The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

<p>What if the source of your best writing isn't something you control — but something you learn to collaborate with? How can ancient ideas about the muse, the daimon, and creative genius transform the way you approach your work? And what might happen if you stopped fighting the silence and let it become your greatest creative ally? With Matt Cardin, author of <em>Writing at the Wellspring</em>.</p> <p>In the intro, thoughts on bookstores and <a href="https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Toppings</a>; 20 ways authors can signal humanity and build reader trust [<a href="https://wishidknownforwriters.com/episodes/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Wish I'd Known Then</a>]; <a href="https://amzn.to/4derGNV" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>Learning from Silence</em> </a>&#8211; Pico Iyer; <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/prowritingaid" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">ProWritingAid spring sale</a>; <em><a href="https://www.jfpenn.com/bones" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Bones of the Deep</a></em> &#8211; J.F. Penn.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://www.draft2digital.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="430" height="144" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/draft2digital.jpg" alt="draft2digital" class="wp-image-23600" srcset="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/draft2digital.jpg 430w, https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/draft2digital-300x100.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 430px) 100vw, 430px" /></a></figure> </div> <p><a href="https://www.draft2digital.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>Today's show is sponsored by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.draft2digital.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Draft2Digital</a>, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.draft2digital.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">www.draft2digital.com</a>&nbsp;to get started.</p> <p>This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.patreon.com/thecreativepenn" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Patreon.com/thecreativepenn</a>&nbsp;</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Matt-Cardin.png" alt="" class="wp-image-37443"/></figure> <p>Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is <em><a href="https://amzn.to/4lWYlda" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius</a></em>, which is fantastic. I actually blurbed it as follows: </p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"> <p>&#8220;A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.&#8221;</p> </blockquote> <p>You can listen above or on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/podcasts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">your favorite podcast app</a>&nbsp;or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Show Notes</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>How Matt balances a full-time academic career with his creative writing life</li> <li>The ancient concept of the genius, the muse, and the daimon, and why creativity is about collaboration with something beyond yourself</li> <li>Why the silences that come into our creative lives, including writer's block and inertia, might actually be gifts rather than obstacles</li> <li>The stages of the creative process</li> <li>Living into the dark, and embracing uncertainty</li> <li>How Substack and blogging can organically grow into books</li> </ul> <p>You can find Matt at <a href="https://mattcardin.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">MattCardin.com</a> or <a href="https://www.livingdark.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">www.livingdark.net</a>.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Transcript of the interview with Matt Cardin</h3> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Matt Cardin is the multi-award-nominated author of eight books at the convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. His latest book is <em><a href="https://amzn.to/4lWYlda" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius</a></em>, which is fantastic.</p> <p>I actually blurbed it as follows: &#8220;A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. . . . If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.&#8221; It is a great book. So welcome to the show, Matt.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Well, thank you, Jo. It's really a pleasure to be here, especially since, as you and I were briefly acknowledging before we started recording, we have overlapping interests to a great degree. So it's really great to make official contact with you.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Indeed. So, first up, before we get into the book itself—</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.</h3> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Well, I'm one of those people whose story is probably typical in some ways, in that I really wanted to do it from the time I was a child. My father was a great writer, although he was an attorney. He wasn't a professional writer.</p> <p>Something about books and reading when I was a child really seriously enchanted me. I was very frustrated when I was so young—and I vividly remember this—that I couldn't read, because I loved the books that were read to me. </p> <p>I craved being able to read them for myself. So as soon as I gained that ability in school, it was off to the races, so to speak, and for some reason, a desire to tell stories myself came along with that.</p> <p>Being a &#8220;writer&#8221; was one of the earliest life desires, job or career desires, that I expressed. I was one of those young people really into fantasy, horror, and science fiction. So I was reading a lot of it and trying to emulate it and write a lot of it. There was a cinematic component—I was a movie fanatic as well. </p> <p>I won a local Authors' Guild short story writing contest when I was a senior in high school and began trying to write stories seriously in college. Then my interest in horror and religion became dominant over time, and that's what I ended up writing about.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Joanna: Has your interest turned into paid work?</h3> <p>That's the other thing, because there's an interest and then there's making writing more of your income and your business.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Right. Well, actually, although I have made and do make money from my writing, it has always, always, always remained on the side. My main career, as far as my moneymaking life, first started off in video and media production, which is formally what I got my undergraduate college degree in.