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Episode 53—Jessica Abel and the Power of Creative Focus
140 Plays8 years ago
Jessica Abel is a cartoonist, a teacher, a writer, and a podcaster and her latest book, Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You're Drowning in Your Daily Life, is her latest project. I came across her kick-ass, 200-page, black-and-white graphic book Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio and reached out to her. So in this episode we talk a lot about what makes for great radio/podcasting, how to obtain creative focus, the power of reviewing your projects and processes, and much, much more. If you dig the show, share it with a friend and leave a review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you found this. The five-star ratings keep coming in and I'd love to have more that way I can reach more people just like you, people who dig what the best artists are doing in the genre of creative nonfiction. Thanks for listening!
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. I'm Brendan O'Meara. You know, how would I describe this latest episode? It's crazy.
00:00:12
Speaker
And that is Jessica Abel at JCCable on Twitter, A-B-E-L, joining me for episode 53 to talk about her book, Out on the Wire, and her latest book, Growing Gills, about demystifying the creative process so you can get the work done.
00:00:33
Speaker
Now, Hattie Fletcher of Episode 46 fame says that just because something is structured doesn't make it any less artful. And that's at the heart of Jessica's work. At least at the heart of growing gills. She lays out systems and reviews and worksheets that allow you to have a clarity about your creative vision.
00:00:55
Speaker
And before we get to the show, you know what I need.
Engagement and Reviews
00:00:58
Speaker
I need reviews. If you have found any value in this episode or any of the previous 52, take 60 seconds and leave a nice review. It'll help with the visibility of the podcast. Reach more people like yourself who did creative nonfiction.
00:01:14
Speaker
And you know, it'll just keep gas in the metaphorical tank so this thing can just keep going, gain a momentum in reaching and encouraging more people to pursue work in the genre of creative nonfiction. So share this with a friend, subscribe, and have
Influences and Background
00:01:30
Speaker
fun. This is cartoonist, teacher, and writer, Jessica Abel.
00:01:36
Speaker
You know, first start off, I know you said your, like I read that your father was a literary agent, correct? Yeah, he is a literary agent. And your mom, what does she do? I can't remember. She's a writer and an editor. Okay, very nice. So this kind of stuff sort of like bubbles in your bloodstream. And also like you grew up sort of like with a punk sensibility. So like, where did that come from? Uh,
00:02:05
Speaker
I don't know. That's a, um, that's a hard question. Where did the, my punk cell sensibility come from? Maybe from my mom. I don't know. Like, uh, there's a certain, um, I mean, it's partly it's generational, you know, like I'm 47. So there's a Gen X sort of basic skeptical kind of point of view on the world that I share. Um, certainly not everybody in my age group, but there's a kind of, um, core,
00:02:34
Speaker
skepticism that comes into things. And I think, and a sense of like, you know, if something's going to happen, we're going to do it on our own in some way. Right. And that is a big part of who I am. Yeah. The punk culture is very DIY. So that must have appealed to you at a very young age and really carried you for the next 20 years. Yeah. I don't know that I thought about it that hard initially. You know, I don't know that I kind of, um,
00:03:01
Speaker
identified that the DIY part was really appealing to me. Some people do. I don't know that that was really the case for me. What did appeal to me was this, just a stance of just, you know, the oppositional basic thing of questioning everything around. And I don't even know how to put it. It's like, they're just, when I first saw people, you know, kids who were punk hanging around on, you know,
00:03:26
Speaker
lolling around on cars and just like being themselves being obnoxious. I was like, Oh, yeah, that's that's how I want to be, you know, and it just hit me at the right time that you know, that was the model for I don't know. I mean, and, you know, additionally, the people who you meet, and you know, most of the people, most of the friends I had in high school were also self identified, you know, into that sort of punk
00:03:50
Speaker
you know, culture. And there were people who tended to be really thoughtful. And, you know, I think the essential I guess, when it gets down to it, and I haven't really been asked this question before, just why I'm stumbling around on it. But like, the, I think the essential thing is like, it's a critical stance
Career Transition to Art
00:04:08
Speaker
to the world. And critical thinking is key to to me to being sort of having that punk sensibility, that you can't just accept things at face value.
00:04:20
Speaker
And so most of the people that I knew who were sort of in the same subculture had great brains. They thought good thoughts. They were really interesting people who were interested in lots of things that were not kind of received from mainstream culture. And that might mean great literature. It might mean philosophy. It might mean music. It was all kinds of stuff.
00:04:46
Speaker
Would you say that that helped you question assumptions as you were developing as a young woman and then coming into your own as an artist? Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. There was never, I mean, you know, it can be a handicap too that like, there's nothing, there's a lot of things in mainstream culture that are fine and you can just kind of roll with it and you don't have to make things hard for yourself, right? Um, so there was definitely, I suffered from that, like kind of making things too hard for myself a lot of the time, but, um,
00:05:16
Speaker
But definitely, you know, it's always been really important to me to find my own path and make my own choices about things and approach things with a critical mind and kind of decide what I really think and so on. And kind of getting the knee-jerk negativity out has taken a long time. I think that I preserve the critical thinking and have tried to get rid of the kind of anti
00:05:42
Speaker
you know, just knee-jerk anti-everything kind of thing that kind of goes with that when you're a teenager. So what did you think you would be before you took up art as a vocation or as you were transitioning into a life where you would feed yourself on your art? What do you think you would be before that? I don't think I had any idea. I was an English major in school.
