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Episode 528: Stuck? Ramona Ausubel Will ‘Unstuck’ You!
1 Playsin 12 hours
"It all has to come from within. So we each have to be in conversation with ourselves and with the work. It's really a relationship, not a project," says Ramona Ausubel, author of Unstuck: A Writer's Guide.
Today we have Ramona Ausubel, author of Unstuck: A Writer’s Guide. It’s published by Tin House.
Ramona’s curriculum vitae is pretty dope. She’s the author of the novels The Last Animal, Sons and Daughters of East and Plenty and No One is Here Except All of Us and the craft book Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page.
Had a TON of fun with this one and it’s a craft bomb.
Ramona’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The New York Times, Electric Literature, and The Paris Review online. She has taught with Tin House, Bread Loaf, and she’s a professor at Colorado State University.
This is a really fun and really crafty chat. We talk about:
- Why people want to be writers in the first place
- The people who stick around
- Coming up with ways through
- It's a relationship not a project
- No writing is ever wasted
- Nobody needs a kind-of-written book
- Submission clubs
- The offering is the action
- Community
- Shame, doubt, and envy
- Lifelong process of voice
- Inviting in other influences
- When querying asking 'who will you be?'
- Platform
You can learn more about Ramona at ramonaausubel.com and follow her on Instagram @ramonaausubel.
If you like this episode, I would definitely check out:
- Eps. 48 and 207 with Roy Peter Clark
- Ep. 49 with Dinty W. Moore
- Ep. 50 with Ted Conover
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Accolades for The Frontrunner
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh, hey, a little bit of news right off the top. The frontrunner, which just turned one year old this week, is a finalist for the first-ever Dan Jenkins Medal for Best Book in Sports Writing from the University of Texas Austin Journalism Department.
00:00:15
Speaker
Crazy. I don't know who nominated it, so I thought it was a scam at first. It's up against authors like Christine Brennan, Hanifa Durakib, S.L. Price, and Seth Wickersham, just to name a few. Yeah, not.
00:00:30
Speaker
I'm in about as much shock as you are. Also, congrats to my pal Kim H. Cross, who won a National Magazine Award. And if you're in the Pacific Northwest, you might want to come hang out with me and a bunch of other badasses at the Chuckanut Writers Conference in Bellingham, Washington.
Invitations & Opportunities for Writers
00:00:46
Speaker
I'll be giving a mini keynote about Raging Against the Algorithm, be a and a master class of sorts on interviewing.
00:00:54
Speaker
It's June 25th to 27th. Visit ChuckanutWritersConference.com to register. Oh, ACNFers, this is dragging on. I know. i know I ask a lot of you. I ask you for your time, and then I have the gall.
00:01:09
Speaker
to ask for ratings and reviews. What an asshole. I also ask that you check out Pitch Club at welcometopitchclub.substack.com. Pitches ranging from ancient queries, feature stories, and off-the-cuff, unhinged essay pitches, and more.
00:01:22
Speaker
We've got some great ones coming up. Daniel Pollack-Pelsner's pitch to Lin-Manuel Miranda to be his biographer, and my overview for the frontrunner, just to name a couple. Maybe even one of my failed pitches with a response from an editor about why it sucked ass. Forever free. You read a little, you listen a little, and you learn a lot.
00:01:39
Speaker
Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com. The people who stick around, I think, are the people who who are really getting getting the feedback loop in themselves.
00:01:57
Speaker
Oh, hey, CNF.
Interview with Ramona Ossible: Writing Craft & Journey
00:01:58
Speaker
I didn't hear you come in. It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I talk to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. I'm Brendan O'Meara. The goose you fed bread to and now won't go away. Hey, you did it. Don't blame the goose.
00:02:11
Speaker
Today we have Ramona Ossible, author of Unstuck, a writer's guide. It's published by Tin House and distributed by your mom. Sorry, I can't help that sometimes.
00:02:24
Speaker
Ramona's Curriculum Vitae. Yeah, we're speaking Latin now. is pretty dope. She's the author of the novels The Last Animal, Sons and Daughters of East and Plenty, and No One is Here Except All of Us.
00:02:37
Speaker
And the craft book, Unstuck, 101 Doorways, leading from the blank page to the last page, is reason enough for her to come on CNFPod. Had a ton of fun with this one, and it's a craft bomb. So get your notebooks out, you little punk. Show notes to this episode more at brendanamero.com. There you can read hot blogs, find out what episodes from the backlog you didn't know you were missing, and sign up for my two very important newsletters, Pitch Club and Rage Against the Algorithm.
00:03:07
Speaker
There's also patreon.com slash cnfpod in case you want to chip in with a few dollar bills and get access to the Flash 52 sessions and maybe...
Challenges & Resilience in Writing
00:03:17
Speaker
One-on-one calls with me depends on your tier.
00:03:20
Speaker
So Ramona's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, New York Times, Electric Literature, and online at the Paris Review. She has taught with Tin House, Bread Loaf, and she's a professor at Colorado State University. It's a really fun chat, really crafty, crafty bits. And we talk about why people want to be writers in the first place, the people who stick around, coming up with ways through.
00:03:44
Speaker
It's a relationship, not a project. No writing is ever wasted. Nobody needs a kind of written book. Submission clubs? The offering is the action, community, shame down envy, lifelong process of finding voice, inviting other influences, and when querying, answering the question who you will be,
00:04:05
Speaker
and platform. You can learn more about Ramona at RamonaAusable.com and follow her on Instagram at RamonaAusable. So I hope you'll stick around for a parting shot about one year of the Front Runner.
00:04:17
Speaker
This episode will also rhyme with ah Roy Peter Clark's two appearances. Maybe Ted Conover. for his book Immersion, and then Dinty W. Moore for his appearance when he wrote the story Cure. Links to those episodes will be in the show notes.
00:04:38
Speaker
But for now, here's Ramona Ossible. Cue up a fresh montage. We're
00:04:49
Speaker
going to do this. It was all people being like, bro, I just drank two 40s, and that was crazy. You know, for fuck's sake, at least we tried. This doesn't look very fun.
00:05:00
Speaker
This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:05:13
Speaker
yeah I've been a writer for more than 20 years or so. And often, especially coming of age as a writer in this era, you know you social media is what it is. And it often paints a certain picture of what it looks like to be a writer. And it's usually some isolated cabin. And it's just all bullshit. And I think a lot of people, they're like, oh, that looks cool. That's idealized version of being a writer. And that's maybe why people are attracted to it. So I wanted to get a sense from you because you've worked with so many people and you've written several books. just as like
00:05:46
Speaker
Why do you think people are so attracted to the idea of being a writer in the first place? Yeah. I love that question. i think, I mean, I feel like there's two parts of it One part is because it is an essential way to communicate and that it's totally different than talking to somebody. There's a, there's a, like a way that you get to form the whole thought as a writer all alone before anybody else is involved, tuning into your own thoughts and feelings and the way it feels right to you, the language, the music of the language, all of that is like so personal.
00:06:22
Speaker
And then you get to pass it over and you still get to communicate, but you had that time in your own self first. So I think that's, that's part of it. I mean, that's a big part of what people want, but then, yeah, there's that sort of like.
00:06:35
Speaker
Tweed jacket, elbow patches, like cabin on the moors. You're like looking out in the fog and maybe at some point you like put on your wellies and go for a walk. But otherwise the only thing you have to do is think and read and write all day long, yeah which sounds just lovely and is not the life of any writer that I've ever met. yeah So there's, it does feel like there's kind of like a little come down at some point of like, wait,
00:07:01
Speaker
I thought that I was going to get that that like stone cottage or like the turret looking out at the sea. or When is that part of it? And I also thought everybody was going to tell me that my work is great and appreciated all the time. And that also is like, you don't get the feedback necessarily that often.