</p> <p>Then I switched into education. I taught high school for some years, and then now for the past, good Lord, 18 years, I have been in higher education. First as English faculty who also taught some religion courses, and then now for the past several years in the administration. I'm Vice President of Academic Affairs at a college.</p> <p>My writing has been something that I pursued as an avocation. As far as earning money from it, that didn't happen even with my first publication, which happened on the internet in 1998, I believe, with a horror story titled &#8220;Teeth.&#8221; It was just free—I didn't get paid.</p> <p>That led to paid publication of that story three or four years later, when it appeared as my very first print publication in a Lovecraftian horror anthology from Del Rey titled <em>The Children of Cthulhu</em>. It appeared as the final story, and that was the first time I had received a paycheck. It was a professional per-word rate.</p> <p>Since then I've had several books published and more stories and essays and that kind of thing. I've had income sometimes from writing and sometimes I haven't. </p> <p>My first book came out of that story. I attended the World Horror Convention in 2001, actually before that Lovecraftian anthology was published, but it had been placed. </p> <p>At the World Horror Convention, which was in Seattle that year, I met one of the two editors of that book, and that led to me having my first short story collection, <em>Divinations of the Deep</em>, which was not for much money, but it attracted a lot of good attention and some good reviews.</p> <p>So it's been like that all along. I mean, I've made a couple of runs at saying I would love to just be an author, as it were, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards for me. And honestly, I'm glad it's not.</p> <p>I have made the most money from some academic editing projects that I've done. I created and edited a two-volume encyclopedia of the history of horror literature, for instance, for a big academic publisher. Those are work-for-hire projects that I get paid for. </p> <p>Making money on my own creative vision and my own creative work has been intermittent. It really has proven over time that not having my primary creative, spiritual, and philosophical drive hooked to what I earn my bread by has been a blessing.</p> <p>I don't want to take this thing I love and make it be how I have to grind to earn my money. I want to keep it in a protected space. That has been spontaneously what's happened with my writing career.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Yes. I think as you say, there are a lot of benefits of that, especially where you are writing at this convergence of horror, religion, and creativity. </p> <p>Your writing is very deep. I would say it's on the edge of academic. I don't want to say it's completely academic, because a lot of people will find that difficult. But I think <em>Writing at the Wellspring</em> goes very deep while still being open to non-academic readers. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">As you say, I think if you had wanted to make a living with your books, you would've had to have gone in at a lighter level, perhaps. Do you think that makes sense?</h3> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Yes, I know what you mean. I want to specify, I know that neither you nor I are saying anything about this as any kind of criticism or condescension to anyone who does make their living as a writer. I mean, I believe you do. </p> <p><strong>Joanna: </strong>Yes, exactly. </p> <p><strong>Matt: </strong>And that's fine. There really are people who have had significant commercial success from books or other things they've written that don't appear to be making huge concessions to being commercial. </p> <p>You can make a living as a writer, I think, and really follow your muse and not feel like you have to pander or cater or cheapen it.</p> <p>Then there are people who have perfectly happily decided to commercialise their work and tune it in whatever way is currently popular. That's fine. Every writer, every creative person should do what is right for him or her, in my opinion.</p> <p>In my particular case, I think what you said is right. I do think that I might have needed to change some things, to back off, to word them differently. </p> <p>Whenever I've tried to exert deliberate control like that, it just turns out that it's not something that my creative spirit wants to do. I don't really feel like I'm in contact with the work anymore. I'm fine with that. I don't think I'm doing a sweet lemons type thing. It really is the way it just needs to be. </p> <p>If it ever proves that me doing it strictly the way I want to do it, going however deep I want regardless of trying to appeal to a paying readership—if it turns out that at some point aligns with boatloads of money coming in, that's fine. That's perfectly fine. I'd be open to that.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Yes.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> I would be open to that.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> You mentioned muse there, and with <em>Writing at the Wellspring</em>, the subtitle is &#8220;Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius.&#8221; So I think this is a good place to talk about it. As you mentioned, you are leaning into your muse and your inner genius, and you use other terms—daemon or daimon. </p> <p>I think sometimes people find the word &#8220;genius&#8221; particularly very difficult because it has the connotation of brilliance in some form. So how can people think about this?</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">How can we lean into this [genius] side of ourselves?</h3> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Honestly, one thing that I would suggest people do is I would refer them to the TED Talk that Elizabeth Gilbert gave some years ago—was it 2009, 2010, 2011? It's one of the more popular TED Talks. Elizabeth Gilbert spoke about. I think it's sometimes given the title <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_your_elusive_creative_genius" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">&#8220;Your Elusive Creative Genius&#8221;</a> or something like that.</p> <p>Her whole talk is about the way in her own creative life, and as she recommends to others, it has been very important for her to seize on the older model that we're talking about. </p> <p>The most clear articulation of it is that it used to be the case—and we're talking about in ancient Western history, back to the Romans and even earlier to the Greeks—that genius was not something that you identified a person as being. It was something that a person <em>had</em>. And I would also say importantly, maybe had <em>them</em> too.