words come from and the fact that they are not just words, they're history. Language is our history and language is a story of how we functioned, whether that's adding or whether that's how we clothed kings. I mean, it's really amazing to me that
00:11:12
Speaker
It's never occurred. And when we have a conversation about why, we call farm animals like pigs, cows, chickens, but we call the prepared versions of them beef and pork and poultry. And I tell them about the fact that the barnyard versions of those animals
00:11:32
Speaker
those are the words that the poor used because they were the ones raising the animals and that the words like beef and poultry, those are what the rich people used because they were being served those foods. And that's how those words evolved in our language. And they get this look of revelation on their face like, huh, I never thought about that before. And that's why I keep going back to the classroom, frankly.
00:11:54
Speaker
Yeah, and if you don't necessarily see the light bulb go on, like when you kind of reference the pencil scratching on the desk in your essay, I imagine that's an equally validating thing that there's a process going on. People are thinking through things and getting stuff down on paper. So what's that like
Personal Challenges: Addiction and Writing
00:12:15
Speaker
for you when you're able to make that connection and see the process in action from your roost on the desk?
00:12:24
Speaker
Well, the nice thing about the writing my students do now is that a lot of it goes back to whatever it is they're working on through their drug and alcohol recovery, because especially with kids, the reason kids end up in a rehab is usually because they're self-medicating some emotional trauma they've had. And as any English teacher or writing teacher knows, most of those, you know, when we're going to hear about emotional trauma, most often comes out in writing. So any teacher of writing or English
00:12:54
Speaker
has encountered the essay where the kid admits to feeling suicidal or that they were abused or you know I've even before I started teaching these kids I got all kinds of confessions about stuff which is you know a tangent why I think it's so important for English and writing teachers to have some training in sort of mental health 101 with kids so now
00:13:17
Speaker
often the stuff they're working through in rehab comes up in the essays and it goes to some really, really dark places, especially when I ask them to think about early memories or I ask them to write about their monsters or I ask them, you know, they tend to go dark with some of this stuff and that's an incredible responsibility. I think any writing teacher has an incredible responsibility to his or her students in the sense that
00:13:44
Speaker
These are their experiences. And whether we agree with the grammar or the spelling or the whatever other problems they have, the stories they're telling us are really important. And we can't minimize that because I've done that in the past. I've made that mistake. And it can really crush a student, not just their emotional state that day, but their faith in writing things down.
00:14:13
Speaker
As a writing teacher, that's my first and foremost goal is to just encourage them to write. And then my secondary goal is to encourage them to write well. So as long as I can keep the first part going, the writing part, and believe me, that can be tough sometimes, then I'm doing my job. And that's, like I said, a huge responsibility. And keeping in tune with this essay, given what you've said, how would you describe your monster?
00:14:43
Speaker
I don't tell them about it early on, mainly because anytime I'm talking about an essay and I'm asking them to be really creative and I'm asking them to give me their experiences, I don't ever want my experiences of it to color theirs. So if we share afterwards, and sometimes they're not ready to and that's okay, if we share afterwards, I do sometimes talk about mine and mine changes really.
00:15:10
Speaker
You know, addiction is a tricky thing. It's a shape-shifting tricky thing that sometimes feels like, you know, a big bird inside my chest. And some, you know, I often will describe it in terms of poetry and read some poetry to them that I think captures it, you know, whether that's sometimes it's, you know,
00:15:28
Speaker
Emily Dickinson is a certain, certain slant of light. And I just talk about it as being, you know, heavy, um, like cathedral tunes. And sometimes I talk about it as feeling like, um, a bird in my chest and forgive me, but I can't remember the author, the writer of that poem right now. But it depends on sort of where I am, just like it's going to change for them too. And I think helping them understand that it's not always going to be this huge and this scary. It's, it's someday it's going to feel like something that
00:15:58
Speaker
can be pushed back in a box or can be tamed with a pointy stick. But today, it may feel like a huge impenetrable thing. And then that's why it's so great to be able to use stories.