00:07:18
Speaker
And the loan the the people who stick around, I think, are the people who who are really getting getting the feedback loop in themselves before it even has to go to anybody else where your own...
00:07:30
Speaker
To listen to yourself as a reader and to feed that, that voice is becomes really satisfying and meaningful, even if. it never makes its way to anybody else. Or even if the people it makes its way to are your mom and your three best friends. And that's it. It has to matter to you more than it's going to matter to anybody else because nobody's going to be like out there showering you with praise. Oh, exactly. if No truer words have been spoken. But like ah it takes a lot of resilience and perseverance for sure to be ah to be in this game for any length of time. So what do you owe your resilience and perseverance to?
00:08:09
Speaker
Part of it is that I think I'm just kind of like a golden retriever with a short attention span for whatever happened at the end of the thing. I'm like, oh, right. I got a like a nice i got a nice review and i got and somebody wrote me a really lovely email who I've never met.
00:08:23
Speaker
That's cool. I'm on to the next thing. Or like, I got a terrible review and I feel I've read, I accidentally, which I do not do, but i'm early on, I read the comment section of the story that had been published.
00:08:35
Speaker
And I still remember very clearly this was like, 14 years ago, the comment that somebody was like, this makes no sense. And I don't get it. you know, that like lodged in the center of my body, but then I'm like, okay, well, I guess that the only thing to do is continue along. So I'm like, throw the ball again. I want to chase the ball again. I want to play my game. I just really, i really love being in the work. I don't know. I think there's a, that, and that I, I've, the more I go on, the more I understand that that's,
00:09:05
Speaker
The whole thing, the whole thing is a being in the process, me and my, what I'm thinking about the way this idea is evolving, the way I'm coming to understand characters of a writing fiction, that that's, that's it. That's going to be the thing that makes it like forever imprint on my life.
00:09:23
Speaker
And the event of publication, whatever that looks like, is going to be like a little moment, like a little like fireworks and it's a fun celebration. And then it's over and it's time to get back to work.
00:09:34
Speaker
So I think I just like keep going back to that. And I also think the reason that I wrote Unstuck is because i I think I'm good at coming up with ways through. So whatever it is, I'm like, i don't know what to do next.
00:09:47
Speaker
And I have that, know what to do next feeling. And then... My instinct is, okay, cool. Let's first like be mad about that, eat a cookie, and then it's time to come. well I don't know. So what are we to do? how are going solve the problem? It's a cool puzzle.
00:10:01
Speaker
Let's try this. And that I started to keep track of all of those let's try this things. things. And pretty soon there was a lot of them. And now they're in a book. Yeah. Yeah. It's um yeah getting your way through. yeah a lot of people get stuck or stumped at any any moment. A lot of times it's that honeymoon phase. Like ah they have this idea and someone's juiced and you get like I don't know how many 10 page novels or 10 page memoirs are out there because you start to, you run out of gas pretty quick. And then you realize that it starts to get pretty hard and difficult to go kind of push through that resistance and push through the middles. And just, that you know, for you, what has been the the exercise? And when you meet that resistance to realize, oh, this is normal. And then you're able to muscle through.
00:10:50
Speaker
That's another one of those preconceptions that I think we go in with that you're going to be when you arrive, when you finally become a real writer, you're not going to feel that stuff. you vote like their Students are constantly being like, so what do you do about writer's block? I'm like,
00:11:06
Speaker
You keep writing. There's no, you find a specific and small entry point and you continue on. There is no moment when that stops happening to you. It's not something
Community & Collaboration's Role in Writing
00:11:16
Speaker
that's ever solved. And I think it's not even, doesn't even have to become this big looming force. And that, I see that with writers all the time of like, no, but you don't understand. I've come to the place where it is impossible. I can't see where I'm going. There's nothing in front of me.
00:11:34
Speaker
I won't be able to move forward. I have to stay here until I just, get it. Like, you're never going to get it. You just are. I mean, maybe like every once in a while that happens, but for the most part, most of us have to be like, okay, I'm in this like dark place. It's all foggy. I can't see anything. What do I have? I have a little sense of who this character is. I have a little sense of like the space of the world.
00:11:58
Speaker
And there's a, there's a, like ah like a hundred flashlights hanging on the wall. Why? i don't know. Let's see what we can do with all of those things. And It's just like that next little step. And the next little step opens it up a little bit further and you might get to another stuck place that's different than the one before. But again, you're going to look at what you have and keep moving forward.
00:12:18
Speaker
And I think that, that I mean, it said ah hundred there's 101 different doorways in Unstuck and all of them are some version of that. way of seeing, of getting some perspective, a way of either zooming in really close and getting into like the granular stuff.
00:12:34
Speaker
or ways of creating that one small step forward so that it doesn't feel like it's this giant impossible task, but instead is a continuous act of discovery, which is not only not a problem, but is a good thing. It's the fun part too. So not knowing also means that you get to discover so much more. I was just texting with a friend this morning. who was like, I'm back to the bottom of the mountain with my novel. I just like, I, I feel like I have to start all over again and I don't know how to plan this thing. Like, Oh, I hear that. That's a hard, that's a hard minute. And you should like, Take some time to be nice to yourself. And then the good news is you get, there's so much more to discover. That just means that all the fun stuff is in front of you. Nobody is going to show up who's going to tell you which of your ideas is the best one and is going to lead to the best version of the book.
00:13:27
Speaker
There just will never be a moment when somebody like comes in and is like, oh my God, you know what you should do? You should make it first person. And it's in the mom's perspective. And she's on a dinosaur farm. You're like, oh, Oh, great. Thanks. I'll just like get typing.
00:13:40
Speaker
That just doesn't happen. It all has to come from within. So we each have to be in that like sort of conversation with ourselves and with the work, it's really a relationship, not a project.
00:13:52
Speaker
And if you are talking to it and you're noticing what there is and what you're interested in and what the, why you are doing this in the first place, what your questions are, what, like where in the book is your or story or whatever it is, is your own,
00:14:06
Speaker
personal like pain and obsession and appreciation, all of that. And that's in there. You have all the ingredients. There's nothing actually blocking you from that stuff.
00:14:17
Speaker
It's just an idea that you don't have access to it because you need some kind of outside permission or outside information. And you you don't get that. You just have to keep asking again, where am I here? What am I interested in? What would be the next most fun thing?
00:14:33
Speaker
And what do I have in front of me that I can work with? Yeah. What's been your experience of, you know, running into that resistance and then the temptation to try the shiny new thing, and be it a, you a new story or ah something else. And instead of sitting with the ugly.
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, all so many writers have ah something in the drawer, you know, a novel that never worked. i was I've been reading Elizabeth McCracken's writing craft book called a Long Game, which is fantastic.
00:15:02
Speaker
And she talks about, I mean, it's a lot of novels she has not published, like a bunch. And she is a terrific writer. So if Elizabeth McCracken has six or whatever it is, novels in a drawer, everybody gets to do that. If you come to the end of a thing and you're like, my heart's not in this, I don't want to finish this book, or I think this book was just practice for something else. there's absolutely no shame in letting that sit.
00:15:25
Speaker
And maybe you come back to it later and figure out that you unlock it. And maybe you don't. No writing is ever wasted. So whatever it turns into, whether it lives out in the world or not, it still matters for for you and for what you can write next.
00:15:41
Speaker
And the only way to finish something is to keep coming back to it. There is no, there's no skip. You can't like just like scooch gently over the middle and land in the end and stick your landing and be like, I guess it's done.