</p> <p>In ancient Roman culture surrounding art and poetry and that kind of thing, the genius was the spirit that might, say, live in an artist's studio and would provide the same service to that artist as the Greek muses provided to someone who was writing epic poetry or history or something like that. </p> <p>That understanding of it has continued in various ways down through history. But there was a fateful transition as Western culture went through what we commonly call the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as well.</p> <p>This was where the term &#8220;genius,&#8221; while it didn't lose all those connotations of being an inspiring spirit—something that a person both has and maybe has hold of them—did become internalised to the point where we speak of people as <em>being</em> geniuses., which is exactly what you're talking about.</p> <p>I agree, some people listening to this probably have some reservations about this. They don't want to call themselves a genius because we tend to mean that's a super brilliant person, some kind of prodigy who is possessed of amazing artistic, creative, or intellectual skills. </p> <p>Again, that is the result of a cultural, philosophical, psychological, historical transition that occurred several centuries ago. And you still see the older meaning of it being attached sometimes. You think of people who we call geniuses being touched by something. </p> <p>Well, the older version—where you think of the genius, which in the way I use it in this book and also in my first book on creativity, <em>A Course in Demonic Creativity</em>—the genius is equivalent to the muse, which is equivalent to that other figure that you mentioned, the daemon or the daimon.</p> <p>It refers to a separate—what seems for all the world to be a separate—centre of intelligence or entity or influence. The thing that gives you both your creative drive and also your ideas, and serves as the source of what comes to you naturally to write. It's more than just ideas. </p> <p>When you talk about the ancient Greek daimon, there was a whole well-developed tradition of that in ancient Greek philosophy and religion. A daimon was, in one famous sense, a spirit that you were born with, that the gods had given you. It was like your double, your higher self. </p> <p>It was the thing that represented your character, your interests, the blueprint and the outline that your life was supposed to follow.</p> <p>There are great books written about that. There's a book by the psychologist James Hillman titled <em>The Soul's Code</em>. A lot of people have read it. It lays out the daimon theory and gives it application to modern instances. The idea is that everybody has a genius or has a muse or has a daimon. </p> <p>For writers, my recommendation is to say, whether you believe it or not, whether you take it as a metaphor—which is fine—or whether you want to get somewhat mystical and delve into the idea that maybe there's really a spirit or something, it doesn't matter.</p> <p>Productively, with practical, measurable results, you can learn to relate to your creative impulse as if you are collaborating internally with someone else.</p> <p>It's the centre of why you're interested in writing what you want to write, why you want to write the way you want to write, and even the types of things that unfold in the course of your career—both your creative career and the rest of your life, in the mould of the ancient daimon.</p> <p>I have found that to be a vein of great power and meaning in my own life. I do it exactly the way I'm describing. I don't actually believe it, but I don't disbelieve it. I find that in experience, it really doesn't matter. It works and it may as well be true.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> I mean, obviously the book has a whole load of ways we can tap into that, but I did like that you talk about stillness and silence, because I feel like that is actually increasingly difficult as authors. </p> <p>Obviously it's noisy online and we're meant to be doing things like social media or interacting with people online. And then the world is just noisy. The news is noisy. There's lots of things. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">How can we use this idea of stillness and silence? Also, any other ways we can practically tap into this side?</h3> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Sure. One thing that wanted to say itself in this book was some things I had been thinking and feeling about silence for a long time. As you say, it can be difficult these days to find what feels like the silence that we need to even get our work done.</p> <p>We're talking about the muse or the genius. How can we even hear it when it seems like the clamour of all the pulls that we have on our outward attention has become truly a cacophony?</p> <p>We have opted for this in many ways through our engagement with social media or other things, but in other ways seems like it's been thrust upon us. What I want to point out, that has been of extreme importance to me, is that many silences come into our lives as creatives that we resist. </p> <p>It's not just that we can't find the silence and the space that we feel like we need so as not to drown out our creativity. It's that we have unwanted silences come in, like writer's block. Or even if it doesn't feel like a block, just inertia. Just stasis.</p> <p>I don't know about you, but I have many, many times found myself grappling with what, for all the world, feels like a totally natural, organic sense of wanting to slip into complete inertia, just total stillness. And that feels like it has been in conflict with my creative drive.</p> <p>It's like I have this residual desire and also a sense of duty that I really should be writing. Maybe I have an idea in mind and I'm just not working on it. Or maybe I'm in the middle of a project and I feel like I'm abandoning it. Or maybe nothing's coming up, but I feel like it should be.</p> <p>I'm pushing myself, but there's a division in me where I also just want to leave it alone. Whether that means actually just sitting there silently at my writing table or in meditation, or maybe just going about regular daily life and forgetting about trying to fulfil this creative calling.</p> <p>I really think there's a vein of gold to be tapped in the silences that come to all of us. Because as I said, that can be in the middle of daily activity. We have this kind of franticness, some of us, about our creativity. We get wrapped up in it. We feel bound to it. </p> <p>The thing that so much of the time we want to think is a gift—we're proud of it, we cherish it, we like our writing—also becomes a burden.</p> <p>This fantasy of just chucking it all, of just saying, &#8220;I would love to be free of it. It's like something that's weighing me down. I'm sorry that I roped myself into it. I would love to just sink into complete silence.&#8221; This sort of meditative thing, or just muteness—hey, that is valid to hear. That's valid to heed when it comes up.