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Episode 119—The Multi-Hyphenated Allison K. Williams
129 Plays6 years ago
"Every project I do has made me more fit and better to do my next project," says Allison K. Williams. It’s The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the very best in the genre of telling true stories, how they got to where they are and the tools, tips, and tricks that make them so good at what they do. I’m your host Brendan O’Meara. Today’s guest is none other than Allison K. Williams. She’s @GuerillaMemoir on Twitter and you can visit her website at idowords.com. Allison is a performer, an editor, and a writer. She also hosts the Brevity Podcast so I recommend subscribing to that wherever you get your podcasts. I mean, while you’re doing that, why don’t you consider subscribing to this show if you don’t already. Share it with your pals if you think they’ll get some value. This is our tiny corner of the Internet and we’re making it bigger each and every week. That’s on you, brah. Oh, and you gotta sign up for my monthly newsletter. I send out my monthly reading recommendations and some other tasty goodies straight to your inbox on the first of the month. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat it? Be sure to give your buddy Brendan a follow on the socials: @BrendanOMeara on Twitter and @CNFPod on Twitter. I post cool audiograms and quote cards on Instagram @brendanomeara. One more, there’s a Facebook page for the podcast if you do most of your hanging out over there. Remember, kids, if you can’t Do, Interview! See ya!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
00:00:04
Speaker
Attention podcast listeners. Riff. Now you would think this is a heavy metal podcast dedicated to the holy trinity of double bass drum kits, face melting guitar solos, and can crushing bass lines. But it's not.
00:00:23
Speaker
It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the very best in the genre of telling true stories, how they got to where they are, and the tools, tips, and tricks that make them so good at what they do. I am your host, Brendan O'Mara. Hey, hey. Today's guest is none other than
00:00:44
Speaker
Allison K. Williams for episode 119. She's at Gorilla Memoir on Twitter, and you can visit her website at IDoWords.com. Allison is a performer and editor and a writer.
Brendan's Newsletter and Allison's Life in Dubai
00:01:02
Speaker
the show
00:01:27
Speaker
Oh, and you gotta sign up for my monthly newsletter. I send it out on the first of the month, and it's my reading recommendations and some other tasty goodies. Straight to your inbox on the first. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it. I'm sure you're already sick of me, so let's kick it with Allison K. Williams.
00:01:54
Speaker
So thrilled to get to talk to you a little bit about, of course, your work, but also your experience in Dubai. Not that I've ever been, but I'm a little familiar with Dubai just because I've covered horse racing for over 10 years. So the Dubai World Cup is a big march.
00:02:14
Speaker
race that happens in March and also the UAE Derby which kind of feeds into the Kentucky Derby a few months later. So I'm kind of like familiar with that from the horse racing aspect but it would be really cool to get your impressions of what what it's been like how long you've been over there and what drew you there in the first place.
Cultural Scene and Expat Challenges in Dubai
00:02:32
Speaker
Well I've been in Dubai for four years now and I moved there because
00:02:39
Speaker
While I was still a circus performer, I was performing in Dubai and I met the man who is now my husband, who is a British national and he's a consultant in workforce management software. So we have so much in common. But he lives in Dubai. He had been working for the London Olympics and that job had kind of a natural ending point and he got headhunted to go to Dubai. And it's funny that you mentioned the horse racing thing because
00:03:09
Speaker
Horse racing in Dubai is a big deal because there are royal people who are really interested in horse racing. Like the King's stable is the biggest stable in the country, one of the biggest stables in the world. They're really into horses. And in Dubai, if somebody royal is interested in something, they often throw money at it until it happens. And that's also true with writing and with literature in Dubai.
00:03:35
Speaker
So there's a big festival every year in March called the Emirates Festival of Literature. It's sponsored by Emirates Airlines, which is owned by the government. It's patronized by important people in the government. And so consequently, it is a big, beautiful world-class literary festival because it goes back to some very specific people wanting it to happen.
00:03:57
Speaker
And so, for example, I just did a workshop at an arts district called Alter Cal Avenue that is this gorgeous like renovated warehouse area where there's coffee shops and galleries and design furniture stores and, you know, places that sell bone broth and, you know, and the people who run Alter Cal Avenue are wealthy enough to really want to provide free art to people.
00:04:24
Speaker
And so I taught a memoir workshop that was like two nights, like 30 people came. It was, you know, which is fairly large attendance for Dubai. It was free. Like I got paid, but the people got to come for free because El Circal Avenue's sponsors, the El Circal family, are really interested in bringing art to people for free.
00:04:45
Speaker
And so that's the really interesting paradox of living in Dubai is that yes, there's a lot of things that are very expensive. For example, I could not afford to rent a theater and put on a play. But there's also a lot of stuff that as long as somebody wealthy wants it to happen, they will make it happen.
00:05:02
Speaker
Yeah. The one time I kind of brushed shoulders almost literally with Sheikh Mohammed, Bin Rashid, Al Maktoum, I forget his full name. I should know his full name because he basically puts on the World Cup. He also has many titles and in Dubai when you announce him on the radio, you must list all of his titles.
00:05:24
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a, yeah, it's a mouthful and, um, in, in Saratoga Springs, where I spend about seven years of time, there's a huge yearling sale, the phasic tipping year yearling sale there. And, uh, he was on, on the grounds one time, you know, he and his entourage and the, and they're in the arena, like in the back.
00:05:42
Speaker
there are these giant beautiful murals, like old art and some newer stuff, but he was just walking around just in jeans and a white shirt, black belt, just looking pretty cash, and he's just pointing to paintings and then someone's writing it down. He's just like, all right, that's going to get on his plane back to Dubai and everything. So it was just pretty cool. And speaking of the art, and if there's anything he wants, he can point to it, and there it is.
00:06:11
Speaker
And he's written several books, too, that have all been bestsellers in the UAE. So it's really nice, I would say, to have a government that is very specifically interested in art and literature. Yeah. Yeah, that's got to get. Have you, in any circumstances, kind of brushed, had an experience with him or someone in his inner circle? You know, I haven't.
00:06:41
Speaker
I think in the long run, one of the challenges as an expat is I want to be a part of the active literary community in Dubai. And I mean, of course, we all want to gain as much renown in our community as we can and influence as many other people as we can.
00:07:08
Speaker
But there's also a challenge in Dubai where it is a country that has an interest in making sure that speech and literature are not inflammatory and don't detract from the good work the government is trying to do. And so it's very important to choose carefully what I want to write about.
00:07:35
Speaker
You know, there were there were topics that I covered when I lived in America that are topics that are off the table for me now because they're not appropriate to the society of the UAE. Whereas in America, that would not be a primary consideration for me. And so I think one of the challenges as an expat is when you're in a country voluntarily and especially in a country where I am granted as much privilege as I have in the UAE, because being a white expat woman,
00:08:04
Speaker
I have a lot of privilege. One must be really mindful of what the local rules are and like not just, oh, what you can get away with pretty much all the time because Dubai is a very relaxed country. They're interested in doing business. They want to be part of the world scene, you know, and they don't, you don't become part of the world scene by, you know, cracking down on people for doing things that are legal in other countries.