00:15:56
Speaker
You have to write every single one of those pages and you have to revise every single one of those pages over and over. And that requires a kind of like persistence and just choosing to do it even when you don't understand it because you won't understand it all the time. So yeah, but I also am a real believer in having another project that you're working on at the same time so that you can take a break from the big thing that's scary and then be like, I'm going write this short story because it is safe. It feels like I'm like floating in a swimming pool on my little like swan floaty and I've got a Mai Tai and a bag of potato chips and it's all going to be okay.
00:16:34
Speaker
That is really different than trying to write an entire novel. And have So many times turning to a short story has saved me and saved the novel. So that then when I finished the draft of the story, even if I only write a couple pages of it, yeah I feel like my confidence is back. I'm like, okay, I had my, like, I played around. i feel like I'm ready to go back. And so many times that something in that story teaches me how to write the next part of the novel. And then I go back and I like run as far as I can run with it.
00:17:06
Speaker
And then I need to take a break again. And that's that's great. So I feel like going back and forth between two things is wonderful. Letting something go that really doesn't feel like it belongs to you or your heart's not in it, that's also okay.
00:17:18
Speaker
But if you know you want to do it, you are going to have to be the one to do it. And you're going to have to make a lot of space and time in your life for that. Oh, for sure. And I remember I was ah speaking ah
Overcoming Rejection & Finding Joy in Writing
00:17:30
Speaker
at up to a group of MFA students at my MFA alma mater. It had to do with what you just brought up about this idea of having like books, unpublished books in the drawer, Elizabeth McCracken's unpublished books. yeah my my mfa book thesis i tried like hell to sell and it wouldn't and i had a mentor who just said he was just like you know what sometimes brendan we write books and they don't get published and just got to move on next one and that's like a hard pill to swallow so i've got that one in the drawer i have this other baseball memoir in the drawer that i pivoted done pivoted from to do a biography on this runner steve prefontaine and when i was talking to the students and they really like you like gave up on the memoir i'm like well Not really, but I did table it for however long it's going to take. That might not come out for 15 years. I don't know. ah But the idea, it was almost like, how do you, like the glaze went over like, oh no, you can write a book and it doesn't get published. It was like, yes. And to write books, you need book practice. And it the you just got to kind of get better at writing books by writing books. And sometimes they're going to publish and sometimes not. I think that's a that's kind of like the sideways pill going down the throat, but it's it's a lesson I think everybody's going to learn eventually. Absolutely. Definitely. And you have to be knowing that it's possible that you won't ever come together as a book that leaves your own house. You still have to put your whole entire soul and all those hours into it. you you can't You can't hedge. There's no point along the way where you can be like, well, I'm just going kind of write it.
00:19:03
Speaker
And then if it doesn't sell, I won't be heartbroken. It won't sell because you're not you haven't you're not in it. You're kind of writing it. Nobody needs a kind of written book. That's not helpful at all. So that doesn't change no matter I'm working on a new novel and nobody owns it. I don't know what's going to happen.
00:19:17
Speaker
I have been working on it for like three years and I'm Right now I'm in a part where I'm like, this is all I'm doing. I'm focusing on this all day, every day. i have spent, you know, who knows how much time.
00:19:29
Speaker
And I'm doing it knowing that I don't know what's going to happen with it. at that never I mean, unless you become some kind of crazy bestseller, none of us ever have a guaranteed next thing. And to your point earlier, once you have a satisfaction with the work and the process itself, that becomes its own reward. And then we're divorced from the the the outcome and the results-driven process of the publication and sales and yada, yada, yada. But if you can sit with the work itself and enjoy that, like that in and of itself is the juice. Right.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. it's It's really amazing to have a part of my life that I can, it's like I'm living a second life. I go through my day and I do the things that the like wonderful things that, you know, mundane, constant, whatever it is, unloading the dishwasher, trying to figure out why the laundry is always on the floor, even after I've put it all back in the basket. My children just like walk past it and it like floats away. All of that stuff is so much what I spend my time doing. But meanwhile, I have this whole other world that I'm carrying around with me for all those years.
00:20:38
Speaker
And I like puzzling with it and like twisting it around like a little Rubik's cube. Like what if I turn this side and then this side? Oh, I see. This character is really like, she's she's all discordant. She's just like, everything is fractured and apart. And by the end of the story, it's going to be integrated. Okay. That suddenly makes sense to me as I'm living my life. And that's so fun and so cool to be able to be to be living with that and to be thinking about it and kind of pouring things from my my lived life into the book and things from the book into my lived life.
00:21:10
Speaker
And I do want to sell it. i hope I do. But if I don't, it won't have been a waste. And I'll start something else. Well, speaking of like things that are you know published over the course of your career, like what can you point to as like a very early win, an early victory for you that put wind in your sails that you point to you like, oh cool. like here's my Here's that early win that gave you some confidence in this.
00:21:34
Speaker
um Well, I had a teacher who asked for a story. He's like, I'm going submit that. Send me that story. I'm going to submit it for a fellowship. I was like, okay. So I sent him this story and which is about it's very much fiction, but it is about my grandmother's death. And it, so it's the character that is sort of the, her character is on this ship with a lot of other grandmothers floating in the middle of the ocean and they don't know why they're there or what's happening.
00:22:05
Speaker
And I, so I gave him that story and I didn't win the fellowship, but the fellowship was sponsored by One Story Magazine. And they said, we'd like to work on this with you with an eye toward publication, which I was like, oh, I am not letting that door close. I will be like the hardest worker you have ever met. We will get this story there. so we worked on it it. was like a bunch of drafts.
00:22:30
Speaker
And Hannah Tindy, the editor there, is really brilliant. And it was fun to work with her. And then they published it. And it came out right after i graduated from my MFA and it was the first thing I'd ever had published. So that was a very, you know, just a, like turns that were lucky and supported by other people and and that had a lot of work behind them and a lot of like real feeling behind it. I really, you know, that story really, I wrote it because I really wanted to be able to picture this person who I had loved so much and had been such a strong supporter of my writing somewhere. I needed to like place her in some other world
00:23:05
Speaker
And that is why I wrote it. So I really meant it. And that all came together. And then that story, because one story that they published one story at a time, it's like this little booklet and they send the book, you know, everybody subscribes and they also send it off to a lot of New York publishing people.
00:23:21
Speaker
And I started to get notes from agents and editors, which I then blew because i they were like, do you have a novel? That's what all story writers get asked. And I was like, I do, even though I knew in my heart that this novel was not ready. i sent it out too early and I got a hundred percent rejections and it taught me a lot about how how committed I have to be and how far I have to take anything before I'm going to invite anybody else in.
00:23:48
Speaker
I learned so many important lessons from that. But in the end, after like the whole year of rejections, I got one last email from an editor ah at Riverhead Books, which is a Penguin Random House division, who said, i don't know how I missed it, but I just got your one story.
00:24:03
Speaker
I really loved it. And I'd love to know if, you know, you do you have an agent already? I'd like to be on the list for anything you you are submitting. And I used that to kind of open up. I was like, do you have any agents that you think would be right for these stories? And she introduced me to the person who was still my agent, like whatever it is, 12 or something, maybe even more years later. And I really felt like that like In a way, my grandmother was like sailing her little weird boat out through this mysterious ocean and like kept like sailing it until she was like, you have to talk to me. This is my granddaughter and you're to pay attention to this. But there was a like feeling that there was not just about quality of of work, but about like like sort of like using all the energy that you have from all the different sources.
00:24:50
Speaker
And that that like that event and that lesson are so still with me. Yeah. And you talk about a lot of that rejection that you endured there. And um yeah, i'm I'm coming off a big book proposal rejection. So I'm like licking my wounds a bit and i had' trying to figure out how to pivot from it, reframe, blah, blah, blah. A lot of people who listen to this show, um yeah, deal with rejection in different ways or they're getting it. And it's it just, it sucks, but we all deal with it. It means we're in the arena. and So just what have you known to be true about rejection and how do you metabolize it?