Inspiration and Challenges: 'The Gift of Failure'
00:16:10
Speaker
I can talk about, often what I'll talk about when I talk about the monster having a flaw, we end up talking about the hobbit. And we talk about the dragon having that one missing scale in the middle of his chest. And if we can just aim our arrow carefully enough, we can pierce it through the chest with that one
00:16:28
Speaker
As long as we know that's there, as long as we know that that soft spot is there, because everything, every evil thing has a soft spot, I hope. And giving them hope for that, I think is part of my job too, because many of them don't have a lot of hope. A lot of them write about some pretty dire stuff and giving them a little bit of hope and giving them reason to believe that having
00:16:56
Speaker
experiences outside of the experiences they've had so far in their life is possible. What was the impetus that made you want to take on the gift of failure and pursue that project? Well, it's funny. My favorite quote in gift of failure is not mine. It's Richard Russo's actually. I quoted Richard Russo in the conclusion of gift of failure because in a book,
00:17:22
Speaker
that was a bunch of authors and I don't think it's here in the room with me so I don't know what I can't remember the title there's a book that I have that's a bunch of different authors talking about to kill a mockingbird and it was published I don't know five years ago I think ten years ago on one of the anniversaries of to kill a mockingbird and Richard Russo talks about the fact that
00:17:42
Speaker
the best books aren't perfect books. The best books have these imperfections and that's what I want in my children as well. The most interesting people to me are not perfect people. They are the imperfect ones and helping our kids understand that they have imperfections and that's part of their beauty. That's what's important to me. I wrote the book because
00:18:06
Speaker
I've been a teacher now for almost 20 years, and I've been a parent for just about the same amount of time. I was pregnant when I started teaching in my first classroom. And I was really getting pissed off at the parents of my students, because all of these wonderful moments that I had, these opportunities I had to teach their kids, something important, like responsibility for their materials or how to organize their time, that kind of stuff. The parents seem to be constantly rescuing them from the
00:18:35
Speaker
the ramifications of their mistakes and therefore short-circuiting the whole learning process. Plus, the relationship I had with my students' parents was going down the toilet because it was becoming adversarial. It was a mess. I had this teacher vision and they were all bad. They were just wrecking my noble profession, blah, blah, blah. Then I realized I was actually doing the exact same thing to my own children. I had one of those moments where
00:19:04
Speaker
I couldn't be mad at those people out there because I am one of those people who's making life a little too cushy for kids so they can't learn from their mistakes. So at the time I knew for a fact that it was wrecking my students' motivation to learn, but I had a sneaking suspicion it was actually messing with their ability to learn, their actual ability to learn. And so I did a deep dive into the research for a couple years
00:19:34
Speaker
and found out that that does happen to be true. And so now, you know, that book was a really important thing for me to write for my own children and for my students and to help the parents of my students understand how, that the very things we're doing in order to feel good about our parenting, those things are handicapping our kids in terms of competence and in terms of even, you know, their self-esteem, which is a term I'm not a huge fan of.
00:20:04
Speaker
But going through that process completely changed my teaching and completely changed my parenting. So I love having gone through that process. And it was a really scary process as well. The story I don't tell very often because it makes me want to barf is that the first draft of my book was unbelievably bad. My editor, Gail Winston, Ed Harper,
00:20:30
Speaker
books who I have so much respect for her. She sat me down and she said this book in its current version is unpublishable. And I had a choice in that moment. I could roll up in the fetal position and go helpless and say, fine, let's get a ghost and help me write this thing. Or I could tell her
00:20:51
Speaker
to give me all the bad news, give me every criticism, give me everything that was wrong with it and let me learn. And I begged her to let me have two chapters to try to rework the book on my own. And those two chapters turned into four, which turned into six, which turned into the whole book. And luckily I didn't need a ghost and I didn't need someone else to sort of step in and rework the book for me. I was able to do it, but only because I was able to hear her feedback.
00:21:18
Speaker
So this book was definitely my own sort of gift of failure experience, and I'm really grateful for that. Because going into my next book, I feel like, man, I learned a lot. And I think it'll get a little easier this time. Because as a journalist, I was used to working in 800 to 2,500 word chunks. I didn't know what to do with 90,000 words. That was just an unfathomable scope.
00:21:45
Speaker
But now I've learned. And why on earth I thought I would be perfect right out of the gate? I have no idea. But anyway, there we are. It was a great learning curve for me. It was a very steep learning curve for me, but I'm still very grateful for it. What was unpublishable about it? What was some of that feedback that you had to digest and then work at? Organization. It really was about the organization. She said the writing was fine. The writing was compelling.