00:08:31
Speaker
But at the same time, it's important to be respectful of the local morals, because I am there voluntarily. And everybody is in Dubai voluntarily. The local population is like 13 percent Emirati, and everyone else is from somewhere else. And so it's a very safe place to live, and it's a very clean place to live, because just about everybody is on their best behavior.
00:08:55
Speaker
Have you run into any experiences
Allison's Storytelling Journey and Views on Success
00:08:57
Speaker
where you are in danger of violating a social norm there that you were maybe used to getting away with, say, in the United States? And you're like, oh, wow, I got to backtrack a little bit here. You know, so I was in a production of Macbeth, the Shakespeare play.
00:09:19
Speaker
And it was an all-woman production. And it was really just an incredible privilege to be a part of. I had the title role and I was also the fight director. And the director cast all of the roles as women, except for Macbeth and Macduff, because we have on-stage wives. And you can't have a power lesbian couple on stage in Dubai. That's not okay. It's not respectful of the local moors. So I'm in full male drag.
00:09:48
Speaker
I had two really interesting things happen for me, one positive and one maybe less positive. The less positive one was that we were doing also just some scenes, just me and Lady Mac, we were doing some scenes at local schools where people were learning to speak English, just as like an immersion thing, a fun thing for them. And one of the schools was like, well, we don't have anywhere for you to dress. Can you please just come already dressed and made up? And I'm like, no.
00:10:17
Speaker
I'm not going to go through the streets of Dubai in my car or walking on the sidewalk dressed as a member of another gender, because I think that might get me in trouble. I didn't actually go look up the law, but I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to pretend you're a member of another gender out in public in Dubai. And I think that would have attracted unwarranted attention. On the positive side,
00:10:42
Speaker
It was an incredible challenge as an actor to play a man and play it realistically. And because gender roles are somewhat proscribed in the UAE, many men in the audience fully believed me to be a man and were genuinely astonished if they had hung around to talk to their friends in the production and we came out without our makeup at the end. And when I did the school shows,
00:11:12
Speaker
I had gentlemen come up to me and say, oh my goodness, I thought you were a man. I was gonna ask you to come hang out with us at the barber shop. And that was just really intriguing and fascinating to me because part of how I was choosing to act as a man, as the actor, was I took up more space, I manspread, I touched people without their permission and I touched them harder than I would touch them as a woman. I was very,
00:11:40
Speaker
obvious about taking space and owning space in a way that as a woman, and particularly as a woman in a country with a patriarchy that's even stronger than the patriarchy in the US, that I wouldn't behave. I wouldn't take up that kind of space. I would yield space to other people. And so it was a fascinating experience to kind of investigate gender roles as an actor in a country with very strict gender roles.
00:12:05
Speaker
Yeah, what an almost immersive social experiment that must have been for you to inhabit that role and to see the reaction you were getting and it must have been like weird and very disembodying being in that skin and then being selling yourself so well that you're able to really fool them into thinking that you were something you weren't.
00:12:31
Speaker
Yeah and it was it was interesting too because the theater production was immersive like we took over an entire building and different scenes happened in different rooms and the audience followed whoever they wanted to from place to place and so people were busy actively being their characters and interacting with each other even when they weren't in a scripted scene and
00:12:53
Speaker
And I found that that was really, you know, there really wasn't an off stage time. I did it once. We had a very well attended night. I normally like ducked down the secret corridor so that I can change clothes for the final fight. Cause I'm in a suit for most of the show. And at the other end of the corridor, normally there's nobody. And that night there were like 40 people and they start to follow me and I had to turn around and look at them and go, now is the time when Macbeth pees.
00:13:22
Speaker
You know, and they laughed and, you know, turned around and went away. But it was it was also very interesting, too, because especially being the fight director. So I was bossing sections of the show and being one of the more experienced professional actors in the show. I also felt the cast treating me like a man, even when I wasn't in makeup. And that was very interesting. What came first, the the performer in you or the writer in you?
00:13:53
Speaker
Well, when I was a little kid, I was dictating stories to my mother to write down for me before I could write, but I was also coming home from the movie Annie and acting out all the songs in the living room. So I think that kind of grew up hand in hand, which is that I really love telling stories and whether that's sharing them with an audience by speaking them or whether that's writing them down,
00:14:22
Speaker
it's kind of always gone hand in hand for me. And I think I got into nonfiction in graduate school. Like I hadn't written any nonfiction other than personal diaries until I got into grad school. I was primarily a playwright. And I discovered with nonfiction that it was a way to not just tell stories, but to reflect people's experiences back on them in a way that was almost as powerful or sometimes even more powerful
00:14:51
Speaker
than the public experience of attending a play, you know, and having that kind of group emotional experience, I found that nonfiction was a way to create that emotional experience in individuals.
00:15:02
Speaker
Yeah. And who gave you the courage early on to, to lean into your interests and whether that was performance or, or, or writing or theater, you know, that's a, it's a career that can often be strangled at a young age. And I wonder who might've given you the permission to say, Alison, yes, keep going. Um, definitely my parents. I mean, I feel very, very lucky that,
00:15:32
Speaker
both my mom and my dad were really supportive of pretty much anything my brother and I wanted to do. They'd challenge us and they'd ask us questions, but they were really supportive. They were really like, okay, you go do you. They did try to talk me into going to an in-state university rather than an out-of-state university, and they did that by withholding money, but it didn't stop me from going to an out-of-state university.
00:16:01
Speaker
they never, however, were like, oh, no, don't major in theater. And I think it helped that I was a really rotten kid when I was a teenager. I wasn't into drugs, I wasn't a drinker, but I did run around with a lot of older friends, staying out till all hours and having a lot of personal friction with my parents. And I think it helped that
00:16:28
Speaker
the option was also either be supportive or lose me entirely. And I'm really grateful that, you know, before my dad died, we had a really great relationship and I have a really great relationship with my mom now, but there were a few years where it was touch and go. And I'm really grateful that they continued to support me even when we didn't like each other very much. Well, that's the sort of the job of a teenage girl is to just make their parents rip their hair out, I think.
00:16:57
Speaker
I think so too. I think so too. So as you progressed and went through college, what did a successful fill in the blank look like for you, whether that was a performer or a writer? At that age, what did that look like to you and how were you trying to manifest it?
00:17:20
Speaker
So I think something that is different for me than for many people coming up in writing or in theater was that I found out really early that fame does not equal success and success does not equal fame. I mean, we've we've all experienced telling people, oh, I'm a writer.