00:25:23
Speaker
That's so much part of our jobs, right? Is learning how to do that. Because it is it is a part of every writer's life, whether it's a short story or and you know something you're submitting to a literary journal or a magazine or a book proposal or a review after a novel has been published. There are just a thousand opportunities for somebody to be like, oh, no, I don't i don't think so. And you have to like take that in because this is this thing that you've poured your whole self into and it's so intense.
00:25:52
Speaker
I don't ever not feel it. And that has never changed. Whatever it is, all of those levels of things still like sink through my entire body. And I'm like, feel my heart drop. And it feels, it feels hard every time. And I know that. So I think for me, that the first step is Yeah, it feels like that. You can feel that feeling. That's part of it. there's no There's no way to not do that. So just, we're all getting rejected all the time. And I i still feel that whole whole thing of it. It still feels just as bad as it ever did.
00:26:27
Speaker
And I have realized that but the job is not to not feel bad, actually. That's okay. And that's maybe even important and part of it to just allow yourself to feel that feeling.
00:26:37
Speaker
Because then that can they can move through that and then that opens up to, okay, once again, what do we have and what do I wanna do with it? what do i still Is there something from this proposal that feels really important to me that I still, I wanna tweak it, I wanna change it, I wanna enter in a different way and try again?
00:26:55
Speaker
or is it, okay, I tried that. Now that that's not happening, I have a like clean field and I get to do something else. What would be the thing I would most wanna do right now?
00:27:06
Speaker
But that is also, that's an opportunity. There's an opportunity in that. And I i have writers a lot of times try to have like pitch or submission clubs. So they're like in a group and they maybe even do all their submissions for journals on the same day, or they're pitching things on the same day, or they're helping each other with query letters. So they're not feeling alone in it. And then track your rejections. And when you get whatever it is you're aiming for in a year, maybe it's like,
00:27:33
Speaker
20 or 50 or 100, you get to get yourself a present. that like The rejections become a pathway towards something that you that you want. Maybe it's like that cool pair of shoes or going out to a fancy dinner that you are striving to be putting stuff out there than just like arms wide open. I'm throwing everything I have out into the world.
00:27:53
Speaker
And I know that a lot of it's going to come back and I'm going to keep throwing, but also that that that the that the offering is the action, not the acceptance. Yeah. Yeah. And in dealing with ah rejection, too, and maybe you've experienced this as well over the course of your career is, you know, through the parasocial relationship that I have with some you know listeners of the show, for instance, like when I shared that I was recently, you know, suffered that, you know, pretty what felt like a very devastating rejection to me.
00:28:23
Speaker
I almost felt like I was letting people down. And it was just like, yeah, here are people who've been along for like so much of this 13 year journey for whatever it's been on this this podcast. And then it's like, oh, I feel like there are these people who like root for me, like, and i and it's so cool that they do. And then I get this thing that's like a kick in the nuts. And it's and then it's like, ah, I feel like I'm not only letting myself down, but it's this ah the the audience as well. what What's been your experience with that?
00:28:53
Speaker
Yeah, totally. Yeah. There's no, we all feel that shame of like, I've, yeah, I failed. i they I've been told that I don't have it or that it's not good or that it's not interesting and nobody wants this thing. And your teachers who believed in you and your listeners who believed in you and your parents and your spouse or your best friends or your writing group or whoever, your dog, you're like, tried so hard, you guys. But then I also, I know so many writers now and everyone has had this at some level, lots and lots of
Creating 'Unstuck': From Teaching to Writing Advice
00:29:27
Speaker
times. I have a really dear friend who had, I think he had two books published and then he just couldn't sell his third novel. if They tried, he's a great agent, they tried for years. They didn't ever sell it. And eventually he had to be like, okay, well, I guess I'm writing another book. And he wrote another book and he spent a couple years later, he sold that book. They, there's a mini series based on one of his stories now. Like he, that was ah like a part where he like went down the thing and was like, I'm in the place right now where I'm not, where I'm not being successful in an external way, but that's not where I'm stopping. That can't be the end. It's just a moment. And then it's onto the next thing. And I'm sure he would tell us that he learned something in that book that didn't sell that made it possible for him to write the next one.
00:30:12
Speaker
that worked and we all just have to like, it's so it's such a long game and it's a lifelong relationship so that whatever the rejection, as long as that feeling of like being able to zoom out a little bit and say, you guys, this one didn't work and it feels like crap and I'm mad and I can like, can you just like be mad with me for a second? Cause I need some buddies and then, but on Monday I'm going start something new.
00:30:38
Speaker
Yeah. i'm And yeah. And I'm going to be with all of you who are doing that same thing. Nice. And how do you see yourself as part of ah an ecosystem of writing and community versus, you know, that image of like that hermit isolated writer?
00:30:53
Speaker
That poor hermit, he's missing the best part. Isn't he? Yes. Writers are really smart and interesting and weird people. like We are all in this project of thinking really deeply and feeling really deeply and trying things that we know might not work and engaging with like the entire body of literature that exists already and each other as we're writing things but in the moment, there's just this like incredible conversation.
00:31:26
Speaker
And I feel like the the idea is to add our, each of us add our own little piece to that, but we are each only responsible for that one piece. And it's so much more fun and so much less scary to be doing it together as this like literature is a collective project. And we're each like,
00:31:45
Speaker
sending our little stream into the big lake. And that, so it doesn't matter. Like your little stream is just your little stream and you get to celebrate the person next to you. Who's like the river has like gotten real big all of a sudden. It was like, so, so many good things are happening rather than being jealous of that feel like,
00:32:03
Speaker
Look at us. Look at what our team is doing. We are crushing it out here. My little thing is real dry right now. It's not going great over here. But I'm going to keep like, I'm just still digging. I'm figuring it out. It's going to okay.
00:32:14
Speaker
this This is not, this has just been a moment. And, but over here is like, I'm so proud to be part of this. yeah That really helps me and feels like both as a teacher and a writer and a forever student, that's how I want to feel in the in the work.
00:32:29
Speaker
Yeah. And when did you feel that you were ready to write a craft book? I didn't intend to do that at all. That was definitely not what I started out thinking I would do. In fact, I started the the earliest iterations of what became on stuff was when I was teaching in a low residency MFA program. And I was like, okay, cool. Workshop.
00:32:51
Speaker
I got it. And then they were like, oh, as faculty, you also will give a k craft talk. And I thought, oh no, i can't give a craft talk. I can't, I don't have like a great lecture on point of view or like how to situate backstory. I don't have an official opinion about any of this yet. I'm still too new and I'm not that kind of writer. and And then that same day I had three different students come up to me and say,
00:33:18
Speaker
Sorry, I have to ask you a question. You're like, you all talk about revision, but what do you mean? What is that? Like, literally, what are you doing when you say you're revising? And so I thought, oh, actually, I do have thoughts about that. That's something I pay a lot of attention to. And I, so I wrote a talk that was eight, i it was called Eight Drafts in Search of a Story. And it was like eight different points of entry.
00:33:42
Speaker
Then that sort of grew and grew as I taught in different places. And i I started to have these kind of different islands of these doorways, as I thought of them, that were like the doorways in, getting started, doorways through, like continuing through that long middle, doorways up, getting some perspective, especially on a long work, which is so hard. And then doorways out, finishing and moving on. And as I started to see those separate sections, and I probably had 50 of them, I thought, hmm, I wonder if this,
00:34:12
Speaker
could be a book. And I had a long conversation with my agent about it and we worked on and we thought about it. And then I, we wrote a proposal and it took a really long time to sell it. And then it eventually it did sell. Yeah. Did you feel like in a sense, cause I think you've got, you know, five novels and short story collections together. What did you feel like you needed a certain number of books under your belt before you could be taken seriously as someone to write a craft book?