</p> <p>I mean, sometimes we have gotten ourselves into situations where we have external responsibilities and deadlines, and it's important to try and honour those and not be a bad person on the level of just fulfilling practical obligations.</p> <p>It's also important to recognise you've got silence offering itself to you in all kinds of ways. The more important silence is paradoxically the one that we so often resist if we're creative people and feel like we have to be making.</p> <p>The more important silence is not whether or not your outward conditions seem like they're a clamour and they're chaotic and they're distracting and they're full of pressure. It's that inner silence.</p> <p>So I recommend paying attention to when it comes up. And for practical ways—they are endless. Take advantage of early mornings. A lot of people have found great value in getting up earlier than they are used to and making a practice of that, and either just meditating or free writing.</p> <p>Maybe using, for example, Julia Cameron's famous practice of morning pages, which has been valuable to me sometimes. </p> <p>Or doing things like—as I've said about the muse and the genius and the daimon—personify your unconscious mind and maybe write down a dialogue between yourself and your creative spirit, whether about your current project or just about your life and your creativity as a whole.</p> <p>There are various tricks to get in touch with this unconscious part of you, and I really am convinced out of practical personal experience that it's not necessary to have outer silence and outer spaciousness when you can find it within yourself. You can find it through some of these exercises for getting in alignment with what your creativity wants to do.</p> <p>You can get in touch with it if you're paying attention to what you might not recognise as a gift—offering it to yourself. If things go quiet and you think, &#8220;Oh no, I should be doing something&#8221;—why not let that be a place where things can germinate? Why not let that be the silence that you might not be able to find on the outside?</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Yes, and I'm feeling guilty here because of course we are producing a podcast episode for people to listen to. I find personally that one of the places I can find silence is when I walk. It's not obviously silent outside, but I am definitely guilty of always listening to podcasts, often at very fast speed as well.</p> <p>Sometimes when I go for a walk, I just deliberately do not listen to anything—don't listen to an audiobook, don't listen to a podcast—and a lot comes up there.</p> <p>I have my phone with me, and when I get back from those walks and jot down things that come up in my mind, I will have so many notes of things that have come up in my brain during the walk.</p> <p>It's really difficult, isn't it? Because I know you also love input. You do a lot of research. As I said, your books have a lot of research in them, and so we both like doing the research. But also I definitely find that has to be balanced with the time for letting it come out again in some form, with that mental silence.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">You also talk about being uncomfortable, and I feel like sometimes that silence can be uncomfortable as well.</h3> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Yes, it can be. There's no telling what might come up when you are faced with silence. Again, it's one of those things—even the outer kind that we think we crave. Sometimes it's a bit frightening when it comes up, which is why we try to fill it with things, like this podcast episode for example.</p> <p>There's a threshold that you can notice you cross sometimes, where what was a natural desire to connect with something that you heard about and found interesting becomes a bit frantic.</p> <p>Where now, really, what might be good is if you shut off—didn't go for the next podcast episode or didn't go for the next click to the website—if you just shut the browser and just sat there and did something else.</p> <p>You're kind of, with a little desperateness, trying to fill the void. What you described about needing to get quiet and let things happen—yes.</p> <p>I love reading and research, but the classic stages of the creative process—first codified, I think, by Graham Wallas, if I remember correctly—they still work. It's really good sometimes to have a model and understand how it works.</p> <p>You have what's sometimes called the preparation stage. All the input, all the research, all the brainstorming, all that kind of thing. </p> <p>Then the incubation stage can be vastly important. That can get frightening, both because the silence seems somehow threatening, like something about you is going to be exposed. Or maybe that you're going to lose the thread of whatever it was and it's never going to come out.</p> <p>But really, if you just stop and let your muse, let your genius do its thing, let your unconscious do its thing, it will suggest itself again. It will come up on its own. Ideas will come back. </p> <p>You'll realise, &#8220;Oh, I didn't know what I was going to do with that character. I didn't know how these ideas were going to come together. I didn't even know what this idea for a story, a book, or an essay was going to be.&#8221; It comes back up, and with you working with it, it shows what it wanted to be all along.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">This whole thing about doing the preparation and then allowing it to incubate and germinate and then sprout when it wants to, that still works.</h3> <p>Part of the reason that we're scared of the silence, I'm convinced, is because each of us operates in our psychological selves as a closed system. It's like we each comprise our own cosmos, so to speak.</p> <p>I know you know that I have worked in horror literature, the literature of cosmic fear. In cosmic horror, as laid out by the likes of Lovecraft and others, the basic effect has been analysed as constituting a disturbance of the universe. </p> <p>That's the horror of cosmic horror—the world is transformed into this nightmarish thing in a cosmic horror story, where there's a haunting, threatening presence that's out of the ordinary and it's somehow bound up with the narrator's interior world.</p> <p>Life reveals itself as supernaturally or ontologically something nightmarish—there are awful forces that are about to erupt all the time. And whether anybody's into cosmic horror or not, I think it's pretty accurate to say that we each constitute our own world, our own cosmos. </p> <p>A lot of the noise that we make—the mental noise and the complications we introduce into our own lives—is, usually unconsciously, trying to stave off confrontation with the otherness that is outside the barrier of our personal sense of self.