00:22:14
Speaker
But my I didn't know how to take what essentially I think a lot of journalists make the same mistake. In fact, I know they do because she told me they do. We tend to put a whole bunch of pieces, a whole bunch of essays, a whole bunch of columns into one book and say, here, look, here's my this anthology of things. Doesn't it make a pretty whole book? It's ninety thousand words. Look, I did it. But there's no
00:22:41
Speaker
thread of organization through the whole thing. It really came down to looking at each chapter and how each chapter was structured and following a format that made sense to the reader that wouldn't confuse the reader so that a reader would know where to look if they had a five-year-old and they were looking for advice versus if they had a 16-year-old and they were looking for advice. I needed to make it so that
00:23:04
Speaker
my advice that I guided them through the book. And this is something I tell my students all the time. Don't make it hard for your reader. Give your reader a path to follow that makes sense to them. And if I'm reading your essay and I'm confused by something, any reader is going to be confused by it. So address the confusion. And I didn't read my own book from the perspective of that objective sort of baseline knowledge
Public Role and Advocacy: Success and Focus
00:23:34
Speaker
person that was just gonna come out, the reader. I wasn't thinking like my reader. I was thinking maybe like my ideal reader or I was thinking like myself or I was thinking like my friends who all happen to be parenting writers and maybe have heard this stuff a thousand times, but I wasn't thinking from the perspective of sort of the average Joe on the street that might buy my book. So that was a great lesson and that's certainly not something I'd never heard before. You know, I get when I turn in my articles at the Atlantic or at the New York Times, I'll often get
00:24:04
Speaker
you know, the criticism that there's jargon in there and I have to remind myself, oh right, I have to get rid of the jargon. I have to speak with sort of a common language there and explain things better. So it was an incredible process of learning how to empathize with my reader and to be there for my reader when they needed something from me, which wasn't how I was thinking when I started the book.
00:24:28
Speaker
What was the process like for you to go from relative anonymity to being like a fairly very, you know, very visible on a national stage like talking about this? Like how did you how did you process that? Because that's an awful big, awful big jump that a lot of people struggle with. Yeah.
00:24:49
Speaker
I was lucky in that it actually happened more slowly than sort of the outside, an outside person might perceive. So I had been writing about education for a while. And then I was asked by a wonderful editor, Robert Pandisio, who had worked in journalism and was writing for the Core Knowledge blog. And he asked me to participate in that blog at the time. And that had a really healthy readership in really well-informed education people. So then my readership expanded from there and my blog started picking up steam.
00:25:19
Speaker
And then I started writing for The Atlantic. And then I started writing for The New York Times. And so slowly I'm sort of picking up audience. And then when, so we had a big auction for my book. I was really, you know, I'm not allowed, my friend and podcasting partner in crime, KJ Del Antonio, she used to be my editor at The New York Times. She says, I'm not allowed to say the word lucky because it wasn't a luck thing. I wrote an article for The Atlantic called, Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail.
00:25:49
Speaker
I submitted it to the Atlantic on a Monday, and it was published on Monday afternoon, no, Tuesday morning. And by Tuesday afternoon, I was getting asks for national media. And by Thursday, I was doing national television. So that was really fast. And then it became clear really quickly that this was a book that publishers were interested in. And so we ended up having an 11 publisher auction for the book, and we knew that
00:26:16
Speaker
we knew it was gonna sort of make some waves. And so my agent actually was really great. She talked to me about some of this stuff. And a previous agent that I had been working with had said the same thing, you know, do you, number one, is this something, is this book, whatever project you're working on, something you wanna be talking about for years on end, because that's what's gonna happen if it does well. And do you wanna be known as gift of failure, lady? I mean, that's really what it,
00:26:43
Speaker
comes down to. And that was a hard decision to make. And I had
Writing Process: Routines and Feedback
00:26:47
Speaker
to talk with my children and I had to talk to my husband. So by the time we sold the book, I was kind of prepared for there at least to be some exposure to my family. And it's gone pretty well. There hasn't been a ton of negative blowback. There's been a little. But since everything I write about my family, I've sort of
00:27:11
Speaker
They get all full approval on all that stuff. I think it's been okay. I had a long period of time to get used to not reading the comments and not reading reviews and stepping away, especially in places like the New York Times and the Atlantic, stepping away from the comments and just not allowing my head to get stuck in that muck and mire. By the time the book came out, I think I had some perspective.
00:27:36
Speaker
And while it's been really trippy, I mean, people will talk to me about things they know about me and that I have forgotten I put in the book. And that's weird. And I talk about stuff on the podcast with KJ. I mean, KJ is one of my best friends. And so we talk to each other on the podcast as if, you know, we're talking to our best friends, which basically we are. And stuff comes out and then I completely forgot I said it. And then I go somewhere to do a speaking event and people are like, oh, how's the puppy doing? And I'm like, what? Oh, the puppy. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really weird
00:28:06
Speaker
It's very odd, I have to say. It's also a huge responsibility. I mean, I think this year, at the beginning of this year, and especially with what's been going on politically, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how I want to use that. And for me, the answer has always been fairly easy, and it remains fairly clear to me, and that's kids. My agenda is to speak for people who don't really have a voice, and that's my students.