00:06:07
Speaker
And that doesn't really suggest much as far as career paths unless you want to be an academic, which I didn't. I think partly because of the way my mom raised me and how she felt about her work life, I just thought it would be impossible to find anything that I would like doing that would be in any kind of standard office scenario. And so I just kind of never went
00:06:36
Speaker
into the professional world at all. And I worked in restaurants and bars and stuff. And I exaggerate because I got jobs at, I worked in administration at some different schools. I was at Northwestern and at the School of the Art Institute. And I kind of liked doing that, doing that kind of work. And I could see that I could have continued with that. So not on the faculty side, but on the administration side.
00:07:06
Speaker
It wasn't intentional. It was just, it's like those are the things that kind of I came across that I had the skills to do. It wasn't like a goal, like it might have evolved into a goal of my life had gone a different way, but it wasn't at the time like a mission, if that makes sense.
00:07:21
Speaker
When did the pain of not doing the thing surpass the pain of actually doing it? Do you remember an inflection point where you wanted to make a key transition from going whole hog into the thing, capital T? I was doing my work professionally.
00:07:47
Speaker
was and continues to be an extremely low paid profession. So it's never been something that was super viable in that way. But, um, while I was working full time, you know, I was doing it on the side and building up my skill skills and so on. And so I didn't, I didn't have that like, you know, and I liked my jobs, you know, the jobs that I had in my early twenties. So I didn't have that sense of like, I absolutely have to quit, you know,
00:08:17
Speaker
And I wasn't not doing the thing, I was actually doing it. They're definitely, I remember having this moment where I was sort of doing a proto-Gantt chart. Not literally, but looking at the amount of time I needed to spend on making my art in order to keep growing, because I was getting clients as an illustrator, and I was getting published and so on as a cartoonist. And I was like, if I'm gonna,
00:08:45
Speaker
you know, I need more time to do these things in order to grow professionally. And my job takes this amount of time and these things take this amount of time and there just aren't enough hours in the day. And that's that was a breaking point. It wasn't like a cry for freedom or something. It was like, oh, this literally is not going to function. Like I can't, you know, I have to figure something out here. And what I actually did was I and this was not
00:09:14
Speaker
intentional, it wasn't like the plan. So my then future husband and I, Matt Madden, moved to Mexico City when I was 28. Because I had some illustration clients and so on, I was making some money in dollars and spending it in pesos, I was able to quit my job.
00:09:34
Speaker
So who at a young age gave you the validation you needed to pursue cartooning as as a vocation and put that fuel in your tank that you weren't completely delusional in your pursuit? Well, I don't mentor. Yeah, I mean, I didn't conceive of myself as a cartoonist until, you know, like after
00:09:58
Speaker
after I graduated from college probably, like as a sort of main identity. I was making comics earlier than that, but sort of thinking this is gonna be something I'm gonna pursue professionally took me a long time. Like I was saying, you know, you asked what I was sort of pictured myself doing. I didn't know, I really didn't know. And I mean, I didn't picture myself doing comics either. I just didn't know what I would be doing. Like how I would support myself was kind of mysterious to me.
00:10:28
Speaker
and remain so as a cartoonist, that's not an answer to that question. But my parents are both, they're both connected to the writing world. I won't say that they're like, they didn't have artistic careers or anything. My mom's writing and editing was very much like, she's a professional, she worked on magazines and she worked in professional organizations that had internal magazines
00:10:57
Speaker
She had a job as a writer. And then she became freelance after that and did things like annual reports. So it's not like she was writing novels. But at the same time, she really was always very supportive of me making art and writing and being a creative person and so on.
00:11:19
Speaker
And I didn't ask that much of her, frankly, as a kid, you know, like, I didn't ask people to acknowledge me as a super RD person. I did very well in school. You know, I didn't, I basically didn't take any art classes when I was in high school. I didn't, you know, declare I was going to go off and do performance art for, you know, there's not, there's nothing that they, it wasn't that hard to support me essentially in what I wanted to do because it wasn't that.
00:11:43
Speaker
at the time, what I was doing was just not that out of the ordinary. You know what I mean? Yeah, it seemed like even from reading the introduction, the early part of Growing Gills, like you were on what you would consider a quote unquote traditional path through the academics. You weren't taking these like sort of magnet school art tributaries of the education system. Like you were just doing what most people do.
00:12:10
Speaker
Yeah, and frankly, that stuff barely existed then, too. I mean, like, there weren't a lot of magnet schools around offering, you know, a whole bunch of art stuff. And there were classes and stuff at my school, and I should have taken them. I would have really enjoyed them.
00:12:23
Speaker
but I didn't, so. So where do you think your methodical, organizational methods come from? You have a very, very keen skill for being able to break things down into digestible bites. So where does that come from?
Organized Creativity and Planning
00:12:43
Speaker
I think, I mean, I've always been a very intense and pretty driven person and had big goals and forced myself through them.
00:12:53
Speaker
But it was a lot of willpower and forcing earlier on Because I have a very strong will and I'm able to do that, but it's painful. It's it's not good so You know just sort of like making myself come back to something over and over again until I sort of come up with Some kind of a solution for it is just kind of no way to live so I just gradually learned a lot of skills from
00:13:20
Speaker
reading and practicing. One big turning point for me was reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. You know, like most artists, I think, I was always reading articles about how other artists do it and how do they organize their lives. And I'm so envious of all these people who managed to, you know, get their work done and still have a life and, you know, all that stuff. And, you know, that's how I eventually found, excuse me, that's how I eventually found Getting Things Done because I was reading about productivity.