00:34:38
Speaker
I definitely would not have tried to do it early on. I mean, I wouldn't have even considered that I could. Like I would never have crossed my mind in those first, even in like after a book three or four.
00:34:50
Speaker
So yes, there's probably part of that. Although I wasn't thinking I need to have five books before I can think about that. It felt like it just kind of came at the right moment. And I had been teaching now. I've been teaching in some capacity since 2005. So like 20 years.
00:35:06
Speaker
But there was a gap in there for a little while where I wasn't teaching as much. So it's been, I feel like I really have, like I belong to that version of myself. I really do feel like I'm a teacher and that that is a ah ah mode that feels authentic and honest.
00:35:22
Speaker
And that means that it felt like I could write the k craft book with that same authenticity and honesty, which is the only way that I think anybody should write any kind of a advice of any sort.
00:35:32
Speaker
And it really wasn't, it wasn't for me. It felt like I have this offering and what ah if it's useful, whoever it's useful for. they're welcome to join me in my weird idea. Nice. And I love early on, you're right. The purpose of this book is to give you ways into your own weird, gorgeous brain and heart for your work to be more and more itself.
00:35:53
Speaker
And I love that, that's a kind of search for that individuality, you know, at at the outset, what expectations are you setting for the reader to embarking on you on this particular book? Yeah, that's the that's the key for me. It really isn't about sculpting toward a particular kind of anything. i There are a lot of craft books that will tell you how characterization works and how dialogue works and some good ways to think about that.
00:36:19
Speaker
i That is not what I'm doing here. It really is a way to say they're you're going to understand yourself and your work differently and better all the time by re-meeting it, like stopping and then coming back again with a new thought, a new position, a new entry point.
00:36:41
Speaker
I think that's truer than we all knew when we were starting out. And it feels like I'm just saying like, what if you stand over here and look at what you're doing and then over here and these sort of like approachable, unintimidating doorways in,
00:36:59
Speaker
that are really not about me at all. Each of them begins with like some little, you know, a mini essay that that tells you how I got there and what it feels like to me. But that is not the point. The point is for a writer to be able to, in like a five minute reading period, find a new thing that feels like, oh, okay, I'm excited. I want to get back to work. now Yeah, and early on too, you're right, like self-doubt and envy can construct a windowless room in seconds. And um I love that element because we're always dealing with doubt and certainly envy. And i I just wanted to get you to unpack that a little bit and maybe how you deal with the doubt that's inherent to this and what happens when those like jealousy hackle ah hackles start to go up, which you allude to also in step 100, but you also get a hat tip to it here and the kind of in in the introduction.
00:37:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think those are that the shame, doubt and envy are probably the things that shut us down most easily. And doubt is like, that's just always there. That's like, we, none of us don't have that. If somebody doesn't have it, they're like a true psychopath that you should not trust them with anything at all. Doubt is, is like it's like, it's a part of the process in a way that is unhelpful. A lot of the time we need to say, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to do this. I don't know if this is ever going
Exploring Writing Challenges & Embracing Creativity
00:38:15
Speaker
to work. I don't know if anybody's going to want to read it.
00:38:17
Speaker
And I can't let those questions stop me. But I also feel like doubt in a way can be a a good coworker in that allows you to keep checking in again. So like, I wonder if this is working. i doubt this is, I feel that feeling of like, Oh, something doesn't feel right here.
00:38:37
Speaker
That's actually useful, intuitive information to, to be able to say, then why am I doing it this way? Is this for somebody else? Is this a preconceived idea? How can I reorient closer to what I actually want here and what means something to me and what matters? So doubt can be part of that in a useful way. Sometimes we have to be like, i don't know. Just go over there. I can't help you right now. That's just not what's happening.
00:39:04
Speaker
And sometimes we have to use that question to move us forward. And envy is we're all, we all feel like everyone else is always more successful. Everybody else, and especially we know this, but it still happens all the time that all of those social media posts are a tiny sliver of the truth. And people are not always dressed up for the award ceremony. And they're not always winning those prizes and getting that amazing front page review of the New York Times and getting the six figure book deal.
00:39:33
Speaker
But that's sort of like all that comes at us. And it feels like Everyone else knows what they're doing. Everyone else is so far along and has so much more. And then there's like little me down here feeling crappy and and and wishing I was one of those other people or that I'd have that idea or all of the possibilities of that kind of envy. And I think that that Doorway 100 is the envy recycler, which is the like, okay, so I take that feeling in. That person just won the Pulitzer Prize.
00:40:05
Speaker
<unk> Yeah, I did not win that. That feels like a thing. I feel that feeling. But all right, so what does that what does that ask me about what I want to try for? Do I want to try to write something? I want to try to write a novel that's eventually good enough that it could be considered for a prize like that.
00:40:21
Speaker
Just considered. I have no control over whether anything wins, but I want to write something good enough that it wouldn't be crazy for it to end up on that long list or short list. That is like an actionable, that feels like something that I can start to work on.
00:40:35
Speaker
And then how can I, how can I take that same thing as the doubt? How can I take that envy and turn it into something actually means something? And that allows me, like pushes me on and makes me feel more confident in my own self or curious about my own self.
00:40:51
Speaker
So yeah, like not just shutting everything down, all those negative hard emotions, but saying, hmm, how are you going to be useful to me? How are we going to do this so that I keep going?
00:41:02
Speaker
Yeah. And I love, ah yeah, I think it's a Doorway 60, Commit to the Bit. Then you open it with a Dolly Parton quote that's like, find out who you are and do it on purpose. And that really gets to ah finding your voice as a writer too, which can be a years long journey of synthesizing and metabolizing all your influences. So, ah you know, what do you say? yeah How did you land on something that felt authentic to you and your voice from your influences? But how do you coach people to to ah to find their own voice and to be patient to find and in finding it?
00:41:35
Speaker
Yeah, it is such a lifelong process. And I feel like it's also changing all the time that Your voice is not a fixed thing that you finally are like, got it. I trapped it in the jar. It's never going to get out now. But it's raging because you're growing older and you have new ideas and new ways of seeing things and things sound different to your ear.
00:41:54
Speaker
So I think I really tried to, in everything I wrote, tried to do things that I just really enjoyed and tried to work on things that I wasn't good at yet. So i was using stories when I was first writing stories as sort of like a laboratory experiment.
00:42:10
Speaker
I was in graduate school. I knew that I eventually wanted to get back to this novel that I'd started, but that I was in no way ready for it. So I was like, all right, going learn to write short fiction. What does this feel like?
00:42:21
Speaker
And how can I do this in a way that feels like fun and cool? And I would just like allow the weird idea to exist right away. But I also would be sort of noticing something that I wanted to try, maybe some like formal things.
00:42:36
Speaker
inquiry or like I plot feels like something that is not my natural element. So I'm always trying to figure out how to like push the things that feel totally just in me up with the things that I'm, that I'm, that I don't like come from the outside in some way and get them to like, not just like fight with each other, but but like get some friction and have them rub up against each other in a useful way.
00:42:59
Speaker
And I think that is kind of like the voice is somewhere between those two things. it's in the It's in the trusting what you are interested in and following your weird, as Jim Shepard says, which is my favorite writing quote, and learning. And if you're always doing those two things, you can't help but be yourself in at least a lot of ways. And then you do the thing that, as like George Saunders talks about, all the sort of meters that he has inside of him. And when his little, he's reading something back and the meter is like, no it's like on the no side, it's like leaning toward red. It's not feeling good. And he wants to work on that sentence until it like the meter comes back over to green and it feels, it feels right to him. I like it more than I did before.
00:43:43
Speaker
that like you just do that over and over. And that is a ah real job of learning to listen to yourself and learning to even hear those things in you that tell you this scene is not that it would, this scene is going to ring differently. If we move that chunk of the conversation to the end where it like can like hit instead of just like, the you know, sort of swoosh into the next thing.