00:28:36
Speaker
You know, lately the stuff I've been writing about has to do with, you know, making sure kids have full due process rights and making sure that kids are getting a good education. And as long as I keep my focus there, I think I'll be okay.
00:28:49
Speaker
And with longer narrative stuff like the book and this recent essay I've taught Monsters, how do you approach it from just a craft point of view? What's your routine as you're trying to drill down, get that maybe what Anne Lamont would call the shitty first draft early? How do you work through it?
00:29:13
Speaker
I, it's been really lovely. I've gotten to the point now where I've realized that long walks and gardening, weeding, things like that are actually part of my process. They really truly are. And the sort of the first 20 minutes of my day, when I first wake up, I'm very fortunate in that my kids are responsible and get up for themselves and go get the bus themselves. And my husband gets himself out early in the morning. So I'm left with about 20 minutes in the morning where I get to just lay there and let my brain do that. Like,
00:29:41
Speaker
just out of sleep unhinged thing where it sort of roams and it's, um, I work out a lot of stuff that way. And yes, I keep paper and pen next to my bed and I tend to write lots of stuff down then and when I'm falling asleep. So that's my first really important part of the process because that's where I get that first, um, kernel of whatever it's going to be. And from there often I'll just sit down and start to write because like with, um, I've, I knew that,
00:30:10
Speaker
I knew I liked that line, I've taught monsters mainly because my students are not monsters and there's that double meaning because it was about teaching the monsters themselves, not teaching my students. And all I could hear in my head, and actually it went off the rails at first, I had in my head someone reading
00:30:31
Speaker
Langston Hughes, you know, I've known rivers deep dark rivers blah blah blah. So that was in my head. And my first version was this horrible sort of, you know, using the Langston Hughes too much and letting that tone come out and
00:30:45
Speaker
And when I first started writing, I knew with this piece, I knew exactly where I was going to end up, which was with a story that never ended up in the essay, actually. But I had the ending written, which was I ran into a former student of mine that had written this essay about monsters. And I knew what my last line was going to be, which is that when I waved goodbye to him, he was working somewhere and I saw him and we had a great conversation and he was doing great.
00:31:12
Speaker
My last line of the essay was going to be that, you know, as I waved goodbye to him standing on the stairs of the whatever, not a monster in sight, I was positive that that was going to be the last line of this essay and it just didn't work. So, you know, I ended up with something completely different than I expected, but, you know, something that
00:31:31
Speaker
you know, I liked better. And then I actually have to say, I found out about the deadline for this essay about 48 hours before it was due. So I worked, I wrote it really, really quickly. And the editors I worked with there at Creative Nonfiction were spectacular. The second version, once I got feedback was much, much better. There was more of a narrative through line about teaching. There was more, it was just richer. So I was really, really happy to get those edits.
00:31:58
Speaker
What about the writing or the editing process or the rewriting process do you most enjoy? Which part sort of just stimulates your brain a bit more? Well, first I have to say that when you get those edits back, it was this way for the book. It was this way for just about everything I write. You're like, oh great, the edits are here. And then you're like, oh, the edits are here. And sometimes I get a little snack.
00:32:27
Speaker
Get myself a cup of coffee. I have to sort of do that. Am I mentally prepared? Because I could open this and it could say, oh my gosh, I don't know what we were thinking. This is horrible. We're rescinding, you know, we're taking back our offer to write, to publish it or, you know, well, and I've, I've had the worst case scenario, which is we can't publish this, you know, that, that, well, and I, I guess in a way that's, I faced the worst. So I guess most stuff is fixable.
00:32:54
Speaker
But I was actually talking on my own podcast with my former editor, KJ, about the fact that I got something back recently that had an edit that was going to be really tough. I was going to have to go find another source, track down another source, interview another source. And it just, with deadlines for other things coming up, just sounded insurmountable and too hard. And I could have very easily just said, oh, forget it. I'm not going to do this.
00:33:19
Speaker
I did it, it wasn't as hard as I thought it was gonna be, which edits are never as hard as you think they're gonna be. Once you get in it, once you've opened the document and you've started reading the comments and you get through the original, you know, you get through the easy stuff like, okay, take out this comma or whoops, I didn't mean to use that semicolon. Then you get into the hard stuff. You leave the, you know, oh, this whole section needs to be reworked because you really moved off of your narrative thread and this is going off on some weird tangent.