00:13:51
Speaker
and trying to figure out, you know, what can I take away from this? And, um, you know, I think also like most people, I had this, um, tendency to, uh, just what I call churn, like sort of churn over stuff. I was, I needed to be paying attention to just continuously, you know, you just have this kind of like, Oh my God, this, Oh my God, that, Oh wait, I forgot that. Oh shit, this, Oh, you know, whatever that, and, and, you know, kind of,
00:14:21
Speaker
Um, feeling like it's impossible to, uh, to hold it all, you know, and, and, and that anxiety is super draining. And so that's what the GTD getting things done method does is it helps you offload all that stuff into a system, um, that then.
00:14:43
Speaker
you know that it's there for you. You can put stuff into it, you know, system being literally a paper, like a notebook, or for me, it's an app, like it's digital. But, you know, it's there and it's reliable, and it's not gonna forget, even if I do, you know? And that's just instantly cut my anxiety levels enormously. And so that was,
00:15:11
Speaker
That's just one of many steps that I took, but it was, you know, people, I think, believe that I'm sort of magical with this stuff. I mean, my students accused me of witchcraft occasionally. But it's totally not magic. I mean, I absolutely had to put this whole thing together piece by painful piece over a series of many, many years. And I, you know, I think that in some cases, like in Growing Gills, I wonder whether I overdid it sometimes
00:15:40
Speaker
I'm talking about myself and how it is for me. But the fact is that people don't really, they continue, they want to believe that this is something that just kind of happens. And I think that's really destructive too, because if you don't believe that it's something that I learned, and that if I learned it, you can learn it, then you don't ever take control. If you don't take control, then you have to live with this stuff.
00:16:09
Speaker
I loved the way you were able to braid the practical stuff, but also weaved in your story of how you implemented those things. You were putting your money where your mouth was. I like that. It's just one person's take, but I don't think it'll be off-putting in any sense when more people get this book in their hands. Well, thank you. That's very nice of you to have.
00:16:34
Speaker
I think it's okay because people talk about liking my hearing my story but it's like I I felt you know I was trying to put in other people's examples and I just kept coming back to like well and they're me you know there's what happened with me there's that example so
00:16:49
Speaker
So it's funny, you write about your bulldogginess and stubbornness with projects, which can be a great asset, especially when you get into the murky middles and the dark forests of the things. But do you ever find that that can sometimes be a detriment or a weakness, and that maybe certain things should be given up on?
00:17:15
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, no, it's a it can be a real problem for me, especially it has been a real problem there. I heard this great interview recently with this guy named Joey Corin men, I believe his name is and he he's talked about the wrong mountain syndrome that like you you muster all of your powers and you you know, have base camps and you hike your way up the mountain. And then you get to the top and you realize it's the wrong mountain.
00:17:46
Speaker
And that's me in a nutshell right there. And I don't want to exaggerate. There's lots of things that I've done that are great and I'm really glad I had the willpower and the structure and the systems to make it happen. But there's so many times that I don't question early enough whether I've made the right decision and whether it lines up with my larger goals.
00:18:12
Speaker
And it's, you know, I'm trying very hard to incorporate lots of, uh, you know, one of the things that I teach students now and I've, you know, because I've realized progressively how important it is, is the idea of review. And like, when do you, how do you incorporate different types and levels of review into your, into your process artistically? And I mean, review of your projects, review of your intentions, review of your strategy, review of your goals and so on.
00:18:42
Speaker
And so I built in more and more levels of review over time. And that's helped, you know.
00:18:49
Speaker
Yes, speaking to that, there's a big reason why with professional sports teams and even levels below that, after the game, they spend hours and hours watching game tape and learning from what happened and reviewing and then changing the playbook and going forward, not just saying, well, on day one, this is the playbook and we're just going to live with it for the whole season.
00:19:20
Speaker
They just they they move and they adapt and that's exactly what you're referring to with you know having the building in these review patterns allows you to sort of change course with You know with with whatever you're doing and reevaluating so it's really it's a it's a good analogy But you like you really bring it to the floor and growing gills, too
00:19:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great analogy. And I mean, I think that whenever you do make an analogy like that, I'm like, oh, of course, like I knew that, you know, but then you forget those things, you know. And and I think one of the things about art in general, writing and art is that practitioners believe and we've been told we've been sold a bill of goods about this, that it's it is somewhat magical thing
00:20:07
Speaker
that if you don't know what you're doing, if you don't have the right kind of ideas, if you aren't absolutely sure about everything, then you're just not cut out for it. You know, when people continue to want to do it, but they're always like, Oh, well, maybe it's just not really for me, because I'm not struck by inspiration at the right moments. I'm not, you know, I don't know for sure that this is, you know, this project, I'm, I'm, I've said, I'm going to do it, but I don't know if it's the right project. I don't know if I'm, this is my passion. And I don't know, you know, all this stuff, which is, it's all just,
00:20:38
Speaker
That's just garbage. That's not how it works. You have to build in these kinds of levels of review and you also have to trust yourself to a certain degree and know that it's not all going to be a known thing ahead of time.
00:20:55
Speaker
Yeah, and the fact is that anyone who has like a great idea, whether it's even looking at your work, whether it's like La Perdita out in the wire growing gills, odds are and you've probably had another hundred that were not good. Like to get to a level of where you have some good ideas, you've got a factor of 10 of bad ideas. So it's like you have to push through all those bad ideas to get to some of those good ones and pan for that gold.