00:17:39
Speaker
And the first question is, well, have you published anything I've read? You know, and the answer is usually no, there's freaking five million books in the world. And I don't know what your taste is. You know, maybe I'm a mystery writer and you only read romance. Maybe I'm a romance novelist and you only read serious literary fiction. And and I think, you know, actors and writers are asked to give public proof of their
00:18:04
Speaker
job and their creative ability in a way that no other people are challenged to provide proof of their ability to do their job.
Managing Jealousy and Personal Growth in Writing
00:18:14
Speaker
But I started out touring on the Renaissance Festival Circuit. The first acting I did was with the Renaissance Festival in my hometown. I eventually developed a comedy circus show with my ex-husbands that toured the Renaissance Festival Circuit and did corporate events. And then I formed a small female circus company
00:18:34
Speaker
that did Renfests and Busker festivals and We Street performed in Europe and did a lot of corporate events. And so because of those experience and because I started as a playwright, which is a very consumer oriented medium, you don't just write your play in a vacuum, you write your play with other people in the room and you collaborate. And if an actor has a problem with their character, they will stop in the middle of the scene and go, I'm sorry, I don't know what my character wants in this scene,
00:19:03
Speaker
And you've got 24 hours to fix the script or the same person will stop in the same place again tomorrow night. And so because I worked in these venues where as a playwright, people are challenging your writing decisions all the time in a supportive way most of the time. And as a street performer and as a Renaissance festival performer, I'm passing the hat after every show.
00:19:28
Speaker
And if you're boring, people leave, you know, and if they leave, you don't eat there. There isn't that kind of like, I hesitate to say self-indulgence because that's so pejorative, but like writing, especially literary writing is a process that really rewards sustained introspection. And I mean, I just, I just came out of a week long workshop with Andre Debuse III, who is a marvelous writer.
00:19:54
Speaker
And Andre is really 100% in the literary camp. He does not show his book to anyone until it is finished. He does not seek focus groups. He is not interested in meeting his publisher's demands. He's only interested in sitting down and writing the very best book he is capable of. And I want to write the very best book I'm capable of too, but I also want it to be widely read and I'd like it to make me money. You know, it doesn't have to be Harry Potter money,
00:20:22
Speaker
I've managed to be one of the most produced playwrights in American high schools, which is a market that a lot of playwrights and a lot of writers don't even know exists. And yet thousands of kids have performed my plays and their teachers all sent me checks, you know? And so part of that is writing to a really specific formula, but also writing stuff that is as good or better than everything else that follows that specific formula. Does that make sense?
00:20:48
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Some people, they forget that they're different. To be a working writer or anything, there are so many different spurs to have income streams, whether it's being an editor, maybe writing that definitely feeds your soul, writing that doesn't feed your soul but pays the bills, and other little
00:21:11
Speaker
targeted niches that help pay the bills. When you look at the whole pie, you're like, oh, there's a living there. I think a lot of people get stuck, especially starting writers or even better, resentful writers mid-career.
00:21:31
Speaker
who compare themselves to say like a john grisham or steven king or whatever and be like yeah those guys get to write their one or two books a year and that sustains them and more power to them but that's the the ideal and the only thing anyone ever compares themselves to where there's a few things wrong with that in comparing yourself to someone else's race uh... and also comparing yourself to that kind of ideal but
00:21:56
Speaker
if you measure yourself up against that bar, you're going to be bitter and resentful and jealous and never do your best work. So it's like, you can't do that. You can only compare yourself to like who you were yesterday. And that's probably the best you can do. Yeah, because I mean, if we were accountants, we would go sit at desks next to other accountants and we would know, oh, Tom's really fast with numbers and John's really accurate with numbers and Jane's better than I am and Susie's worse than I am.
00:22:25
Speaker
But as a writer, we work alone so much of the time and the only visible people in our profession are those whose success has become fame. And so we forget that John Grisham was working 90 hours a week as an attorney and he got up at three in the morning to write for three hours before he went to work each day, you know, because we don't see that. What we see is his book on the airport bookshelf.
00:22:52
Speaker
And I think it's very hard as a writer when the visible success is so far removed from most writers' experiences and the people around us judge us by that visible success.
00:23:05
Speaker
Yeah, and it's further exacerbated by social media these days too because we're comparing our ugly cells to the blow dried image that we see on the screen and it really leads for, it's a recipe for making yourself feel super shitty and that you're not doing enough and you're not successful, you're not earning enough and then it just totally rips apart your soul and just drains the joy out of something that you got into because you just genuinely loved it.
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's where I'm lucky is that I genuinely derive joy from teaching. I really like editing and it is really important to me that my work is enjoyed by other people. Like I want to create something beautiful and true and original, but being able to reach people with it is a key part of my process and a key part of what I value about using my
00:24:05
Speaker
creativity that I have been blessed with. And that I work really frickin' hard to sustain. Yeah, of course. It's a never-ending grind, for sure. And did you have a moment where writing the plays for high school audiences and clearly having a degree of sustained success with that, did you have an ego check moment where you're like, you know,
00:24:34
Speaker
Maybe I'm not gonna write the next Hamilton, but you know, I can serve a lot of great, you know, young audiences here and make a living. Was there a crossroads there where you swallowed some ego so you could maybe do something that wasn't quite as prestigious, but it was still art? I would say I was doing a one-woman show.
00:24:59
Speaker
that I toured the Fringe Festival Circuit, and I did a prestigious festival in Toronto, which was a theater market I would have really liked to have broken into. And I realized that no matter how many people come to and enjoy this one-person show, it's still not going to be anywhere near the number of people who see a script that I write and send out into the world.
00:25:27
Speaker
I wouldn't say it was a come to Jesus moment. I think for me it's been more of an evolution. I'm thinking back and I'm thinking, my publisher definitely had a come to Jesus moment because she realized that she did not want to break into the theater market in Toronto anymore. She wanted to have her own publishing company and publish her own plays.
00:25:48
Speaker
And now they're the third or fourth most successful playwriting company in North America. But I think I'm very lucky that for me, it's always been a case of every project I do has made me more fit and better to do my next project.
00:26:08
Speaker
And I listened to an interview a couple years ago with Mike Brabigula, comedian, and a great, great screenwriter, too. His movie, Don't Think Twice, is brilliant. I don't know if you've seen that, but that's... Yeah, he is so clever, and I love to sleepwalk with me, too. That's great, too. Yeah, I love... And so much of the themes of, say, Don't Think Twice apply to a lot of the things I love to talk about with people. It's just you can be very...
00:26:35
Speaker
Um, this is kind of a tangent, but you can be like very talented, but you don't get the break. And then how do you, how do you process the jealousy you feel for even a peer who does maybe get that break? And there might not necessarily be any better than you, but for some reason they got it. They struck oil and you're still sleeping in a bunk bed with four roommates. Jealousy is so hard. Like, I mean, even definitely on social media, um,
00:27:03
Speaker
Even in person, it's really hard to look at somebody else who got that break or who got that publication and go, oh man, that should have been me. And I think part of it is remembering that in some ways jealousy and envy can be a very positive thing because it means I'm almost there.