00:44:06
Speaker
Those are things you have to learn by doing them. Like you're or like, you're playing an instrument. You need to tune all of your, your ear and your, and your, all those sort of intuitive capabilities.
00:44:18
Speaker
So it's as much about those intuitive capabilities as it is about some voice that you discover. And no matter where you are in your career, you need those capabilities. Those are the ones that are going to lead you to the best stuff.
00:44:31
Speaker
Yeah, I was um lucky enough to speak to a group of profile and feature writing journalism students at the U of O yesterday in Charlie Butler's class. And ah at the end, the you know, a young woman came up to me and she's asking about the podcast and everything and how i started it so long ago. And she's like, and and now like everything is so crowded. And like, how do you stand out? And I just said like, whatever makes you weird, like double down on your weirdness, because that's the only way you'll ever start to stand out. Like be very specific, whatever makes you quirky and odd, like all of that, this podcast is all like heavy metal music and,
00:45:08
Speaker
talking about shit we don't want to talk about and the demystifying the process. And like, as a result of that, it's kind of built its own little thing. and That's what makes me weird in this ecosystem. And I, so I love hearing you echo that sentiment of like, yeah, we need to yeah be, be weirdos, yeah be weird Al to make this thing work.
00:45:26
Speaker
yes i love that so much i think that's exactly right and it also goes back to the thing were talking about at the beginning of you would do this you you are really enjoying it because it's actually your real self you're not having to like put on a dumb suit and like show up as like mr podcast host guy and fake it that would first of all be really boring and it would be stupid waste of time but you also probably wouldn't really enjoy it that much. And then the conversation would be less good and it would have petered out long ago. But because you made the choice to show up as yourself and to invite other people to do the same thing, it's alive and real and cool. And you get to keep being whoever the next version of you is and keep inviting other people and allow it to evolve.
00:46:10
Speaker
I think a lot of that is that just keep to keep choosing to hear yourself and to be out loud, whatever the thing is that you are right now, whatever you're really, truly interested in right now. And then even if nobody cares, you will have cared and you will have done something that was real to you. That's it. Then you can't fail.
00:46:32
Speaker
Yeah, in ah Dory 48 about you know reading, you you write that, yeah, my students are often afraid that they'll copy someone else or that they'll be unable to tell the difference between inspiration and their own voice. In almost every case, we become clearer about our own perspective the longer we keep writing. So that's kind of, that's echoing the sentiment we're talking about now of synthesizing those things. But yeah, it's a long game and being in it gives us a chance at developing into a truer sense of ourselves, and that's which is always evolving.
00:47:00
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that inviting those outside influences in is like the more, the more you open your arms to that and have lots and lots of things that are coming into your brain and yourself,
00:47:14
Speaker
the more interesting and textured your own thinking becomes. So it's not, I mean, I definitely do avoid sometimes reading something that I feel like might be too close to what I'm writing at that moment.
00:47:25
Speaker
But that's just a, that's like a moment. Then pretty soon my thing is already like off and it's itself. And I'm not worried about reading something that turns out to be a different version. It always also turns out to be way more different.
00:47:36
Speaker
than I ever could have thought. So it's let it's like the the fear is not really real. But I was talking to a student the other day who was working on her MFA thesis and she was like, i don't know, I feel like it's like going kind of in a YA direction and is that bad? And then there's like horror, do i have to choose? And I felt like...
00:47:54
Speaker
that's cool. Those are things, those are like walls that are kind of like coming around you. You get to push up against, you get to like grow ivy over them. You get to knock parts of it down and use other parts.
00:48:05
Speaker
That's all, that's all part of the landscape of what you're thinking. and you can use your influences however you want. You can use them because you hate them and you want to do the opposite.
00:48:16
Speaker
You can play with the tropes and sometimes flip them over on their head. And sometimes pick a useful thing that's just exactly, you want to take it exactly as it is. And you can, you can paint it and graffiti it and run a train line through it. And all of it still is yours, but you don't have to exclude the things that already exist. In fact, the more you include them, the richer the whole thing gets to be. And the more you remember that you're writing in that bigger pool and that it's like this, it's fun. You get to bring in like the blocks that other people have been playing with. Oh, I want to play with your blocks too. Cool. That sounds fun. Yeah. Well, even, ah even echoing back to a start of our conversation and we were just talking about writing writer's block and then, or maybe the, this sort of a genre creep of the student of yours coming in kind of gets to door 49 of just it, you know, just like, fuck it. Just yeah if a zombie just started to walk through the door, like, well, all right, well,
00:49:11
Speaker
Run with it. See what happens. Because maybe maybe that zombie will walk through that novel and just veer off into its own short story. and But you'll never know if you just didn't let it happen. I really love that. And how often do you employ you that particular thing to your work? So often. So often.
00:49:30
Speaker
Yeah, I was just thinking about it today because I'm working on this new novel and it has kind of a fairy tale. a little fairy tale veil that has gotten louder as it comes to the end of the novel. And I feel like, oh, fuck it. Let's just put the fairy tale in there. Let's just name it, right? Maybe early on, or maybe like a third of the way in.
00:49:49
Speaker
It still has totally real characters that live in the world that we live in. And it takes place in the 90s in New Mexico, where I grew up. So it's got a lot of my life. teenager life in there. There's so much that's real and that's very much tied to our world.
00:50:05
Speaker
But then it was like, what would be the risk? I mean, the worst risk is like you put it in and it doesn't really work, but I'm, so I'm putting it in. I'm like going in with my Sharpie and being like, yes, this is here.
00:50:16
Speaker
This is how it works. And I feel like even if I trim it back later, it will have kind of created those useful boundaries and Yeah. like Like, fuck it. Just name the thing. Just say what you want to say.
00:50:29
Speaker
Try it. Try it bigger. Double it. And then and then you actually know what you're working on. Yeah. To that point, I think it was it must have been in Stephen King's on writing where he was thinking through the stand and it was getting too big. And it was just like, oh, what if I put a bomb in this house and they're like kill six of the characters or whatever, however many it is. It's like. okay, that kind of liberated him to prune that tree and and go into and keep the momentum going forward. And it's just like, yeah that might've been an effort moment for him where he was just like, let's just blow up half the cast and see what happens.
00:51:11
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cause you start with something you don't understand yet and you will come to understand it by writing it. Second draft, you knows things that first draft you could not have known and same with fourth draft you And then, yeah, you could start to be like, wow, we've really gone crazy over here. This whole idea of this gang that's to rob the farmer's market, I actually don't think that's part of this book. And you might be able lose 100 pages of something. And you have to say, in this next draft, I'm going to try it without that.
00:51:45
Speaker
And that's not a permanent decision. Every part is a moving part. Anything can always be put back or taken away. But you have to decisively give something a try. So you'll either, once you try it, you'll either be like, yeah, this feels better. Or wait, wait, wait, I missed that and I need to figure out a way to bring it back in. And so then the the next job is, how can I figure out a way to bring it back in?
00:52:08
Speaker
Yeah, and ah later in the book, too, you you talk about writing a query letter, you know and that's different for fiction as it might be for nonfiction, but they're all kind of part and parcel of the same little umbrella of pitching and so forth. um But I love when when you say, like, when it's time to introduce yourself and your work, and who will you
Professional Development & Navigating Publishing
00:52:25
Speaker
be? And that's something I've never quite ah thought of with ah with a query, and I love your spin on it. So yeah run with that a little bit about this this this casting forward.