00:21:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's true. But at the same time, I also believe that like almost any idea you have could turn into a good idea. If you invest in it enough and you find what's at the heart of it. No, I mean, there's good and then there's good. You know, there's some ideas that are just kind of like they just stand on their own and it's really clear. But, you know, I've done
00:21:46
Speaker
an entire book about slacker vampires. I've done an entire book. I'm doing work in the middle of a book about a roller girl on Mars. Like these are not ideas that are on the face of them. Awesome. I mean, roller girl on Mars. That's awesome. But like, that's really like that's a quick, that's a quick read. That's not a 200 page graphic novel, right? So but but it is in fact, like it's much more, there's much more there.
00:22:12
Speaker
And that's because of what I put into it, not because of what it offered me right off the bat. And again, this is about the, it's not magic part. It's a lot of work and a lot of strategy and a lot of, you know, making decisions over and over again about how you're going to do this and taking control of it, not letting it, you know, live in the realm of sort of fuzzy non logic.
Defining Artistic Success
00:22:35
Speaker
It's back to critical thinking, I guess.
00:22:37
Speaker
Yeah, the slacker vampires. I just have this vision of vampires that should be out, going out, trying to find blood, but they're just sitting on the couch, just like eating chicken wings or something and playing video games. Well, it's not quite that, but they are forced by their vampire laws to work for their masters who create them. And they're the main characters. Their master is this old-world vampire from Transylvania. And he lives in L.A. and he's opened a line of
00:23:07
Speaker
He's got some all night groceries, you know, like corner stores. And so he makes new vampires in order to work the night shift. Oh, my God. That's. Yeah, I love it. So when when you were when you were younger, like, let's say like twenty five thirty, like, what did a successful artist look like to you? You know, from your from from that point. And then, you know, you've obviously got another, you know, 15 to 20 years of perspective on that.
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think at the time it's. I don't know how much it's actually changed the idea, just like I know much more of the reality inside is, you know, I think a successful artist to me then would have been somebody who, well, A, was able to live off their work. I mean, successful in life, not successful as an artist, you know, because there's plenty of people who can't live off what they do and are highly successful artistically.
00:24:05
Speaker
And that's always a shame, but true. But so somebody who was able to make a living from what they do without too many twists and turns, like I would not rule out giving talks in the occasional class, but like full-time professorship doesn't mean you're not a successful artist, but it does mean you can't live off your work. Like you don't become a full-time professor
00:24:35
Speaker
in your art career financially speaking, which is not to denigrate full-time professors like myself, but that it's just sort of like, the thing I figured out, and I guess I'm getting confused here in terms of like different times that I thought of different things, because maybe at the time I would have thought that.
00:24:55
Speaker
being a full-time prof and making your art and being well known for it and having lots of people read it or look at it or whatever kind of work it is. And being in demand for things like major exhibitions and doing talks and things like that. Maybe that's what I would have thought in my late 20s. And then now it goes further that where it's like, I have no problem with people doing stuff that
00:25:25
Speaker
will support them that isn't their art, like being a professor. But if you're talking about what is a successful, financially successful artist, it's somebody who has a back catalog of art, whatever it is, writing, comics, visual art, that sells so that they can live off this passive income and they have freedom in their lives. They can decide what to do with their time.
00:25:51
Speaker
So how did you get involved with the Radio Illustrated project, the very first like kernel that would ultimately sort of like lead to out on the wire. But how did you first get involved with that? That was just that was purely Ira. So Ira Glass, I had lived in Chicago before I moved to Mexico City. That's where I was living. And I did nonfiction comics on
00:26:18
Speaker
occasion for a local tabloid called The New City. And at one point in I think 95 or so, Ira had clipped and saved one of my first pieces for them and put it in his file drawer. And then like three years later, he's coming up with one of his clever ideas for how to make pledge drives less painful, which is basically he's very good at that. He's very good at making them like, they're not great, but they're less painful than they would be.
00:26:48
Speaker
Um, and so he was like, let's do a, um, a comic book about the show and called me and I had moved to Mexico city. And in the meantime, and because this was 1998, um, I had had this notion, you know, it's like email and websites were just not really a thing. Like you wouldn't have thought of the Google didn't exist. You know, like I'm sure he could have found me if he really looked, but you know, it's not,
00:27:17
Speaker
It wasn't simple like that. And so he actually just looked me up in the phone book, like in the white pages, and called my number in Chicago. And I had had this fantasy that people like art directors, you know, illustration art directors would call me after I moved and they wouldn't be able to find me. So I put like a forwarding message on my phone for six months. And, um,
00:27:46
Speaker
And about five months in, Ira was the only person ever to get that message and call me. So, you know, I pick up the phone in Mexico City and it's Ira Glass, and it was just like the weirdest experience ever, because I was a huge fan. You know, we would actually stream it in Mexico. We would stream This American Life, which was not easy in 1998.
00:28:08
Speaker
So as you were gearing up for that project, what was that experience like as you were basically being a reporter and then taking all those quotes and instead of drawing a pure, instead of writing a pure narrative, you partially did the dialogue and drew it. So what was that like? I was familiar with the basic
Narrative Storytelling and Collaboration
00:28:32
Speaker
approach that I was going to take. The thing that was interesting about that project, and then this is the exact same thing that I had to deal with, again, out on the wire, is that there's a lot of, first of all, it's radio, right? So there's a lot of stuff that isn't particularly visual to depict. And there's a lot of conceptual stuff, a lot of things that I needed to create visual metaphors for and convey in some way or another. And so that was a really interesting project for me.