00:33:49
Speaker
You know, it's hard to get rid of that stuff. But at the same time, there's that moment of exhilaration where you say, oh, this is really clicking. And there are always also those moments where I hold off on an edit and I have, you know, with every editor I've ever had, no matter how wonderful there's that edit where you're you get a little indignant and you're like, oh, no, that's good. I'm keeping that. There's no reason to change that. What is she talking about? I'd say almost always the editor's right.
00:34:18
Speaker
Um, I, there was one exception. So I had a, I had a, I had a new editor once and I had a line in a piece that was my favorite line in the piece. And I knew, I knew it was really important and I knew it was the line that would get quoted a lot because it really encapsulated the whole piece and the, the, my editor wanted to get rid of it. And I said, I can't know that I, I, I'd rather not have this piece run than get rid of this particular line.
00:34:44
Speaker
And we've known each other for a long time now, this editor, and every once in a while, whenever it goes out on Twitter, and that's inevitably the quote that gets put on the Twitter card for the piece, I'll send it to her just for fun. Just sort of poker a little bit. Because an editor has a lot of power over the writer, and the bad editors forget that. Forget that there's a human being on the other side of those edits. But the really great editors, and I've been very, very lucky to have great editors,
00:35:14
Speaker
remember that there's a person there who is invested in this piece of writing and sometimes is going to push back a little bit and that that's part of the process. It's not just being argumentative or being problematic. And I try to limit the number of times I question an editor, but when it's something that's really important and I begin to trust my gut, and that was actually the most important part of my learning curve with
00:35:37
Speaker
being a journalist and with writing this book was starting to learn when to push back, those moments where I know I'm right and I need to keep something. I'm starting to trust that a little bit better, a little bit more while still also having huge faith in the editing process. I remember hearing Ron Lieber at the New York Times, who writes the Your Money column, he and I have the same editor at Harper, and he was about to get the edits back for his amazing book, The Opposite of Spoiled,
00:36:06
Speaker
We were just staggered a little bit in our timeline with our books. And I said, so you're about to get your edits back. Are you scared? And he's like, no, I'll just I'll get the edits back and I'll do them. She's probably going to be right. And that's the voice of a guy who is used to being heavily edited and who trusts editors. And for him, it worked great. And I've tried to adopt a Ron Lieber sort of
00:36:31
Speaker
You know, calm, cool cucumber demeanor when it comes to being edited. So while I wouldn't say I love the editing process, I will say it makes me a better writer and I learn a lot from it. It takes a while to not take those edits personally, personally. You know, like Dinty Moore was talking about that. Like it's the work that's being criticized, not the writer. And so I think it takes a long time to
00:36:59
Speaker
sort of divorce yourself from the work. When you see all those red track changes, it's not the writer, it's just the work. When the editor is enrolled in that process, it's just like, okay, well, this is great. This is the gift that you're giving me to make the work better. And it takes a while to get to that point.
00:37:20
Speaker
Well, so I live across the street from Jenny Bent, who owns the Bent Agency. It's a literary agency. And every once in a while, I'll say something to her like, yeah, my agent rejected me four times before she took me on as a client. And Jenny will say, no, no, no, she didn't reject you. She rejected the project. And then I'm also reminded that when Gift of Failure first came out, I got a lot of questions about,
00:37:48
Speaker
how boys and girls react differently to failure, or if they react differently to failure. Rachel Simmons, who has written a couple of fantastic books about girls, Odd Girl Out, Odd Girl Speaks, she's a fantastic writer and she works with girls leadership. She wrote a review for Time Magazine about gifted failure. The whole article was about the fact that girls do take
00:38:12
Speaker
do take failures and mistakes and errors differently than boys do. And of course, as always, this is a gross overgeneralization, but that girls tend to internalize the mistakes and the failures and see those failures as their own, as of themselves. Like I failed, not that project is a failure or this draft is a failure or that paragraph is a failure. It's I failed in this. Whereas boys
00:38:36
Speaker
Again, gross oversimplification tend to see the mistakes as this thing that's outside of them. Oh, that was a mistake. I am not a failure. That thing I did over there is a failure. So if Rachel is correct in that assessment, then I do try to think about that when it comes to my students, that when I'm editing a paper,
00:38:55
Speaker
I try to make it really clear that it's their writing we're talking about, not them as human beings. But it's easy to say when I got that feedback about my book, I did feel like a failure. I felt like I'd been handed this incredible opportunity and I had somehow squandered it. But I think allowing, stepping away from failures and seeing them as the,
00:39:23
Speaker
our output, the result of our work as opposed to us. I'm not the failure of my, this thing I just created may not work very well, but that's not any, that doesn't mean that I stink. So that's also been a process. And I think that's been a process also of that whole thing I talked about before about not looking at comments and especially places that where the comments are open and not moderated in any way, if you venture in there,
00:39:51
Speaker
They're going to be people who are mean just for the sake of being mean. And if I were to take any of that personally, man, I'm sunk before I even begin because then I'm writing for commenters or writing, you know, I do sometimes write for my editor because I trust her judgment, but I can't write for commenters. I can't write for the people who aren't, you know, don't have a little skin in the game.