</p> <p>The weird thing is that that otherness is actually in us, and in fact, we can approach it in the figure of the daemon or the daimon or the muse. So creativity is fraught. </p> <p>You're dealing with something that you might want to think, &#8220;Oh, this is great, it's going to be the source of my ideas, it's going to fulfil my creativity.&#8221; Well, yes, but it is frightening to think about the fact of something about yourself being beyond yourself and perhaps being out of your conscious control and somehow guiding your destiny.</p> <p>A lot of people have trouble getting along with their own unconscious, which is another way to put it. There's a horror, a fear, a dread effect that comes when we feel like we are out of control. </p> <p>We all face that ultimately—when it comes to our death, for example. There are some spiritual traditions that talk about dying before you die, that being basically the way to enlightenment in those traditions. </p> <p>Recognising and coming to terms with the fact that this thing that is you, that you call yourself, is transitory. It is only there by being enclosed within and swamped from without by this thing that is not you, which is a sort of void to which you'll return.</p> <p>In the book, I deal with some of that, and I talk about it from a non-dual spiritual viewpoint, because ultimately for me, these creative questions have become inseparable from spiritual questions.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Yes. And obviously people know about my book <em>Writing the Shadow</em>, which is how we really connected around this Jungian idea of the shadow and the darkness. I agree with you—there's some really interesting things at the juxtaposition of all of these topics, which we could talk about for a long time.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">I do want to ask you around your idea of &#8220;living into the dark.&#8221; </h3> <p>Because I feel like you do take things beyond just the writing into this idea of living into it. So maybe talk a bit about that. And obviously synchronicity, which is a Jungian psychology concept.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Living into the dark is the thing that forms the overarching ethos or perspective for me of all this. I got the term from &#8220;writing into the dark,&#8221; which actually comes from the American science fiction and fantasy author Dean Wesley Smith. He wrote a book titled <em>Writing Into the Dark</em>, subtitled &#8220;Writing Without an Outline.&#8221;</p> <p>It's a great book. I recommend it to anyone. It is about forsaking and foregoing the felt need to outline writing in advance and trusting your creative mind to be able to make up a story in real time. That draws on the deep nature of storytelling to come out right. </p> <p>Therefore you write into the dark, as if you're walking down a road where you have a lantern and you can only see one step ahead. You haven't mapped out the territory.</p> <p>It was a great metaphor. I had already been thinking in that direction about life and about creativity for some time when I first came across that book. I devoured it and recognised it described how I had already been writing anyway, which is one reason it was so powerful for me.</p> <p>Then it edged out into a broader understanding for me that I had also been coming up with, that I just ended up calling &#8220;living into the dark.&#8221; None of us knows where anything is going, that much is obvious. But living into the dark goes farther than that, to embrace this understanding.</p> <p>I think of this in connection with what so many people, either personally or because of jobs they have where they're required to think like this. I think of this in terms of the famous five-year plan that so many of us want to draw up. </p> <p>There's nothing wrong with a five-year plan or a ten-year plan or a one-year plan. You can come up with that for practical purposes and try and chart where you're going, but we too often forget that that's just a fantasy exercise.</p> <p>We are not actually thinking into the future, nor are we ever actually thinking into the past. Remembering the past, predicting or projecting the future—both are events that are happening right now, in this moment, which is always now. It's no less now than it was when you and I first started this conversation.</p> <p>Past and future are projections—mental projections right now. And everything is unfolding in the present in real time, which effectively means what's going to come next is coming out of—well, we don't know where it's coming out of. Darkness.</p> <p>Living into the dark is living with full-on contact with, and awareness of, and embrace of this fact that we don't know what's coming up. That encompasses all of life and all of creativity.</p> <p>That same darkness, if it's helpful for you to take on this emotional tenor—which it is for me—can relate to the darkness in cosmic horror fiction, or to some of the rich traditions of darkness, like in Daoism with the yin contrasted with yang. Yin is the dark, moon, feminine aspect of things—the receptive source of the universe.</p> <p>This idea of living into the dark, of just accepting that we're all on this journey on a path where we can only see one step ahead, even if that far, has been meaningful to me. It's been meaningful to my creativity, and I recommend it to anybody to whom it appeals.</p> <p>It takes a lot of pressure off. I think that's a guiding meta-theme for me—trying to take the pressure off us from trying to control things that can't be controlled, and more stepping into that flow of understanding: what's going to come to me is going to come to me, and my posture toward it, whether I align with it or not, is what's going to determine my experience of it.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">You mentioned synchronicity. It's interesting. It's verifiable.</h3> <p>I know a lot of people have verified it for themselves. Maybe some people listening to this have too. </p> <p>It's verifiable that when you really get in tune with this present-moment thing and get in tune with your creativity—and you can tell when you're aligned and not, when you feel blocked or when you feel resistance or not—when these things align on their own sometimes, strange coincidences do happen.</p> <p>Jung talked about synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle. That was probably due to the fact that the psyche is not separate from the fabric of the world that gives rise to it, so that we might have subjective things—impressions, fantasies, dreams—that we rather uncannily see mirrored in objective events.</p> <p>Like the famous thing that clarified and coalesced that for him: a psychotherapy session with a patient who was describing a dream she'd been having about a scarab beetle. </p> <p>Then he heard a tapping at the window of his office and he went there and opened it, and there was a European beetle—a kind of scarab beetle, much like the Egyptian scarab—that was there. </p> <p>He held it up and said to the woman, &#8220;Is this your beetle? Here is your beetle.