00:29:01
Speaker
to sort of figure out how I was going to do that. And in fact, I came up with this approach that works fairly well, which is to use a kind of what I call a meta layer. Now I call it that I didn't at the time where you have the IRA character in that book was IRA and me.
00:29:24
Speaker
um, drawn in a simpler style with sort of no background. And we could, we could talk about what was happening inside the, the scene. So, um, in radio speak, the scene would be the actuality, meaning that that recorded on the spot stuff. And then you have the IRA character and the me character sort of meta IRA, meta Jess walking into the scene and saying, like, look at how this happened and pay attention to this. And so that's kind of the narration level.
00:29:54
Speaker
So it's very parallel to the way they do narrative audio. And the basic idea I got from Scott McCloud, actually, from Understanding Comics, which had come out a few years earlier, and the way that he has his character walk into scenes and talk about what's happening there in the comics language. And how important do you think narrative and storytelling is to our culture these days? I mean, I think it's incredibly important.
00:30:24
Speaker
I mean, as somebody who, in my own working style, I'm very narrative arc oriented, the way that I write and the way that I work, although something like Out on the Wire obviously is not narrative arc because it's more essayistic. But I think it's super important. That said, there are other ways to organize stories that are equally valid, but they're not as easily conveyed to other people.
00:30:54
Speaker
So I think for every narrative artist, having a strong understanding of how the narrative arc works and being able to use those tools is super important. You know, I just taught a workshop at an MFA program, writing MFA program, and I was talking to a poet about this, and I hadn't
00:31:19
Speaker
ever thought about or had to deal with. What application does the narrative arc and narrative structures have for poetry? Especially poetry that's not narrative. It was not a narrative thing. But still, the tools of figuring out who is the protagonist and what does she want. And thinking through the audience point of view and how does the audience can engage with this stuff, all those kinds of things.
00:31:48
Speaker
was immensely helpful for the for the poet. It was really interesting because it's not that it would then turn into, you know, a classic sort of three act structure. You know, kind of story, but but she got control of this, of the story she was trying to tell by using that tool.
00:32:11
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And how would you assess sort of the state of podcasting and narrative storytelling? It's kind of a booming thing of late, a booming medium. And I wonder like how you've spent a lot of time with some really talented people with great ambition and great taste. So I wonder like how would you assess the work that's being done on
00:32:41
Speaker
Well, I mean, the whole reason I did what I did is that it's amazing. I mean, the work that a lot of narrative audio producers is making is just like among the best narrative work in culture right now. Now, obviously, that varies. It's not like every single producer, every single story.
00:33:05
Speaker
The reason I took the approach I did was these people are incredibly good at this and they do it week after week. How do they do it? How can we package up what their approach is and what they do in a way that will be helpful for people?
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And what commonalities would you say that you found from like, Gwen Washington, Jad Abumrad, Ira, Stephanie Fu, like all these just, you know, Zoe Chase, all these people, like what did you find across the board that all of them had in common? Well, they all were looking for characters, first of all, you know, they're all looking for, ideally, protagonists, but certainly
00:33:50
Speaker
human experience in which to encapsulate ideas. So even like a show like Planet Money, which Zoe Chase worked for at the time, and Robert Smith, they were like, you know, sometimes they have big idea stories, and there's like, nothing you can do about it. It's not something where you can decide that, you know, it's about, you know, you have a protagonist to go through. But you know, it's interesting because Hannah Jaffee Walt worked at Planet Money at the time as well. And
00:34:20
Speaker
She was known among the staff for being a master of figuring out how to tell a very abstract story about economics via first-person storytelling, or not first-person, but character-based storytelling. And so one of her really famous innovations was to tell the story of the housing crisis via this 14-year-old girl in Florida who bought
00:34:49
Speaker
a house with her babysitting earnings. And so she found that girl, you know, she found that story and like how she found that was, is actually not in the book because it didn't, it didn't fit. But it was like, you know, it's all this stuff of thinking through like, who are the people who would be involved? Like, you know, she was working on a story when I was there and actually did follow this a bit, although it also didn't make it into the book. They're doing about offshore
00:35:14
Speaker
And she's like, well, somebody's got to actually set up these accounts. There are people who are working for these banks in Belize, in this case, and maybe I can talk to them. And so she would interview people and get characters out of this. So characters are super important because it's the way that we understand information is through how it affects people. At least it's a very strong way that we understand information. So that's one piece of it.
00:35:44
Speaker
Another really interesting thing is more process-oriented, which is that all of the people who I talk to have intense editorial systems of feedback and collaboration. So in no cases is there a show, you know, like a Radiolab or, you know, This American Life, where one person makes it and that's what you see.
00:36:13
Speaker
It just does not happen. That's not how it works. Yeah, I was gonna ask you what it was like to sit in on an edit there. That seems, that's pretty intense. It's crazy. Yeah, it's a really, yes, it's very intense. It depends on the edit. I mean, the ones that I sat in on the most were at Snap Judgment and they are like really intense. I mean, they're just like intense people, aside from anything else.