Demystifying Writing: Podcasting Insights
00:40:12
Speaker
your your podcast and the am writing podcast and also when you say that steven king's on writing and through a lot of your work uh...
00:40:23
Speaker
His, well that particular brook demystifies the process a lot and I think makes writing in general a lot more inviting and sort of breaks down those walls and I think your podcast is doing that same thing. So what do you think people are struggling with the most to maybe fulfill a creative itch or to get writing down? In your experience, what are people battling with?
00:40:54
Speaker
It's been interesting the feedback we get from the podcast. Um, at first I felt we were being too wonky. We were talking about a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff. Like we talk a lot about how to pitch, how to query, how to find an agent, how to, um, you know, how to the, how twos of the process. One of the, our frequent guests is this woman.
00:41:14
Speaker
This writer, Serena Bowen, it's not her real name, she writes under a pseudonym, but Serena comes on our podcast because Serena has published both in traditional publishing and is an incredibly successful self-published author. She writes contemporary romance. And what she gets asked most often is, okay,
00:41:34
Speaker
I have finished writing the document. I have saved the document. Now I want to turn it into an EPUB. What do I press? What button do I press? So it turns out that when I'm out there in the world, the questions I get about writing really are about those nuts and bolts moments. Do you like to do edits in comments or do you like to do edits with track changes? Do you like to do that kind of stuff?
00:42:01
Speaker
There aren't a lot of books out there anyway. There are some podcasts, but there aren't a lot of books out there that really answer those nuts and bolts questions. And now the thing I like most about on writing and the reason that I read it over and over and over again, and actually I listen to it over and over and over again. I'm a huge audio book fan. The reason I listen to it over and over again is that I find it makes me want to write. And my 13 year old and I were listening to it yesterday actually in the car on the way back from our dog obedience class.
00:42:30
Speaker
And it I every time I listen to it and listen to him talk about his basement place, his far seeing place, falling through the page, you know, all of those. The joy that he expresses about the process of writing that makes me want to write, too. And I remember when my older son and I were listening to it years and years ago, my older son's now 18 and about to head off to college, he was saying,
00:42:56
Speaker
years ago when we were listening to it, he said, this makes me wanna write. Let's get home so that I can go work on something. So anything that does that for me, oh, I'm hooked, I'm in, and I'll listen over and over and over again. And also there's something compelling about his voice reading that book because you can hear in his voice how much he loves to write and how the writing saved him, especially in the last section when he talks about his accident that in the end it was the work that saved him.
00:43:26
Speaker
When people start to get precious about writing and don't treat it like a job, don't treat it like something you have to get up, go sit down, keep your butt in the chair, our tagline at the podcast is keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game because it is a job. If you choose to take writing on as a job, it is my job. It's not this thing that I can allow to be dictated by the muses. It has to be something that I need to be able to write on demand.
Professional Writing: Consistency and Practice
00:43:52
Speaker
there are tricks to making that happen. And that's what we tend to write about or talk about on the podcast. The business of being a writer, how to cobble out a living doing it, how to, you know, those what button do what, you know, do you like Scrivener or do you like Word? And when you use Scrivener, how do you compile the documents so that you can turn it into your agent? Those sort of very nuts and bolts things. We were lucky enough recently to interview some writers, a comedy writer,
00:44:19
Speaker
and a travel writer, and especially with the comedy writer, her name is Wendy Ahrens, and she's a fantastic writer. But how do you talk about the nuts and bolts of being funny? But she did it, and I learned a lot from her about how to add more humor into my writing and actual practical tips about being funny, which you wouldn't think those two things would go together very well, but they do. She did a really good job with that.
00:44:47
Speaker
You know, I hope that in every single podcast, KJ and I always say, are we are we offering something helpful this week? We record once a week and we try to have we try to make sure that it's not just us talking about our agents and our publishers, because a lot of people that listen to us don't have an agent yet don't have a publisher. They're just trying to get started and they want to know.