Preparation and Entrepreneurial Mindset in Writing
00:27:24
Speaker
I don't look at Stephen King and think,
00:27:27
Speaker
How come I didn't sell 15 million copies of Christine? Because I know that's not within my realm. But I definitely look at, say, Stephanie K. Land, who's making a really big splash with Made right now. And I love Stephanie. I wish her all the success in the world. I'm also a little bit jealous, but it's because I'm close. And I think that's the thing to remember is that jealousy and envy, if we channel them,
00:27:53
Speaker
they can be the spurs where we go, you know what, I need to work a little harder because I'm close or I wouldn't look at it and think that should be mine. Yeah, that's so well put. And I tend to be, it's just in my nature and I don't like it, but I tend to be a bit jealous and get into the compare game and it's bad and I have to, I can recognize it right away. I can feel like this weird little vibration in my body when it's happening.
00:28:23
Speaker
And I kind of just put that in a fuel tank and be like, okay, if you're feeling this, all it means is you just need to lean into the work more. It's just like have a better podcast, edit it better, interview better, write better. And it's just like trying to channel it in the right direction.
00:28:42
Speaker
And like like Barbigula was saying in an interview before, he realized that if he put more work in, worked harder on his jokes, did more shows, he got better and got more visibility. And so it's like you just have to kind of all you can do is lean into the work with rigor and the rest is kind of out of your control. And so yeah, and being lucky is being in the right place at the right time and being prepared.
00:29:11
Speaker
You know, luck means nothing if you're not ready to take advantage of it when the break comes your way. I love the story about Madonna, how when she was first starting out before she was anybody, she carried her demo tapes with her everywhere. If she went out to the bodega to buy a pack of cigarettes, she carried her demo tapes because she never knew when she was going to run into somebody who could do her some good.
00:29:35
Speaker
And I love that level of preparedness. People like to knock Britney Spears, but Britney works so hard promoting her first album. I mean, she toured shopping malls all over the United States. And it's hard work that gets people that success that looks easy.
00:29:55
Speaker
Yeah, there's, and I'm guilty of this too, there's an entrepreneurial nature of having a satisfying writing career or documentary film career, whatever it is, freelance career, that I think a lot of people, especially me, kind of eschew in the, like if I just do my thing, I will get discovered. And the fact is, one out of 10 people, I don't know the math, but it's probably close to like one out of 10.
00:30:21
Speaker
They get discovered just by doing the work somehow. The right person found it. Someone retweeted it, went to the right person, and boom, book deal. Never really happens. But you have to kind of be like Madonna in this instance, where you've got those demo tapes and there is an element of hustle that you have to employ. Otherwise, you will just wallow in obscurity and probably grow
00:30:46
Speaker
jealous and resentful over time and bitter. So like for you, you have a very diverse portfolio of things that you do to sustain yourself, you know, editing, writing, playwright, every all these things. So how did you manifest your like, sort of global business plan and employ that kind of hustle that you say that Britney Spears and Madonna use to, you know, propel them to fame?
00:31:14
Speaker
Well, I think a lot of it is being willing to work harder and longer hours than pretty much everyone else around me. I definitely have to recognize that not having children has opened up a huge swath of time in my life that a lot of people don't have because they have kids and kids need, you know, good parenting. I think a lot of it is refusing to be told no
00:31:43
Speaker
and declaring who I am without waiting for permission. Just like you want to dress for the job you have, I feel like you want to act entitled to the job you want.
00:31:58
Speaker
And I guess too, I've been wrestling a lot in the past few weeks with the idea that if you're okay with where you are, you have to be okay with what got you there. I wrote a column for brevity a couple of days ago that talked about how, you know, I had a terrible high school experience, but I wouldn't go back and change it because it led to some of the writing I'm happiest with. And I think it's that constant
00:32:25
Speaker
pushing against other people who wanted to tell me, no, you can't do this. No, you're too weird. No, you're too smart. No, you're not allowed, you know, and just doing stuff anyway. And and I don't think that works for everybody. I don't think everybody is that stubborn and pushy to begin with. I mean, it definitely took me a long time to go from being
00:32:48
Speaker
a pushy, arrogant person to a confident and self-assured person. And I mean, I still am pushy and arrogant some of the time, but I'm also okay with that. And I think I'm very lucky in the sense that I worked extremely hard and got some good breaks that I spent so long
00:33:09
Speaker
with, oh, those audience members walked away. Maybe they hated my show, or maybe they needed to pee, or maybe they had to be somewhere else on time, or maybe their kid just had a fit and they're taking him away before he yells and disrupts my show. I don't care. My job is to focus on these other 150 people who are still here with me. And I think that really taught me a lot about, I'm not gonna reach everybody. I'm not gonna try to appeal to everybody. I don't wanna sell a book to everybody.
00:33:36
Speaker
I want to sell a book to the people it specifically speaks to, and I want to be as narrow to reach those people who need to hear from me that they're not alone. They're not the only ones who feel this way. And I think it's certainly not unique, but I think it's very hard to be that combination of pushy and confident and arrogant and yet emotionally naked and vulnerable.
00:34:03
Speaker
There's a story slam tomorrow night as part of a conference that I'm teaching at this weekend. I'm at Hippo Camp in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and I'm trying to decide, do I tell my sex worker story or do I tell a nice safe story about being in a temple in India? You know, they're both good stories. I've told them both before. They both sound great. One of them is more emotionally vulnerable and emotionally naked than the other one. You don't have to weigh
00:34:30
Speaker
Well, is it going to be better to make that choice and be a little edgy, or is it going to be better to make a slightly safer choice and make people feel a little safer? When I had Jeff Geiger on the podcast a while ago, he was saying that if the art doesn't scare you a little bit, it's probably not worth doing. So my advice is to do the one that's scary.
00:34:54
Speaker
I really love that. I really, really love that. And I think that's it, too. I think a lot of people are still worried, especially in the nonfiction world. What are people going to think? Is my mom going to be mad if I write this? Are my kids going to be embarrassed if I write this? And again, I don't have kids, so I can't weigh in on how people should treat their children. But I think that modeling dedication and focus and doing what you need to do is also good parenting.
00:35:21
Speaker
And I think that if people object to the way you tell your story, well, nothing's stopping them from writing their own damn book. How have you, in personal stories, reconciled, telling the truest story you can tell, but also even if that does maybe shed people close to you and not the most flattering light? You know, I told my now husband when I first got together with him, I said, you know, just so you know, I'm writing a book that's a memoir that has a lot of sex in it.
00:35:50
Speaker
And the book ended up not selling, so it turned out to be a moot point. But he said, there's a lot of books in the world I haven't read, and that's going to be one of them. And I think we forget, because the literary world matters so much to us, we forget that outside our world, it's actually pretty rare that our family comes across a specific book and decides to read it. And it's a perfectly legitimate choice to go, you know what?