00:36:40
Speaker
Yes. It was like, as soon as I saw that, I was just, I was amazed at how, I don't know, just like the intensity of it and the attention of it, you know, there's such respect sort of built into it. I'm somebody who doesn't resist editing very much. You know, I like being edited. I like that process.
00:37:09
Speaker
Um, and so I envied it in a way, even though it was like really, it could be really harsh. It could be really hard to take. There's just this, they're people who are really like, they're really, really listening, really paying attention. And they're, their intention is entirely to make your thing saying to make it better. And that can be hard to take, you know, but it's exactly, you know, it's, it's, it's what a piece needs to be the best.
00:37:37
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of times it's hard to divorce your own worth from the work. During these edits, it's easy to maybe take it personally, but it's all about the work sitting in on one of these edits. So it's to make the best possible outcome, not to be taken personally, of course. Right. And I think that they had to work on their interpersonal
00:38:06
Speaker
dynamics, how they would talk to one another to try to remind everybody this is about the work. They definitely ran into issues with that where it was, you know, people would know better and still take it personally, because it's just so hard to maintain that distance for that long.
00:38:27
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess it might be worth mentioning that, like an edit when it comes to narrative radio is kind of like a writer's room for TV where they've got the piece and then the whole team is on there just feeding it in and almost like dispassionately cutting it up, but ultimately to make it as great as it can possibly be and condense it and compress it and make it beautiful.
00:38:52
Speaker
And it is, like you said, intense atmosphere that can be sometimes belligerent, but ultimately in service of the story. Yeah, I mean, belligerent is bad. If it's belligerent, that's a mistake, I think. I mean, it can be. But I think that if that happens, that's a problem of the critiquer, that that person should get their shit in order. Excuse my language, I think we have to put an E on this. Ready alert.
00:39:21
Speaker
But I mean, that's not OK. You have to figure out ways to be a respectful, helpful, and to a degree, even loving, critiquer. That is a huge skill that needs mastering. So if that line starts getting crossed on a regular basis, then there's a big problem, I think. But yeah, I think in the basic ideas,
00:39:49
Speaker
the producer who's the main reporter and or producer of the piece will play it live in a room. Or in this American life's case, they'll actually read script and then play the same thing with Planet Money, they'll read script and play clips. So they'll have the tape clips, you know, edited to a certain degree. And, you know, as far as they can do it, and then they will read the script and
00:40:14
Speaker
And then people are listening, they're sitting there in the room silently. And as soon as it's over, they go back through and often they'll take notes, sort of running notes. It'll go back through and just pick it apart, just take it apart. And it just can be really, I think it can be really emotionally difficult for people.
00:40:34
Speaker
And how did crafting and making your Out on the Wire podcast differ from other projects
Adapting and Managing Creative Projects
00:40:40
Speaker
you've done? What was that learning curve like and what made you want to take on narrative audio after having done the book research and the book writing? It evolved sort of organically in a way because I was thinking about how I could write about or do something about the book on my
00:41:03
Speaker
blog and write blog posts about it and do some stuff to try to get people to pay attention to it, just marketing basically. I just told you a couple stories from Planet Money, some things that didn't make it into the book. There's lots and lots of stuff that I had that didn't make it into the book that was really great and really interesting. I thought, okay, well, I can write blog posts with this other stuff. That would be really fun. Oh, and I've got tape of this. I could put some clips in.
00:41:32
Speaker
into my blog posts and then I just kind of smacked myself in the face and was like, obviously this should be a podcast that just is dumb to not even think of that. So then also obviously, because of my leanings in terms of narrative, but also because the work, the interviews were all pre-recorded, the material I wanted to use was pre-recorded and didn't have any inherent structure to it.
00:42:00
Speaker
You know, it wasn't like what we're doing right now where, you know, you have an interview, you know, idea like what you want to do and you're asking me questions and I'm answering, you know, it's all kind of. There's just it makes it'll make sense as much as I make sense when you when you run it, even if you edit it a little bit, you don't do that much for me. There was no way to do that. I couldn't just like edit down my interviews. Right. So if there was a if I was going to use this material, I had to do
00:42:30
Speaker
narrative audio. You had to log the tape and structure it and shape it. I had to log the tape and I exactly had to write scripts and I had to narrate it. Otherwise there was nothing there. And then it turned out I was just enormously lucky that I was living in France at the time and another person who was resident in the same artist residence as I was was Benjamin Frisch and he's an American cartoonist.
00:42:59
Speaker
and just happens to be an NPR-trained audio producer. So, if that hadn't been true, it definitely would not have happened. And so, because Ben was interested in working with me on this. So, yeah, that's how it happened.
00:43:18
Speaker
And as you transitioned from Out on the Liar and then ultimately into your teaching and the book that has become Growing Gills, such a key component of the early part of it is this notion of idea that
00:43:33
Speaker
and embedded in that is like a lot of people they come up with a ton of ideas but they don't finish things or don't even start things or there's a perfect vision in the head but it just can't translate so people stop or they don't start. So like what systems do you have in place so maybe you don't slip into idea debt and you pay off those debts and you never accrue this anxiety interest
00:44:02
Speaker
Well, I think that the kind of thing we talked about earlier in terms of review is a big piece of that. So if I have ideas, I will put them into my system. And there is time scheduled to look at them. I know that they're there. And I have a couple of folders full of various little notions here and there, both things for stories, but also things for projects and other kinds of stuff that I want to do. It's going to be there for me.