00:45:09
Speaker
what button to push when they need to compile that document so that they can send it to an agent and they need to know how to query an agent and that kind of thing. So we hope that that's what we're providing. So if someone wants to turn pro, what do you tell them? What's the first actionable step if someone's looking to take their writing into that more vocational realm? That's tricky because the
00:45:35
Speaker
you know I would the easy thing to say is to start you know make sure you you know let's say it's magazines make sure you read the magazines and you're familiar with the tone and you're familiar we talk about all this staff stuff ad nauseam on the podcast but I hate to say this but the real the reality is is that if
00:45:53
Speaker
you do get something published. Let's say you hit really early. Let's say you send something off and it's your crazy miracle happens and it's your first piece. And let's say it's done really well. Well, you've got nothing else in the hopper. You've got nothing else sort of there for people to go to and say, oh yeah, look, she's got all this other work that's so great. So it's the main reason I'm not allowed to use the word lucky when it comes to gift of failure because by the time gift of failure happened,
00:46:19
Speaker
I had been writing for many years and I had many, many, many blog posts. I had many pieces of work to point to to say, oh, this is also what I write about. Oh, look, publisher, here are all the interviews I've done on other pieces I've written. So yes, I will have an in, oops, I will have an in to the marketplace. Or here's all the stuff that I've done over the years that show that I'm not a one-trick pony because the minute you want to get someone interested in your work,
00:46:48
Speaker
the first question is going to be like, OK, well, this happened, but does that mean that she can do it again? So and Stephen King, again, says read a lot and write a lot and that, you know, you can't possibly hope to play with words unless you have a lot of words at your disposal. And the way you do that is by reading. There's just there's just no way around it. And, you know, he talks about the fact that he was sort of the last generation of writers that
00:47:13
Speaker
grew up without a television set and that we would do well to cut the cord to our television set. So as much as possible, I try to do that. Create a routine. Get your butt in the chair, get your head in the game, and sit down and write. There have been plenty of days where we actually have this thing. Serena and KJ and myself, we text each other all day long every day. And when we get our sticker, which represents a thousand words,
00:47:43
Speaker
It's a sticker that we stick in our calendar on the day. We text each other the word sticker. We're each other's accountability buddies because even if those thousand words stink, it doesn't matter. There's still a thousand words. You still get credit for those thousand words and those thousand words may not be a part of an eventual manuscript. Those thousand words may be an essay that you published six years from now. There's plenty of stuff that I've jotted down
00:48:10
Speaker
During my thousand words that I may never use at all But it develops some other idea that ends up being something that I use later and it's also kind of apt I'm listening right now to David Sedaris's new book theft by finding and theft by finding are his journals and I have been
00:48:30
Speaker
feeling bad that I'm not a good journal keeper because this man has an unbelievable reserve of material and quotes and all this stuff that a writer would dream of happening. But that's because every single day since he was in his 20s, he has written at, you know, some probably somewhere around a thousand words. And that's powerful. That's really powerful. It's practice. Number one, writing takes practice just like, you know,
00:48:59
Speaker
My knowing how to write a full length book wasn't something I could do right out of the blocks. All writing takes practice, but also it's a muscle memory thing. Sitting down and being able to have the words come on demand, 1,000 words a day, 2,000 words a day on a fixed schedule takes practice. And the writers who are most prolific, like, for example, Serena Bowen. Serena Bowen puts out a couple of books a year
00:49:27
Speaker
Wow. And I'll ask her about, I'll say something like, oh, so have you gotten started on that thing you're working with, with that new co-author? She's like, oh yeah, I finished that two weeks ago. I'm on to the next thing now. That's just this woman every single day sits down and writes. And you know, she's amazing, but it's not a trick. It's hard work. When I'm asleep on an airplane and she's going somewhere with me, inevitably she's sitting next to me and working. It's so,
00:49:54
Speaker
I can't make any excuses for the fact that I'm not as prolific as she is with my writing because I simply don't write as much as she does. It's work. Yeah. Sort of to the point with Sedaris' journals, it kind of reminded me of this Chinese proverb that it's like the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second time is now.
00:50:19
Speaker
So it's like, all right, yeah, maybe you've lost that 20 years of journaling, but, you know, you can start today and plant that. It kind of goes to your gardening. You know, you said like gardening is big for you, but that's such a great metaphor for writing. You know, the planning to plant and then the weeding of, you know, it's just, it's an editing process unto itself.