&#8221; It just blew her mind. It opened new levels of the therapy that she was receiving. Those kinds of things happen. I've had them happen.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Me too.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> If you're a long-time writer or reader, you're familiar with the library genie—the library daemon, we sometimes refer to it as—the book that, just at the moment you think of it and realise, &#8220;Oh yes…&#8221; </p> <p>You're doing your study, and it doesn't have to be a library, it could be on the web or whatever. You finally realise what it is that you need, what you've been looking for, and in some cases it literally falls off the shelf onto someone's head.</p> <p>What do you make of those when they happen? At the very least, it rattles your cage. You might enter a state of suspended judgement about whether we really are living in a kind of magical cosmos full of real correspondences.</p> <p>It's a bit like the daimon or the muse: is it a metaphor? Is it just an interpretation, or is it something real? Probably the best place is one of profoundly, actively embraced agnosticism, and just take it for what it is.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Yes, and leaning more into your intuition. I think you definitely demonstrate that in the book as well, really exploring a lot of very interesting topics.</p> <p>Now, we are almost out of time, but you do have a Substack, <a href="https://www.livingdark.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">The Living Dark</a>, where you publish essays, and you've also got all kinds of really interesting books. I want people to go have a look at some of the other stuff you've written, especially if you enjoy horror and religion and all of that kind of thing.</p> <p>So just to ask, how do you decide when something is an essay on The Living Dark, and how do you decide when you are going to put it in a book or in some other way? </p> <p>I feel like a lot of authors are thinking about Substack but don't necessarily know what to put on it. I think I first connected with you on your Substack, where I was like, &#8220;Oh, this guy's writing interesting, weird stuff.&#8221;</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">How do you use Substack as opposed to writing for your books?</h3> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Sure. Let me answer by first talking about what happened previously with that first book on creativity that I mentioned, <em>A Course in Demonic Creativity</em>. I had all kinds of thoughts and ideas coming up, seeded over many years of practice and reading about the daimon and the daemon and the genius and the muse.</p> <p>In 2009 I founded a blog—it was just a WordPress blog—and I titled it Daemon Muse. I attended to it for two to three years. A lot of people ended up reading it. I really did not have any plans, not even any back-burner plans, of taking the material that I published in posts there about this way of creativity and making it a book.</p> <p>I did realise about a year and a half in that essentially I had a book I had already written in those posts. So it took some work, and I spent six months making it all into a coherent book. </p> <p>By the way, that book was only ever published as a PDF, which is still free on my website, <a href="https://mattcardin.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">MattCardin.com</a>—although plans for the first-ever print edition of it are in motion right now. That was published in 2011.</p> <p>When I went to Substack and started my newsletter there in 2022—and by the way, it wasn't originally called The Living Dark; my first title was &#8220;Living Into the Dark,&#8221; and then I changed it about a year, year and a half in—I kind of am doing the same thing.</p> <p>It's been a while since I took anything and thought, &#8220;I'm writing a book with it.&#8221; I write what comes to me to write. You know how Substack Notes is Substack's own version of social media, kind of like Twitter used to be or like X kind of is now.</p> <p>It happens all the time that I write things that just stay in contact with people as a Substack Note—some short thing. And then I realise I wanted to say more about that.</p> <p>Or you have what happened just this morning. Three or four hours before you and I were talking, I started writing a Substack Note and it got so long I realised I had something that could be a post to The Living Dark. So I switched over and finished it that way.</p> <p>The book <em>Writing at the Wellspring</em> came together after I had written things for a couple of years at The Living Dark and realised that I could trace a path through about a third of the posts that I had ever published there, and had the makings of a book. </p> <p>So that, plus other material from earlier in my life—there are things from my private journals from years ago in <em>Writing at the Wellspring</em>—plus some new material, ended up turning into that book.</p> <p>So I'm not thinking about the difference, is what I'm saying. I find writing at my Living Dark newsletter to be a needful and enjoyable creative outlet, partly because I have some 3,800 readers now and it feels good to be in contact with them and to have that audience and to know that there's that eye on what I'm writing.</p> <p>That's partly because I just have the freedom to work it out to my satisfaction and publish it there. I'm already halfway forming another book that will be of a different focus, to come from things that I have published there. </p> <p>So for me, there's an organic relationship between Substack writing, or any kind of blogging, and the writing of books.</p> <p>If people haven't thought about that, they might want to consider it. If you have one already or if you're thinking of starting a blog on Substack or anywhere else, maybe you have things that can guide you to a book that already exists and you just haven't realised it.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Joanna: So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?</h3> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Well, The Living Dark that we're talking about is at <a href="https://www.livingdark.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">www.livingdark.net</a>—and it does require the three Ws at the beginning to get there. Then my author website is <a href="https://mattcardin.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">MattCardin.com</a>, and you can go to the books page there to get a link to all the books I've published and read about them.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Matt. That was fantastic.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong> Thank you, Jo. I really appreciate the invitation.