00:44:29
Speaker
And so when it's time for reviewing, that's when I do it. And I look at it and try to be strategic about it and not just run up the wrong mountain again, basically. And think about what's going to fit in with my larger goals. And so there's a lot of it that has to do with figuring out for me at this point. I don't think this is necessarily true initially when you're just trying to figure out how to do anything, you know, how to finish anything.
00:44:59
Speaker
But for me right now, a lot of it is about trying to be much more strategic about what I choose. And as you choose these these products inevitably, like if you've chosen the right one, you will ultimately always run into the dark forest and which is which is a great place to be. It's a great you know, it's a great place to have been. Correct. Well, I like to say that the dark forest is a good sign.
00:45:29
Speaker
in a project, that the project is something that is artistically worth doing. Now whether it's gonna be successful or not, all those other things is a big unknown. But for you, artistically, if you're in the dark forest, meaning if you're in that stage of the project where you were really excited about it, you started doing a whole bunch of stuff, you made a whole bunch of things, you keep making stuff, and at some point you're like, oh my god, I totally have no control over this, I have no idea what I'm doing, I'm totally lost. That's the dark forest.
00:45:59
Speaker
The reason that happens is that you are stretching, that you are trying to do something that's really hard, that's harder than something you've done before. And it will stop you for a while. And you have to then take the time to work out what the things are that you don't know and get control of the project.
00:46:24
Speaker
But what it means is that you're stretching. It means that you're doing something that you don't know how to do already. And so you're going to be growing from this project whether or not it is either artistically or financially or whatever, you know, it's successful. It will be a step in your journey that is worth taking.
00:46:42
Speaker
And is it something that you can see coming on the horizon? Like you're getting like when you're writing Growing Gills, you're like, oh, no, I can there it is 13 miles ahead. The road post sign is saying there's the dark forest and I can't turn around. Is it or does or do you just appear inside it? How does it how do you process it? How do you see it? Well, I think usually I know in theory that it's coming, but I forget to think about it. And then it sneaks up on me, basically.
00:47:12
Speaker
And then I'm in it for a few days before I'm like, oh, that, that's why it's happening. And even just identifying it to myself actually makes it a ton better. Like even though it's not, it doesn't fix the underlying problem of like what I'm trying to figure out. Acknowledging myself like, oh, dark forest, right, okay. I need strategy around this. I need to go have a focus session with somebody and talk about like what the problem is and whatever. That happens now pretty quickly for me, whereas it used to take weeks to realize that
00:47:40
Speaker
oh, I've done this before. And even then, I didn't really have any way to get out of it. And really what I learned from the audio producers is this idea that I'd already used, but hadn't sort of defined in this way. So now that I've defined it, it's much more useful, which is the focus session idea. Yeah. Could you elaborate on that? That comes towards the end of Growing Gills. Right. So the focus session is based on the edit, but it's kind of like
00:48:08
Speaker
a mini version because I really it's like one person you know it's not like a room full of people although you can do it with more than one person but the idea is basically you talk you set up a time a specific time and you basically explain where you're stuck and why you're stuck to somebody as as you see it like what is it that's you're trying to figure out how you know why is this hard like what's the what's the thing that every time you get there you get stuck on it and sometimes it's
00:48:38
Speaker
If you can, that's the moment when you can, as you explain it out loud, using your voice to talk about this will actually change, I find it changes your relationship with the thing and makes it easier to see what's wrong with your thinking. So even if the other person has nothing to contribute, usually they do have something to contribute, but even if they don't, you're going to figure out a lot of stuff that way.
00:49:07
Speaker
So you are, you know, you're as you as anyone who reads the book will find that you like try to break things down so there you can digest it and kind of take some of the overwhelm out of the process and I wonder like what is what's your say your morning routine as you're like when you wake up breakfast coffee journal whatever it is like how do you
00:49:32
Speaker
How do you set up the day so you ensure that you win by the end and however you define winning? It's just, you know, to make sure you look back on the day and be like, you know what, that was that was a damn good Tuesday. I wish I had a system that ensured that. I totally don't. But what I do do is so my mornings are pretty similar, but I have kids. So it's really centered around them and getting them going and not weekends, obviously, but weekdays, you know, getting them fed and off to school.
00:50:02
Speaker
And then, and often I do a thing that I think is not a really great idea, which is like checking email in the morning when I get up. But I'm not too bad at kind of then ignoring it after I check it for quite a while. So what I try to do is, so, cause my mornings are all broken up with family stuff. It's not like concentrated creative time or anything. So I try to
00:50:32
Speaker
have like a kind of clear out my inbox and know that nothing's crazy and then after the kids go to school then usually I'll sit down and get to work on whatever the thing is for the day. I try to set up, the thing that's gonna give you the best chance of having an awesome Tuesday is Monday. If on Monday before you get started you set up your list for the day for Tuesday and you do not overload it, you don't put it full of stuff that's like impossible to finish, you just put on like
00:51:02
Speaker
you know what your top one to three things is for the next day. And you might have a few other things, but they're not, it's okay if they don't get done. And even better if you don't even put them on the list, you know, if you don't know that you're gonna get to it. And then set up your calendar, like look at your calendar and be like, when am I gonna do what? And actually put those things that are on your list onto your calendar. And if you set that up the night before, and over time, you'll get better at being accurate with this, then
00:51:29
Speaker
you're gonna set yourself up for success in a way that will really help your day. The problem is when you wake up and you're like, okay, now what?