00:36:18
Speaker
Mom, I'm really glad you're proud of me. I want to share with you this one particular chapter that I think you'll really like, but I suggest you not read the book because I think you might find part of it hurtful. And I think the way to be honest with our readership and be honest with ourselves is to, number one, describe people's actions rather than our judgment of their actions.
00:36:43
Speaker
You know, I say all books are mysteries because the idea is to leave enough clues that the reader can assemble what happened in their head and make their own judgments about the story. And I think you don't have to say, you know, for instance, and you know, this is not my mom, my mom's delightful, but you don't have to say my mother was a horrifying alcoholic who beat the children and left us scarred for life instead.
00:37:07
Speaker
you can talk about the time when you were supposed to go to the fashion show and you got all dressed up and you waited and waited and waited and mom never came home to take you because she was at the bar. And you don't have to say, and she was horrible and I was scarred for life because your reader is going to get that. They're going to get it really clearly from describing the actions. And I think the second important thing is we must describe our own actions as clearly
00:37:33
Speaker
and as mercilessly as we describe everyone else in the book's actions. If you look at your memoir and you are unequivocally the hero of the memoir, chances are you've written a pretty shit book. And even for novels, if the hero or heroine of the novel is like absolutely perfect and wonderful, we call that Mary Sue, it's a shit book. And that's the way I think to get around
00:38:01
Speaker
feeling shitty about hurting people's feelings, because you're going to hurt people's feelings whether you want to or not, because some dumb thing that you didn't even think mattered is going to hurt somebody's feelings. You know, oh, I can't believe you told my age. I never tell my age. You know, something that we can't even anticipate, because to us it's not a hurtful thing, is going to hurt somebody's feelings. And so you kind of have to decide to say to yourself, you know what, I'm going to tell the truth as I know it.
00:38:29
Speaker
And part of telling the truth is being honest about what happened, not necessarily your judgment of what happened. And if done well, the reader of the memoir isn't even really going to be paying attention to you, the narrator or your ugly family. They're going to be overlaying their own ugly family over yours. You're just going to be a list.
00:38:54
Speaker
And so really, they're going to be reading about their own family. And just every time they see an action in play, they'll be like, oh yeah, I remember when my mom did that or my dad did that. And they'll just kind of use you as a conduit to be kind of reliving and rekindling their own ugly past vicariously through this book if they even pick it up. Yeah. And seeing what you see and feeling what you feel. And I think, too, I think the memoir process can also, if we really
00:39:22
Speaker
seriously analyze the actions of the people around us. I think it can give us insight into them. I had a moment back when I was playing Macbeth. We were in a building with an elevator and I got into the elevator and I was headed towards an important scene in the room that was the Macbeth house. And I get into the elevator and I'm holding the door and there's like, I don't know, five or six audience members kind of hanging back.
00:39:50
Speaker
and trying to decide if they should get into the elevator with me or not. And we were supposed to speak whatever dialogue we wanted when we weren't in an actual scene. And I looked at them and I said, come on, I'm not holding this door for my health. And I realized that's my dad talking. That's my dad being brusque and mean and yelling at us to get somewhere because he had an important place he wanted us to be. And it was important to get us there.
00:40:20
Speaker
And it gave me this like moment of literally walking in my dad's shoes. You know, I mean, these big man with lifts in them so that I'll be taller. And I'm realizing when you truly go into someone's actions, because very, very few people wake up in the morning and think to themselves, I'm gonna go hurt people today. I'm gonna make my children miserable. You know what I really wanna do today? I wanna beat my spouse. You know, people don't wake up and think that way.
00:40:50
Speaker
They wake up and they think, oh man, I had to hit my wife last night because she did this horrible thing and it just triggered me. Or they wake up and they think, I really hope my kids behave today because I just can't stand that I'm gonna have to yell at them and lock them in the closet. I'm not saying those actions are right, but I'm saying that we need to muster as much compassion as we can
00:41:16
Speaker
and ask ourselves, well, why did they do that? Why for them was that the response to the situation that came out of them? What made them the way they were? What made them like that? Because Darth Vader has a view of the world in which the government would run much better if it wasn't for these pesky rebels trying to upset things. Everybody's the hero of their own worldview. And I think we serve our nonfiction better
00:41:46
Speaker
when we show people's worldviews that make them the hero of their own story and let the reader go, ooh, that person's worldview is really twisted and not the way that things should be. I think this person is bad. You know, not quite as simplistic as that, but by presenting actions, we let the reader become more involved in the story and they figure out who's a good guy and who's a bad guy.
00:42:10
Speaker
And whether you're writing an essay or something longer or play, what do you find that you struggle with in the process? Ass in chair. My number one problem is ass in chair. You know, somebody asked Nora Roberts, how do you write three books a year? Ass in chair. You know, that's that is the major secret to writing. Can you sit down and start typing?
00:42:35
Speaker
And that is the hardest thing for me. It is very hard for me to put writing first, like I tell everybody else to do. It is very hard for me to do a little bit every day, like I tell everybody else to do. It is very hard for me, even when I have booked retreat days in a specific place, to spend that time focused entirely on my own work as I tell everybody else to do. Once I sit down,
00:43:00
Speaker
My process is pretty fast. I have a playlist that's specific to each book. If I'm writing something shorter, it's usually I'll put one song on repeat. And so the song helps me get into the mood right away. I don't have to work myself up to the mood. Once I've sat down and put my headphones in and actually started typing, I can usually kick out about a thousand words an hour for two hours with a short break in between to get up and pee. And then my writing day is done.
00:43:29
Speaker
But sometimes I will dick around on the internet for five hours before I sit down and do that thousand or two thousand words. And I don't know why that's my obstacle. I don't know if I'm more afraid of success than I am of failure. I don't know what stops me. And I would like to start investigating that a little bit more because I feel like my writing career could be a little bit smoother if I was a little bit better about ass in chair.
00:43:55
Speaker
How did you get comfortable with doing enough bad work to get to the good work? Does that make any sense? I didn't know any better. I look back at shows I did before and I'm like, oh, that was really awful. I've always been picky about words on the page in
00:44:23
Speaker
middle school, I think, when I was writing bad middle school poetry, my process became recopy the entire poem onto a new piece of paper, leaving out any words that did not belong. Okay, do that again, recopy it onto another piece of paper, leaving out any words that did not belong. Okay, now I can write it in my pretty notebook with the picture of the silver unicorn on the front. And
00:44:49
Speaker
And so I've always really cared about the right words in the right order. And I think the stakes were really low to begin with too. You know, I was, I was writing for fun. Um, probably the transformational event in terms of, Oh, Hey, I like writing and I'm good at it into, I would like to be a full-time writer. This is my job. Um, back in like 2011, 2012, I think.
00:45:18
Speaker
I mean, I had written my plays before, most of my plays before then, but I wasn't looking at writing serious essays or anything like that or putting together a whole book. But I took part in a contest on LiveJournal, that antiquated creaking social media site that even at that point was pretty antiquated. And it was called LJ Idol, and it was run by a friend of mine from high school.