</p><p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/03/30/writing-at-the-wellspring-tapping-the-source-of-your-inner-genius-with-matt-cardin/">Writing At The Wellspring: Tapping The Source Of Your Inner Genius With Matt Cardin</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p>What does it take to write strong sentences? How do you keep writing when the world feels dark? How do you push past self-doubt, build a sustainable writing practice, and trust that your voice is enough? Anne Lamott and Neal Allen share decades of hard-won wisdom from their new book, <em>Good Writing</em>.</p> <p>In the intro, Hachette cancels allegedly AI-written book [<a href="https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/2026/03/20/shy-girl-hachette-ballard-ai-publishing-contract-cancelled/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">The New Publishing Standard</a>]; <a href="https://www.pangram.com/research/how-it-works" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">How Pangram works</a>; Publishing industry insights from Macmillan's CEO [<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcSbQU0g8hw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">David Perell Podcast</a>]; Photos from <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DWHDFzbDZVL/?img_index=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Notre Dame</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DWMJLATjc2a/?img_index=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Saint Chapelle</a>; <em><a href="https://www.JFPenn.com/blackchurch" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">The Black Church</a></em>; <em><a href="https://www.jfpenn.com/bones" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Bones of the Deep</a></em> coming in April. </p> <figure class="wp-block-image"><a href="https://www.prowritingaid.com/joanna" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><img decoding="async" width="1200" height="300" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PWA-wordmark-1200x300-pink.png" alt="PWA wordmark 1200x300 pink" class="wp-image-36589" srcset="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PWA-wordmark-1200x300-pink.png 1200w, https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PWA-wordmark-1200x300-pink-300x75.png 300w, https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PWA-wordmark-1200x300-pink-1024x256.png 1024w, https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PWA-wordmark-1200x300-pink-768x192.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /></a></figure> <p><a href="http://www.prowritingaid.com/joanna" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book&nbsp;<em>before</em>&nbsp;you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.prowritingaid.com/joanna" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna</a></p> <p>This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.patreon.com/thecreativepenn" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Patreon.com/thecreativepenn</a>&nbsp;</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><a href="https://www.shapesoftruth.com/" target="_blank" rel=" noreferrer noopener"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Anne-Lamott-Neal-Allen.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-37430"/></a></figure> <p>Neal Allen is a spiritual coach, former journalist, and author of non-fiction and flash fiction. Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of memoir, spiritual and creative non-fiction, and literary fiction, including <em><a href="https://amzn.to/4uQ3iso" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life</a></em>, which many authors, including me, count as one of the best books on writing out there. Neal and Anne are also married, and their first book together is <em><a href="https://amzn.to/4bWsq9j" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences</a></em></p> <p>You can listen above or on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/podcasts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">your favorite podcast app</a>&nbsp;or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Show Notes</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Why strong verbs are rule number one</li> <li>How Anne and Neal's contrasting styles created a unique call-and-response writing guide</li> <li>Practical advice on finding and trusting your authentic voice across genres</li> <li>Why award-winning novelists typically write for only 90 minutes a day — and what that means for your writing practice</li> <li>How to keep writing during dark and discouraging times without giving up</li> <li>The uncomfortable truth about publication, longevity, and why nobody cares if you write</li> </ul> <p>You can find Neal at <a href="https://www.shapesoftruth.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">ShapesOfTruth.com</a> and Anne on <a href="https://substack.com/@annelamott" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Substack</a>.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Transcript of the interview with Neal Allen and Anne Lamott</h3> <p>Neal Allen is a spiritual coach, former journalist, and author of non-fiction and flash fiction. </p> <p>Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of memoir, spiritual and creative non-fiction, and literary fiction, including <em>Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life</em>, which many authors, including me, count as one of the best books on writing out there. </p> <p>Neal and Anne are also married, and their first book together is <em>Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences</em></p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> Welcome to the show, Neal and Anne.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> Thank you so much, Jo. We're happy to be here.</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> Hi, Jo.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> Let us get straight into the book with rule one, which is use strong verbs. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">How can we implement that practically in our manuscripts when most of us don't start with the verb?</h3> <p>We're thinking of story or we're thinking of message?</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> Throughout the book, it's pointed out that these are rules for second drafts, right? So you've put it down. You've already got your story down, you've already got your piece down—your email, your text, it doesn't matter what.</p> <p>Then you stop, you pause, you go back to the beginning and you go sentence by sentence and look at them.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> I'd like to add that there's a lot in the book, usually on my end of the conversation, that has to do with really using these rules anywhere and everywhere. </p> <p>Whether you're writing a memoir or a grant proposal, I believe these rules apply to getting everything written at any time, in any phase of the work because, from <em>Bird by Bird</em>, I'm all about taking short assignments and writing really godawful first drafts.