00:50:44
Speaker
Well, and there's I remember specifically a problem I worked out with gift of failure. I was having this on one of the chapters. I just I couldn't couldn't figure out how something was happening. And there's a weed here in New Hampshire that I have a ton of. And it's called we I don't know what other people call it. It's Bishop's weed here in our in our neck of the woods. And it sends out these very these roots that are
00:51:05
Speaker
pretty easy to tease out of the soil if you kind of loosen the soil around them, but they're white. They're really easy to see and they go for long distances and you have to untangle them from the roots of other things. And so there is this moment when I'm untangling these white roots away from the roots in my raspberry patch, that that sort of giving my hands something to do, doing the untangling with my hands helped my brain do the untangling
Life's Influence: Balancing Roles and Creativity
00:51:28
Speaker
too. And I had it and I had to come in and I tracked dirt all over the house and I actually have pictures of
00:51:35
Speaker
Um, out in the garden, I have pictures with my, a journal next to me, a notebook next to me that's just covered with dirt. And you know, I've got gardening gloves on sometimes when I'm doing it. So the handwriting is really messy, but there are many, many times I'm out in the garden with a pad of paper because that is often where I get, um, I get my best stuff. And then my family also knows that when I come back from a run a hike or especially a long cross country ski, I need a few minutes because.
00:52:01
Speaker
I do a lot of writing, especially when I'm doing something like cross-country skiing. And there was an essay I wrote once that I particularly loved that I wrote completely in my head while I was out doing a 10K ski. And that essay, all I had to do then was just dump on the paper. So being out there, I've had to not feel guilty about that. I've had to learn that that's a part of my process, and I can't
00:52:27
Speaker
I can't feel guilty. I can't say, oh, you know, I don't want to work right now. I'd rather go for a walk. No, no, no. Going for a walk right now when I'm feeling a little bit stuck, that's a part of the process. And that's an important part of my process.
00:52:39
Speaker
You know, writing isn't just, you know, putting pencil to paper or something like thinking about it, going for that walk, doing any sort of meditative practice like that is is part of the process. It doesn't necessarily feel like work, but it does inform and feed the work. And it's kind of an investment in the work to take some time away. Yeah. Well, and I guess the other thing is, you know, the danger is is that you
00:53:03
Speaker
pontificate on the great American novel that you want to write for 20 years and never actually, you know, get anything down except for a few scribblings. Um, you know, you have to do the work too, but yeah, the, the writing, and for me also, uh, I write about teaching. So it's really important to me that I can, that I stay in the classroom and I can't do it full time because I travel a lot, um, to speak, um, at schools mainly and community stuff. And, uh, it's,
00:53:30
Speaker
But I still teach part-time because I have to. It feeds my soul. It feeds my work. It's what I am. I am a teacher. So for me, it's really important to take that time away from the writing to lead the life that feeds the writing. And when I'm walking, I'm usually walking with my kid or my dog and my husband and going off to teach at school. That's where the good stuff is. And so we can't
00:54:00
Speaker
Being one of those writers that lives to write, that's exempting out a big chunk of life that feeds the writing, and I like to keep a good balance.
00:54:15
Speaker
Just one more thing before I let you get out of here, Jessica. And how do you define hard work as a writer? It's kind of this nebulous area. You don't have blisters. You're not sweating, maybe. But how would you define hard work as a writer and a creative?
00:54:40
Speaker
I really, it sounds really simple and superficial, but I really word count. Word count and being committed and being serious about the process, not serious like you have to always write like you're trying to write a Russian short story, but because you're serious about the writing and you're serious about the word choice and you're serious about getting that word count done every day because you're committed to that.
00:55:10
Speaker
I know plenty of people who don't make a living just from their writing and write before and after work. That's serious. I know teachers, for God's sake, teachers who get up at five o'clock in the morning so that they can publish books while they're teaching full time. And that's hard work right there. The work of being a writer means that you get words on the page. It's as simple as that. It means that you read, it means that you write.
00:55:40
Speaker
and it means that you get words down on the page.
Conclusion: Gratitude and Future Content
00:55:43
Speaker
Well, fantastic. That's a perfect place to end on because that's just a powerful knockout punch right there. I love it. There's no way around it either. There are either words there or there are not. It's a pretty black and white, so to speak, thing. Fantastic. Well, Jessica, thank you so much for carving out some time in your morning here to do this. Oh, absolutely. This is a big pleasure for me to speak with you. Maybe sometime down the road we can have you on for a round too.
00:56:12
Speaker
Uh, that would be absolutely great. I would love that. Fantastic. Well, keep up the great work and we'll be in touch. Thank you. You got it. Take care. So thank you so much to Jessica Leahy for coming by the podcast. It was a great conversation. I hope you got a lot out of it. And, um, you know, that, you know, that time around the holidays, the doorbell rings, you open the door.
00:56:37
Speaker
You're like, oh great, the edits are here. And then you're like, oh, the edits are here. All right, that's it for this week. Tune in next week. We're back with more of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Thank you very much.