00:45:41
Speaker
And he recruited me to be in it. And basically we started with 362 people. And each week there was a prompt. And each week you had to write something in your own live journal that suited the prompt in some way. It could be a journal entry. It could be a short story. It could be an essay. Some people wrote songs. Some people wrote poems, you know, anything you wanted that responded to the prompt in any way you wanted. And then each week there was a vote and the low people in each group went home and
00:46:11
Speaker
I got into it for a lark and then all of a sudden like the numbers are going down and I'm still in it. And the contest ended up taking, I want to say 10 and a half months. And near the end, as we got into like the top 10 and the top five, they started giving us assignments like, okay, you must tackle these 12 prompts in the next 10 days. And what this contest did for me was a couple of things. Number one,
00:46:40
Speaker
it made me build a readership because if you were gonna win the contest, and I did win the contest, I was the last one standing, if you're gonna win, you had to recruit an outside readership to vote for you because the people inside the contest, you know, you voted for your friends and you voted for the people who you thought were good. And as it got closer and closer to the end and everybody was good, you voted for your friends. So the other last person standing and I
00:47:08
Speaker
we really had recruited heavy outside readerships. And so I built this mailing list of people where I rotated through and emailed like a different 40 or 50 people each week, but it let me go, oh, my Facebook friends really do want to read my work. My friends from high school really do want to read my work. If I share my work with people, they actually do want to read it. And so I built this group of people who wanted to hear what I had to say. It also
00:47:36
Speaker
got me writing every week on a schedule, something quality, whether I felt inspired or not, because my competitive spirit wanted to stay in the contest. And the third thing it did was it made me a much better editor and critiquer, partly because I was working back channel with a small group of other women where we read each other's stuff and gave each other feedback on it. And partly because if you wanted to win the contest,
00:48:04
Speaker
you had to show that you had read everybody else's work. You know, like that was not a rule or anything like that, but certainly, you know, people were going to vote for you and get on your side if you also read their stuff. And so I got really good at being able to give everyone a comment that was constructive about something they could do even better and complimentary about something that they were doing well.
00:48:32
Speaker
And I started to notice trends in people's writing. And as an editor now, most first-time book writers have the same set of problems in their books, and they're relatively easy to identify. And so it really got me in the habit of writing being a thing I did all the time for 10 and a half months. And when you're looking for a watershed moment, that was probably my watershed moment.
00:48:56
Speaker
When you're in the throes of writing something, whether it's shorter or longer, and the honeymoon period of that piece has worn off, how do you grind through the ugly middle of a draft to get to the end? Oh, I walk away and say fuck it and come back later. OK, so just recently I wrote a piece for Creative Nonfiction, the magazine, and it's a venue I really want to be in.
00:49:24
Speaker
I had a really hard time writing the essay. I did a first draft of it, didn't really care for it. I got some feedback that like sort of sent me down a different path that wasn't really working for me. And then I was late and then I was guilty and then I was ashamed. And I felt like I couldn't sit down to do it because I was guilty and ashamed. And then it just got later. And finally, you know, and I was sick in there as well. So finally I'm like four weeks overdue.
00:49:51
Speaker
I am convinced that nobody from Creative Nonfiction ever wants to speak to me again. I am going to be blacklisted forever. I have ruined my chances with this publication. And I call up my life coach and I tell her how guilty and ashamed and bad I'm feeling. I love her. She's been my life coach for 25 years at this point. She's taken me through three businesses. And I said, you know, I feel really shitty about this. And then I realized, you know what?
00:50:16
Speaker
can I just read it to you out loud? And she's like, you know, I'm not a writing person. And I'm like, that's okay. You know, I just, I just need to read it to somebody out loud. And as I read it out loud, I was like, Oh, I just need to tweak that. And you need to fix that over here. And that part's not as bad as I thought it was. And at the end, she said back to me, Oh, hey, and you set up this one thing that never pays off. And I finished it in like an hour.
00:50:38
Speaker
and sent it off to the editor. And the editor wasn't mad at me, God bless her, and gave me great editorial feedback that helped make it even better. And then it was done. And I looked back and I was like, geez, why was that so freaking hard? But I think you have to get to the point, especially with a book, because writing a whole book is not only long, like as you can attest, it always takes about 10 times longer than we think it's going to take.
00:51:06
Speaker
You know, if I had a nickel for every time a first time author comes to me and says, oh, hey, here's my book. All it needs is a quick proofread. And I'm like, no, actually what it needs is a developmental edit and about six more drafts from the ground up. People don't understand how long it takes to write a book. And I think you have to keep discovering like what's new and fresh about it for you. I think you have to save some like
00:51:33
Speaker
boring technical tasks like, oh, hey, I have to make a continuity timeline and make sure everything's happening in the right order relative to the, you know, the events of history that I mentioned outside the book, you know, to keep your momentum going on those days when you're just not feeling particularly creative. And I think you have to embrace sitting down and writing shitty some days because it's so much easier to polish a shitty first draft than it is to start with a blank page. I mean, what do you do when you're stuck?
00:52:00
Speaker
Let's see. Coming from newspapers, fortunately, I've been able to... I'm okay with just... I can write fast. And I'm okay with just things being not necessarily good, but good enough. Yes. So I think I was very conditioned at a very young age to just be okay with that. So I'm lucky in a sense that when I...
00:52:29
Speaker
I don't get stuck too often if I'm feeling a bit apprehensive about writing something or even interviewing somebody. If I'm real nervous, I find that doing extra research, reading an extra thing, and doing a little more preparation, pretending I'm a quarterback, and I've got to watch hours and hours of film to prepare for the defense.
00:52:55
Speaker
And when I kind of put that mindset on and be like, you just need to prepare more. You know, Tom Brady's not going out there just winging it. He's watching 80 hours worth of film in a week and then he goes out and performs. So I kind of have that, I kind of use an athletic mindset like that. So to not get stuck or let nerves or apprehension get in the way. And I think too, like your Tom Brady example is great too because the man has spent his life perfecting his craft.
00:53:25
Speaker
And at this point, even if he's not having his best day, there's only so bad he can be, you know? And I think that's true. I mean, once you've written for a newspaper for a long time, there's only so bad you can be because it's in your hand, it's in your head to crank out a story that is in the right format and functions in the way it needs to function for the venue that it's in. And I think that's it too, is we have to embrace
00:53:52
Speaker
writing crap and writing slightly less crap until we get to a stage where we understand the unwritten rules of literature and we know how to break them when we want to break them for effect. And there's only so bad we can be. I mean, I think too, like people who are like, oh, but I'm so bad, you know, it's hard for me to write because I'm so bad. It's like, well, people don't wait to go to the gym till they're stronger.