00:51:40
Speaker
Absolutely. I can't agree with you more on that because I think a good morning routine starts with a good evening routine. And it's like if you're going to wake up at five in the morning before the sun's up, you need to have some objectives. Otherwise, it's just way too easy to just stay there curled up in your blanket and just snooze away 45 minutes. I don't get up before the sun's up.
00:52:05
Speaker
possibly avoid it. I don't have any idea what that's like. So people naturally have been and as they get the growing gills into their hands, they're going to be obviously turning to you for inspiration and ignition. And so who do you turn to for that same kind of inspiration when you're stuck or in a slog?
00:52:31
Speaker
in terms of? I guess in terms of in terms of your work.
Inspiration and Teaching
00:52:35
Speaker
And you know, when you're like the way some people might go to Jessica Abel dot com or pick up growing gills and and look to that to get them unstuck. You know, you're you're you are now that instrument for a lot of people. Who do you and what do you turn to if you are similarly stuck? I don't know that I get stuck in this that exact exact way.
00:52:59
Speaker
What does inspire me, though, and gets me sort of thinking, you know, when I'm sort of like, I need to think through new things. I mean, I have a bunch of friends I've made and and sort of people I read who are in the
00:53:14
Speaker
like creative entrepreneurship area. And so I read stuff from them and they'll often have really good stuff about setting goals and kind of getting strategic. Cause like, as you can probably tell from what I'm talking about here, like my big challenge right now is more the big picture strategy than it is the day to day stuff, right? So it's not about getting stuck day to day. It's going like, okay, is this the right thing to be doing? You know, I'm making the right choice here. The right mountain. The right mountain, exactly.
00:53:39
Speaker
And so I do get inspiration from people who have like a much sort of bigger strategic picture. And, you know, I follow Tara Gentile a lot and she's somebody who talks about this kind of larger goal setting stuff frequently. She's not in the arts realm. So it's not that kind of thing. It's more like just thinking strategically in a more generic sense, you know. And then I get a lot of inspiration actually from students.
00:54:08
Speaker
from students who are in my creative focus workshop, which is sort of my course that follows the Growing Gills methodology, essentially. Growing Gills follows the creative focus methodology, more specifically. So those students, I have a lot of interaction with them, both during the course and also when they're finished and find out what are they struggling with and what's going on with them. And then that will help me figure out what to write about and how to talk
00:54:37
Speaker
about these topics. And then also the students I have live here at PAFA, helping them and dealing with them, building their careers and figuring out how to handle being artists in the world and how to be grown ass humans. And that's really what I like talking about and teaching about. And so having
00:55:05
Speaker
these people around is inspiring to me in terms of doing the work. And would you say that teaching has helped inform the creative work you still do? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely. Teaching has been so earlier on, I was like, I was afraid I was heading down this road that made it sound like I disrespect teachers. I totally don't love teachers. And the practice of teaching is absolutely essential for
00:55:35
Speaker
learning, I think, you know, like for me anyway, like the way I really learn stuff is by teaching it. So like one thing I've been doing is, for example, is I've been teaching what I call the story matrix workshop, which is derived from the story structures, the story formulas that are in the creative, I mean, in Out on the Wire. So I've taught that a bunch of different times to different audiences.
00:55:58
Speaker
and through doing that and dealing with what people pick up when I talk about this stuff and what are they talking about and what's hard for them and how do they misinterpret or interpret interestingly what it is that I'm trying to talk about. That is how I learn what should be in this workshop. I wouldn't know otherwise, basically.
00:56:25
Speaker
What excites you most about this next little chapter of your life that's stemming from the Creative Focus Workshop and Growing Gills? What excites you most as you go forward in the next few months or the next couple years?
00:56:42
Speaker
You know, you're talking about what is a successful artist and I interpreted that as financially successful and life successful. What I'm trying to do with my own learning as far as creative focus and then also with the way that I'm teaching it and doing the book and so on is trying to get to the point where I have that success, where I can be somebody who has enough involvement with students and activity and things going on in my life that I can have some freedom in my time and also get strategic enough that I make the right choices and don't.
00:57:11
Speaker
overwhelm myself all the time with too much stuff because that's my tendency is like to be workaholic and do too much. So I really what excites me is working less basically doing as much less as possible figuring out how to do that and still be the person I want to be to people still help people still you know make stuff that's valuable but do it without
00:57:36
Speaker
practically killing myself. Well, fantastic. Jessica, this was such a pleasure to get to speak to you about your work and what a thrill. And the work you've done is inspiring and a great service to the creative and artistic community. So just thank you so much for doing your work, being you, and carving out some time to speak with me this morning. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I appreciate you having me here.
Conclusion and Connections
00:58:05
Speaker
Big thanks to Jessica for her work and a big thank you for listening. Hey, I've got a monthly newsletter where I send out my reading list for the month. Think of it as a book a week. Check out my website, BrendanOmera.com. You can also ping me on Twitter, at BrendanOmera. If you want to say hi, bye, don't bite.
00:58:28
Speaker
As some of you know, I can be a little bit nerdy. So I wanted to know if it would be a good idea to apply to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Seems cool, right? If there was only someone I could talk to about this. You know, people, I think, believe that I'm sort of magical. My students accuse me of witchcraft occasionally.
00:58:51
Speaker
That's a lead. All right, until next week, when we delve into another in-depth interview with a purveyor of someone in the craft and genre of creative nonfiction. Thank you.