00:52:35
Speaker
Yeah, this came from, a i had a lot of ffa advisees one year because we had people on sabbatical and I just had the whole third year class. So I decided to give them a kind of professionalization on informal seminar. And we every week we would meet and talk about a particular thing, whether it was how to read your work aloud or how to think about literary magazine submissions. And one of the weeks was query letters. And when I, so when I started planning that, I was like, oh, this is gross. I don't feel great about this because none of them are ready yet at all to start querying. They just are, they've like been writing the thing for three years at most. And
00:53:12
Speaker
It takes longer than that to write your first book. So they're not ready. Why are we pushing, you know rushing ahead to publication when it's not time? But then when we did it, what happened is that everybody wrote this thing and they saw the difference between the the things they could say now and the things they wanted to be able to say when the book was finally done and they were ready to actually do the querying.
00:53:35
Speaker
They wanted to have gone to some writers' conferences. They wanted to have done research in a particular place for this novel or nonfiction project. They wanted to to have ah some publications, some short publications under their belt. They wanted to have written some sort short stories that they could even submit so that they could try to publish them.
00:53:55
Speaker
And that became this like really wonderful opportunity of feeling of, oh, there's so much that I want to try to do. And they left with not like, oh, my query letter sucks. And I have nothing. i have no, you know I have no platform. i have nothing to stand on yet.
00:54:10
Speaker
And I'm, and I'm already failing, but like, okay, i am, I am here on this map right now, but where I want to be is like through this whole path. And so that's my path. That's what I'm to start working on now so that I can,
00:54:25
Speaker
So that I can land somewhere in that zone, even if we, you know, you think you're headed out exactly one way and you don't usually go that way, but you somewhere further, further with more that you can offer, which I feel like is kind of how we should all be.
00:54:39
Speaker
doing I mean, I guess in like business, you'd write a 10 year plan or something, but I don't care about bottom line or sales figures or IPO or whatever those things that those people talk about. ah ROI. yeah Exactly. Yeah.
00:54:52
Speaker
Yeah. Stock, your I don't know. AI, like I don't care. Just like, what do you, what do you, yeah. Like who do you want to be in a few years? What do you, what, what is that? How is that exciting to you right now? And what do you want to get started on?
00:55:05
Speaker
What particular doorway or an advice or key to a doorway do you find maybe hardest to follow for yourself? Hmm.
00:55:17
Speaker
That's a good question. i mean, I've really used all of these things. I think that I, I probably am not strict about exactly following it perfectly, but it's also because I've done it a lot of times. And so I know that wherever that little burst of energy comes from is great. It doesn't matter if I started off trying to do the like envy recycler in, in this way. And on step one, I like had and a different idea that that's great. That's, I did, did its job, even if I'm not using it as the like exact, you know, if you can use the hammer to do a screwdriver's job, fine, whatever's working for you is, is great. And you should go with that.
00:55:58
Speaker
So that maybe that kind of rigidity is something that I think we all need to try to take a breath and let go of it. However it's working, whatever it is for you, that's good. You don't have to adopt somebody else's exact process or ethos or any of those things. And I think that took, that took some learning for me to not feel like, well, but look at her. She gets up at five zero in the morning every day and writes for two hours. So I'm probably messing this up if I don't start doing that.
00:56:25
Speaker
I don't do that. That's not how it works for me. maybe it would be good, but I'm not going to try because that would mean I didn't sleep and I really want to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. And ah you brought up platform um a moment ago, just in your, in ah elaborating on queries and stuff. And a lot of people on the show, something I think about all the time, it's so important, be it for non fiction or nonfiction. um But how are you thinking about, you know, platform and the, the many spokes to that wheel?
00:56:54
Speaker
Yeah, i I think I was, I'm lucky to have started writing before, like Facebook was still only for college students. When I was the first year I was in grad school and then they opened it up somewhere down the road and, you know, we were all like, ooh, what's going on in that, you know, new thing.
00:57:12
Speaker
But we weren't, it wasn't a professor, there was no professional social media yet. It was all professional. people being like, bro, I just drank two Forbys and that was crazy. So I feel like I had a little more space at the beginning to to not know what a platform was and what I was supposed to do to be a professional writer.
00:57:30
Speaker
And I was just writing the best things I could and getting them really far along, like working so hard. And that while I, so there's like definitely things to say about the platform, but I feel like no matter what else, even if you have 25 million followers on whatever platform and you're the world expert in fake plants, you still need to write something really great. That's that. You can't do anything without that. That's it. You need to be able to send that query letter. And for the person to read the first 10 pages and be like, send me the whole thing immediately. I can't wait to read the rest because you have poured all of yourself into it and worked on it for,
00:58:13
Speaker
as far as you possibly can with readers and feedback and all the help. So no matter what else the platform might possibly be, the work is 95% of what you need to be thinking about.
00:58:26
Speaker
And then when you get there, I think having some of those kind of like, you can trust me. Here's why you can trust me. These are the things that I'm doing in the world that, that give me some credibility that, that I'm connected in the, you know, in, in the world that I'm talking about. So I'm not making this things up.
00:58:43
Speaker
I have, maybe it's for some people, especially maybe in nonfiction is more of the sort of like, you need to be on some kind of official platforms and you have to have your professional self out there.
00:58:54
Speaker
I am still not very good at that. And i don't, I don't pay a lot of attention. I mean, i do, I post things but that I need to post, but I'm not like on there building a whole world. Yeah. It needs to be something you have, you have to have a place to stand. And it is also something that you build. slowly. So it doesn't have to be that it feels like I just finished grad school or I'm starting out and I have to get all these followers, start a sub stack, figure out, you know, how to like be in all these associations, go to all those parties so I can network.
00:59:29
Speaker
That's too much all at once. You need to start with a ah genuine thing. I remember when I was first, my first novel was coming out and I had lunch with my editor in New York and I said like,
00:59:39
Speaker
should i like start a blog or something to support this? And she was like, do you want to start a blog? And I was like, no, she was like, then definitely don't start a blog because that would, you would not be good at it because you don't want to do it. So don't do something just because you feel like you should try to find ways to build your platform better that actually are yours, like where your voice is there, your ideas are there, your connection to the material, whatever it is at the moment is there. So that you're building something that actually stands up rather than throwing all your energy at some grand project to get a million followers or start a newsletter. We don't blog anymore, but you can start a sub stack that you don't really care about. And then it falls apart. And then that was your platform. And you put all your energy into this mythical idea of a platform and it turned out it had nothing to do with you. And now it's over and you're starting over from scratch. So small bricks that actually mean something to you continuously and you'll get there.
01:00:33
Speaker
Yeah, so many people put the wrong emphasis on their the totality of their writing presence. And you can get as good at social media as you want, but if you're a shitty writer, all you're doing is calling attention to how shitty you are. It's like yeah you got to build that foundation of of skill and craft and just be a ripping good storyteller. At that point, sometimes platform will take care of itself. Like you just...
01:00:56
Speaker
You know, and you all you want, you want to be published anyway. So it's like work on getting published and then, you know, link back to whatever is important. And then over time, people going get real excited to see, you know, your byline on a story. And like, that's what, that's what you set out to do in the first place, not to become an influencer, but to become a writer who is trying to share of the human condition or whatever. So it's a, i we've been so hoodwinked over the last 15 years or so to put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. uh, the wrong syllable as the pun goes. So it's, it's nice to hear you say that, you know, building that foundation of like good sound storytelling and craft and the rest will take care of itself. 100% over and over and over. Yes, completely.
01:01:40
Speaker
Yeah. And I don't want her i don't really care. Like when when I'm buying a book, I mean, I want to know if they're, if it's nonfiction and they're claiming to be an expert on something that I want to know that they know something about it, but I'm reading a book right now called How It Feels to be Alive by Megan O'Grady. it's about our our relationship with art, ah her relationship with art. It's kind of like a, almost like a memoir in pieces of art.