00:54:17
Speaker
Yeah. It's just like anything. It's kind of like what I was getting at earlier is being comfortable with writing shit so you can eventually get to good stuff. You might write 5,000 words to get to one good sentence, but it doesn't mean that those 5,000 words were a waste because you eventually got there. It's this narrowing of a gap that sort of Ira Glass talks about. I'm sure you've heard. Yes. Oh, God. I was just about to bring that Ira Glass thing up. And you know what you made me think of?
00:54:44
Speaker
When my former partner and I were doing our very first show on the Renaissance Festival circuit, a very wise man named Jim Green, he plays a character at many Renaissance festivals called Emerus Fleet, the rat catcher. He's the funniest man I've ever met in my life. And Jim came up and he said, you know, here's the thing, you're gonna put up a 30 minute show and in that 30 minutes, there's gonna be maybe five good minutes, but they're not all in a clump.
00:55:12
Speaker
It's 30 seconds over here and one good joke over there and maybe a whole minute over here if you're lucky. And you take that good five minutes and then you write another 25 minutes to go with it. And then out of that show, there's maybe another good three minutes and you just have to keep going until you've got a big enough pile of lumber that there's some wood in there that you can build your birdhouse out of.
00:55:37
Speaker
Yeah, you can almost take a page out of stand-up comedians and how they workshop putting together their Netflix hour. So many of the big headliners, they go to the comedy clubs and they'll do 20 minutes and maybe 30 seconds of that is going to make it into what hour they're working on.
00:55:57
Speaker
So that hour is actually probably 100 hours of comedy I've been workshopping, and it's just been whittled down to that fine piece of ore or gold. And so it's like, but they have the benefit of working in front of an audience and seeing the reaction. That's the real gift of performing comedy. It's good and bad, but you can actually see, oh, that joke got a laugh. Make a note.
00:56:24
Speaker
That one didn't cut it out. Exactly. But then there's the courage to tell the bad joke, the one that the room goes quiet because that's the bad work to get to the good. That's so important. And I think too, I think because writing is so solitary, I think it's very hard for people to remember that you can also pay someone to teach you.
00:56:46
Speaker
I work as a writing coach some of the time. I'm trying really hard not to take on any new clients because Andre last week looked at me and said, you have to stop editing and write your own book. But people can pay me and I can help them be better. And for writers, if you're really struggling with something, like maybe you can tell that your dialogue is terrible, but you're not sure what to do about it, or you're having a really hard time getting published and you don't know why you're getting all these rejections with no feedback,
00:57:16
Speaker
Pay somebody. Look up somebody whose work you respect. It's important that they're in your field and that you like their work. It rings true for you. And ask them, hey, can I pay you to look at my work? And maybe you spend 50 or 100 or 300 bucks, depending on how often you meet with them or how many words you have them look at. But it can be so valuable
00:57:40
Speaker
to get feedback from someone who does not love you, who is not in love with you, who does not care about protecting your feelings, who cares about making you a better writer.
00:57:50
Speaker
That's such a hard hurdle for a lot of writers to get over, paying somebody. For some writers, they don't have a lot of money or they're just so, I don't know, maybe because they can give their manuscript to a close friend and that friend's going to read it. But they're not going to have the technical expertise to make it great.
00:58:12
Speaker
In your experience, how have you been able to try to get people to actually pay you for the service? It's something that people are so reluctant to do, I find. I've developed my reputation of being generous with advice so that people understood that, oh, when I had to say something, it was valuable.
00:58:36
Speaker
Um, I mean, I write for brevity. I write a lot of posts about writing craft. And so people came to understand that I knew what I was talking about. Um, I think too, it's a little bit different for me because I'm, you know, and again, I have to address my privilege here. I have no children. I have a husband who pays my rent. I have a husband who has a quote unquote real job in which he wears a suit and tie to work every day.
00:59:01
Speaker
So my financial situation is nowhere near as precarious as it was for my first 20 years of working as an adult. And I am not at this point trying to figure out how to get people to give me money. I am trying to figure out how to say no to more people who want to give me money, which is a different problem than most people have.
00:59:23
Speaker
Because in my editor groups on Facebook, everybody is always, you know, what marketing news does everybody have? How are you getting more clients? Where are you finding them? And I'm like, um, I need to figure out a polite way to say no to people who want to give me money. Um, and that is really hard. It's hard to say no when I know I can help someone. It's hard to say no after a lifetime of must accept job. Don't know where next job is coming from because you know, I've been a freelancer my whole life.
00:59:52
Speaker
As my mother-in-law used to say, when you're an actor, you know your unemployment date as soon as you know your employment date. And so I'm not really having that problem. But I think the challenge for coaches and editors and teachers is to put enough of their work in the world for free to be generous enough with their work that they establish that their work is worth paying for. And again, I mean, I come from street performing. We give the show away for free.
01:00:22
Speaker
the people who can afford to pay for it, subsidize the people who can't afford to pay for it. And it's up to us to deliver a product that is so good that people choose to walk up and pay us at the end, even though they could walk away and give us nothing. And I think as a writing teacher, as a writing coach, your job is to establish that your advice is worth paying for, even when they have already benefited from the stuff you gave them for free. And I think writers don't always realize
01:00:51
Speaker
how much it can help them to pay someone, like how much of their money's worth they'll get. I've had a couple of authors come to me because they really wanted to get into McSweeney's and I've kind of become the McSweeney's whisperer, you know, where people can send me their piece and I will talk to them about how to revise it and make some really specific notes and go tighten this here and fix that there and find your thread over here and then their piece gets into McSweeney's.
01:01:19
Speaker
I think it's very hard to know what the payoff is going to be, especially if you start with a more abstract goal, like I want to be a better writer or I want to finish my book. And I think that's the challenge for those of us who are paying for help, because I mean, I've hired coaches myself is figuring out, OK, yes, I am actually going to see a concrete benefit. My work is going to get better.
01:01:42
Speaker
But dancers go to class their whole adult professional lives. Why do writers think we get to get our MFA and then we're done learning? Yeah, actors do the same thing. I've heard Bryan Cranston talk in interviews on YouTube and also in his memoir, A Life in Parts. There was a part through his career. He would have been happy doing commercials his whole life. Make a check.
01:02:11
Speaker
You know, here I am. I'm making a living as an actor. But there was a point where his wife, second wife, I believe, she really encouraged him to take a class and level up. And it wasn't until then that he started just applying a bit more rigor and earnestness. And even someone who was already established, you know, it
01:02:38
Speaker
It leveled him up to getting the Malcolm in the middle, the Walter White breaking bad and blasted him off into the stratosphere. And here's a guy who didn't really achieve worldwide fame until he was in his 50s or something.
Overcoming Self-Doubt and Age Concerns
01:02:56
Speaker
Talk about someone comfortable playing the long game, but also someone comfortable investing in his craft and learning more his craft even after he had been in it for 20 years.
01:03:08
Speaker
And I think too, we also forget that paying for classes, attending conferences, you know, going to workshops and retreats, that's one of the things that connects us to the network of people who are our colleagues and our peers and our mentors. And I think that's very hard because doing that gets expensive and not everybody has that kind of disposable income. And so I think it's important for writers to know too that it's okay to call up that conference you want to go to and say, hey,
01:03:37
Speaker
Do you have any kind of a deal where I can do some volunteer hours and come to the conference for a reduced rate? Is there anybody else who needs a roommate for this because I can't really afford the hotel? I mean, I'm here at Hippo Camp, and I'm in an Airbnb. I'm not in the conference hotel. I love the walk, and it's substantially less expensive. The last conference I was at last week, I had a roommate the whole time because it made it less expensive.
01:04:02
Speaker
And I think writers need to know that it's okay to advocate for yourself. It's okay to call up your local arts council and say, hey, what kind of professional development grants do you have and do I qualify for any of them? You know, it's okay to call up that retreat and go, hey, can you waive the application fee? I can't really afford it. You know, and if they say no, they say no. And then you go to somebody else. I mean, as writers, we already have to be the kind of people who can hear a hundred no's before we get to yes.
01:04:30
Speaker
So you might as well practice on something low stake that's not even your actual work. And what still excites you and brings you back to the keyboard time and again, if you can get your ass in the chair. Okay. So this is going to sound so like dippy and like beginning writer, but I just love it when a character walks onto the page and starts doing whatever the fuck they want. Um,
01:04:57
Speaker
I had an absolutely terrifying realization the other day. I workshopped 25 pages at the postgraduate writers conference at the Vermont College of Fine Arts last week. It's the class I took with Andre. It was wonderful. Love that conference. Very lovely conference. Highly recommend. And my 25 pages got good critique and I really appreciated the feedback from my classmates. And as I started like making notes about what people said,
01:05:26
Speaker
I suddenly realized, oh, maybe this isn't going to be a 75 to 80,000 word young adult novel like I intended. Maybe this is going to be like 150,000 words. And I mean, I'm no Donna Tart, but maybe this is going to span a lot more time and space than I thought it was going to. And I mean, who knows if it's actually going to. But I've definitely had times like in the novel that I'm almost done now, which is a different book.
01:05:56
Speaker
I definitely had a scene where I sat down to write two people coming together and forgiving one another. And as I wrote the scene, I realized, oh my God, no, she can't forgive her. She would never forgive her for this. And I'm weeping as I write this scene where these characters are just having this horrible moment together. And it's like, oh, but that's what's true. And I think it's very exciting to discover
01:06:22
Speaker
within ourselves what's true and what really wants to come out onto the page. I mean, we've all had that experience where we do the writing exercise at the beginning of class and a bunch of stuff we never would have actively chosen to write about suddenly spills out onto the page. You know, there's a connection between the hand and the heart that bypasses the head.
01:06:44
Speaker
And to be mindful of your time, I feel like I could talk to you for another two hours about a lot of this stuff. Of course, you host the Brevity's podcast and you're on Twitter and you actually had this incredibly sort of viral tweet the other day. Neil Gaiman retweeted me.
01:07:07
Speaker
I may have like shrieked like a little girl for several minutes all right to describe before Before we kind of like let everyone know where they can find more about your work talk about talk about this tweet because it is okay, so I mean it's kind of funny because Like for I mean first I'm gonna tell everybody how to go viral, but first I need to give you next week's lottery numbers You know like there there really is no way that
01:07:31
Speaker
to know whether or not you're going to go viral. Like before this, for me, a successful tweet got 25 or 30 likes and maybe five retweets. And I just, you know, I've been ticking along. I follow people. They follow me back. You know, I'm in writers groups where we do like follow fests where everybody posts their Twitter handle and you follow everybody in the group and they all follow you back. And I mean, I've literally built been organically building my social media.
01:07:58
Speaker
by interacting genuinely with people about stuff I really care about for probably five years now, maybe four years, maybe six years. And it really is day to day being my real self, talking to people I like about shit I care about. And so I was having kind of a down day on Sunday
01:08:21
Speaker
I was working on my my novel that may become a giant sprawling novel and writing down all the feedback that my classmates gave me and trying to organize it into like action steps where Oh, you know, they said this so I need to do this thing when I tackle that next draft and that kind of thing. And I started to feel very overwhelmed and I started to feel like here I am. I'm in my 40s. You know, I have
01:08:45
Speaker
I have wasted my life, I will never be a writer, never Morales, never. And then I realized, but I've already done three other careers. I've been a successful performer, I've been a successful teacher, I've been a successful director. This is career number four. And careers one, two, and three gave me something to write about. They took me around the world, they met me a lot of different people.
01:09:10
Speaker
And then I started looking up like what age famous writers were when they published their first books, first novel specifically. Somebody got me on Mark Twain. And I made a list of famous writers like Toni Morrison and Mark Twain. Oh goodness. Frank McCourt, the guy who wrote Angela's Ashes. Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when she wrote the first Little House book. And I don't want to fight with anybody about whether or not Rose wrote those books. I know what I believe.
01:09:39
Speaker
read Prairie Fires, you know? But it went viral. And I was astonished at how many people responded with, thank you, I needed to hear that. This gives me hope. I needed to hear this today. And it was what I needed to tell myself that day that, you know, look, you're not too old. You're not missing out. You haven't missed some magic door that's going to close at, you know, age 46 or whatever. Just keep going.
01:10:08
Speaker
You know, just keep doing your thing. And when the time is right, the time will be right. Just keep working hard, showing up to the page, doing your craft, ass in chair, getting a little tiny bit better every single day until one day you look back and go, wow, I have really come a long way.
Conclusion and Social Connects
01:10:25
Speaker
And now I am ready to share my work with the world. Wow, that's great. So where can people get more familiar with your work, Alison, and find you online?
01:10:34
Speaker
Well, my kind of like hub central is Idowords.net and that links to all of my other stuff. I'm on Twitter at Gorilla Memoir spelled like Shay Guevara, not like the ape. And I blog for brevity mostly twice a week. Sometimes I get out of the habit of blogging and then I have to drag myself back to it because I really do love it. And I'm on Instagram as well at Gorilla Memoir.
01:10:59
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Alison, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your process and your approach to the work. And thank you for all the work you've done and the work you'll continue to do. So again, thanks for coming on the show and being so generous with your time. Thank you for having me. It has been a fantastic time. Fantastic.
01:11:20
Speaker
I'm Brendan O'Mara and I approve this podcast. I hope you got some tasty nuggets to take home in your doggy bags. Allison is the real f-ing deal. Be sure to give your buddy Brendan a follow on the socials at Brendan O'Mara on Twitter and at cnfpod on Twitter. I post cool audiograms and quote cards on Instagram at Brendan O'Mara. One more.
01:11:48
Speaker
There's a Facebook page for the podcast if you do most of your hanging out over there. I think I just blacked out from reading all that. Cal Newport would be shaking his head at me. Look him up. Time to lock this one up. Remember kids, if you can't do interview, see ya!