01:02:02
Speaker
And she is, she teaches in the art department at CU Boulder, but she's not an artist. She is a critic and thinker and appreciator. And she really knows her shit, but she's honest about that. She's working with studio art students as the person who is a viewer and is helping them think about where they sit in the whole conversation. what kinds of how these materials have been used across time. And it feels like such a cool position to take that she's not pretending to be an artist and she's also not pretending to be an art historian.
01:02:35
Speaker
She's this thing that no one else is. And that, like, she's an expert at that. And I love reading about it because it's so interesting. And it feels like it just opens up, like, how do I think about myself in terms of art? I very much do. It's a real part of my life, but I would never, I haven't thought about having a sort of like an official thing to say about it before.
01:02:58
Speaker
But she has because she does. And that's how it works. That's amazing. Well, I love thinking of your book kind of like ah you're almost like a gatekeeper and all the keys. You got a giant ring and 101 keys and it's like go up to a door and like, all right, got to go through this one. Try to try this one out. That one's not working. And I love the idea of like, that's what this book is and can, pun intended, like unlock some problems for a lot of people. So I'm just, I'm really deeply appreciative for the work you've done. I can't wait to maybe dig into a few of your novels too now that I know you now from this. um So I just want to thank you for this work. and
01:03:35
Speaker
As I bring this conversation up for landing, Ramona, i love asking for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners out there. It's just like anything you're finding cool and fun. doesn't have to be a book. A lot of people recommend books, but it could be just about anything you're just excited about you want to share.
01:03:48
Speaker
Okay. um I have, I've been on sabbatical this year and one of the things I've done is taken a bunch of art classes and I'm not good at these things. And I have really discovered the joy of being bad at stuff that I am like, i am used to being the teacher. I'm the expert in the room. I like, I've thought about writing for a long time. I know stuff about writing.
01:04:09
Speaker
And here I am like walking into this pottery studio and other people are building these like amazing sculptural figurines. And I'm like, working on this weird little salt cellar that like came out kind of like cockeyed, left-sided and glazed and looked that nice. But it is in my kitchen right now. We have salt in it and it's useful. And it was so fun to make it and to feel like not only am I allowed to try something that I don't understand, but that there's actual pleasure in not being good at something and just feeling what it feels like. So i that my recommendation is try something you don't know how to do and be bad at it and enjoy that. Yeah, it's like it doesn't take, I mean just going from a kid to an adult drums out of a lot of that feeling of okay being okay, being bad at things, but then we see the performative art on social media of like everybody just seems to be amazing at all these things they're doing, and so it's like, goddammit, like I was just trying to make my little bowl here and it's all wonky and whatever and everyone's making these like super polished things that look like they came out of a factory. And it's like, those are further things in our way of like getting in the way of us just experimenting and just having fun with things. It's it's too bad. Like when we were kids, we could do seven afterschool activities. You could be like gymnastics, guitar, pottery, and like, you know, sword fighting. And you were allowed to just go and do it because that was interesting to you for that moment. And then you didn't have to do it anymore after when you were done.
01:05:37
Speaker
I think we as adults should reclaim that. Like, what do I feel like doing? That seems cool. I'm going to sign myself up. Yeah. Austin Kleon has a new book coming out called Don't Call It Art. And it's um about him learning from his kids and their reckless abandon for doing anything creative creatively. you as with your With your kids, I'm sure you know the way they look it. He basically wrote his book watching his kids do art.
01:06:03
Speaker
And he's like a good... artist himself but just uh so i've just started reading it's it's it's uh goes right alongside his other ones that steal like an artist and show your work and keep going and so ah yeah this idea of trying to get back to that fun of who cares just make things to make things and have fun who cares if it's bad um and when we call it art we're putting too much pressure on it yeah yeah exactly yes yes don't overthink this just put your hands in the thing Exactly.
Reflections on The Frontrunner & Future Aspirations
01:06:32
Speaker
Awesome, Ramona. Well, thank you so much for the time and for the work and for coming on the podcast to talk shop. This is a lot of fun.
01:06:37
Speaker
Thank you, Brendan. It's been such a pleasure and thank you for doing this podcast. I love
01:06:46
Speaker
Yes! Awesome! Thanks to Ramona for coming on the show. The name of the book, again, is Unstuck. Love it. Love it that it's like a giant ring of keys to any number of problems.
01:07:00
Speaker
And boy, will you encounter problems. Visit brendanamara.com for more information about this episode and others. You can follow the show and me on Instagram at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. And be sure you're subbed up, either in the podcast feed, I sure hope you will, as well as Pitch Club at welcome to pitchclub.subtech.com and the Rage Against the Algorithm monthly newsletter.
01:07:23
Speaker
Both embed forms are brendanamara.com. Or you can just seek them out. I had an entirely different parting shot written than I realized the frontrunner turned a year old this week, and I should probably riff on that.
01:07:35
Speaker
It's hard to imagine. It's hard to believe, really, that it's been that long. It's hard to believe that I've been doing this podcast as long as I have, 13 years. Going strong in this attention economy, in this economy, despite what I might say or tonally convey, I am greatly proud of the book we put together. And I say we because writing is a team sport, especially book writing.
01:08:00
Speaker
and but What are some lessons that I learned? Well, yeah here's here's a bulleted list. Write handwritten thank you notes to give out to booksellers, people who have had you on their radio program or TV program or podcasts, whatever.
01:08:18
Speaker
Say yes to everything. Don't saturate the market with book events, especially in the same city. Don't do that. You're just cannibalizing audience. Unless you're George Saunders, bookstore events are often a drag and most won't help with publicizing.
01:08:36
Speaker
social media is overrated. Email is underrated. One-to-one, I think, is underrated. Like text a friend, email a friend, one-to-one. I'm going to be here for this. Instead of like the infinite possibility of social media, which of course we all know is not going to be infinite, versus that one-to-one. You have that better connection.
01:08:54
Speaker
I think that works better. You're selling your next book as much as you're selling the current one. Don't expect your publisher to do your publicity for you. You're probably going to do 95% and they'll give you five.
01:09:07
Speaker
Start your marketing publicity for the book years in advance. Slow is fast. You underestimate how much research you need to do in order to get a book proposal off the ground.
01:09:20
Speaker
Deliver a talk with the same energy to four people as you would for 40 or 400. Your attitude is contagious, good or bad. Either way, i vote for good.
01:09:30
Speaker
And enjoy the moment. Most of us, if we're lucky, are writing and publishing one book every three to five years. A lot of that time is in the cave and you're alone. And then you finally get to come forward with this thing.
01:09:44
Speaker
Take that moment and let it wash over you. You know, your pub day, all these events, like, oh, my God, it's pretty special what we get to do. I know i'm ah I'm a bit of a pill at times. I say that quite a bit.
01:09:56
Speaker
um But when I'm doing events of this nature, being able to celebrate a book that I worked really hard on. i really did try to tell myself to, I just enjoyed this moment, like take it in.
01:10:09
Speaker
It doesn't come along very often. Really enjoy it. I probably could write a parting shot for each of these bullet points alone, and I'm sure I'll come up with 10 more when I stop recording. And I'm not exactly here to wax poetic about it, but those are some lessons I learned, and maybe I'll expand on them in more depth in the future with parting shots. But those are the biggies, just off the cuff, really.
01:10:33
Speaker
I thought this would be a whole lot longer and gooey, um but I'm so in the thick of trying to get the next thing off the ground. And I had a couple phone calls with other writer friends, and sometimes you leave those conversations feeling like there's no hope at all.
01:10:46
Speaker
And it's because there's so much uncertainty, and I think we all want a taste of certainty. Like a shot glass of certainty. Not a keg. Just throw one back.
01:10:58
Speaker
A body shot of certainty. So happy one year to the front runner and stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do interview, see ya.