</p> <p>What is fun about writing is to have spewed out something on the page and then to get to go back right then and just start cleaning it up a bit, straightening it out, probably inevitably shortening it. One place to start is to notice how weak our verbs are.</p> <p>If I say &#8220;Jo walked towards us across the lawn,&#8221; it doesn't give the reader very much information. But if I say &#8220;Jo lurched towards us across the lawn,&#8221; or &#8220;Jo raced towards us across the lawn,&#8221; then right away you've improved the sentence with really two or three quick thoughts about what you actually meant with that verb and a better one.</p> <p>So it really applies to every level and stage of writing, but Neal's right—this is really about going back over your work sentence by sentence and seeing if you can make it stronger and cleaner and clearer. The reason it's rule one is to write strong verbs.</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> A nice thing about strong verbs is that they often preclude the need for an adjective or an adverb, right? If I say &#8220;I trudged,&#8221; it's shorter than saying &#8220;I walked slowly and depressed.&#8221;</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> Absolutely, and how you answered that question is kind of how the book works, right? Because Neal does an outline of the rule, and then Anne comes in and comments.</p> <p>Maybe you could talk a bit about that process. You are both strong characters, obviously you've been writing a long time. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Talk a bit about how you made the book and how that worked as a couple as well.</h3> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> I'd had these rules collected for a number of years and I had them on my website. When I met Anne, she liked them and would hand them out when she was doing writing sessions.</p> <p>I was intrigued at some point a few years ago and looked around to see whether there was a list like mine out there. I noticed that all the other lists I saw were much shorter. </p> <p>Hemingway had his four rules for rewriting. Elmore Leonard, his eight, which are wonderful. Margaret Atwood has 10. The longest I saw was Martin Amis had, depending on what year it was, 14, 15 or 16—he'd go back and forth with a couple of them.</p> <p>I had 30-some and I wondered, well, 30-some might be enough for a book. I didn't want to write a scolding book like on grammar. I didn't want it to be academic or written like &#8220;I'm the expert, I know.&#8221;</p> <p>I'll just let my mind range. I'll explain the rule and then let my mind go where it went. Which, by the way, is one of the rules—show then tell. Not &#8220;show, don't tell.&#8221; It's show, then tell. Let your mind riff after you've explained something to the reader or shown something to the reader.</p> <p>So I wrote the book. It was too short to be published, and I showed it to Anne and I asked her, &#8220;What do I do with this?&#8221;</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> I said, &#8220;Hey, I know something about writing, Bub,&#8221; and I asked if I could contribute my thoughts and retorts and examples and prompts to each of his rules. We were just off and running because his stuff was so solid.</p> <p>Mine is more maybe welcoming and giving encouragement and hope to writers because writing's hard. It's still hard for me. This is my 21st book and I'm only a third of it.</p> <p>Writing's hard, and what we hope is that our conversation can help people understand: a) it's hard for everybody, and b) it'll work if you just keep your butt in the chair and do the best you can, and then go back one day at a time and try to make it a little bit better.</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> It turned out to be pretty serendipitous because just naturally I'm more of an explainer and Annie is more driving toward catharsis. So the call and response is always: I set out the rule, I explain the rule, and Annie drives it toward catharsis and usefulness.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Jo: In some chapters you do disagree in some form. How did that work in the process of writing?</h3> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> Usually I disagree because Neal might be using words that are too big, or it might be a little bit elitist, I would think. Or of course I would point out that he's completely overeducated, whereas I'm a dropout and so I have a much plainer, more welcoming version of the rules.</p> <p>All of the rules are so strong, but I would feel that the way he explained it was beyond me. So I would come in and try to explain what Neal had been explaining. It was actually really funny and fun.</p> <p>We do come from really different directions. Neal is an explainer. He's like an ATM of information, and I am the class den mother who brings in treats and party favours on everybody's birthday. </p> <p>My message is always: you can really, really do this, I promise, trust me. But you start where you are, you get your butt in the chair, and then Neal comes along and says what has worked for him.</p> <p>He was a journalist forever, so he writes in a very different way than I write. It just turned out that the two of us together kind of make a whole. People have asked us if there were a lot of conflicts or if we really objected to the other person's take.</p> <p>I can tell you, Jo, there wasn't a day when we had only conflict. We were just laughing and we were excited because one of us would remember a great example from literature. We came to believe that these two very distinct voices would form one voice of encouragement for any writer.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> That brings us to rule number eight, which is trust your voice. I feel like this is easier when you've been writing a while. </p> <p>We're told to find our voice, but I remember as an early writer when I read <em>Bird by Bird</em> and other books and I was like, &#8220;How on earth do I find my voice?&#8221; Maybe you could talk about this more for early stage writer.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">How do you find and trust that voice?</h3> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> Boy, that is a halt for almost all of us. This follows from any intellectual pursuit that requires lots of practice and repetitions.</p> <p>Malcolm Gladwell's great statement, or discovery, or restatement from somebody else who discovered it, that the human brain requires 10,000 hours of repetitions before something can be allowed to just flow without thought. Flow as if intuitive rather than thinking.</p> <p>I don't think that's any different in writing than it is in basketball or football or anything else—sports, creative pursuits, everyday pursuits. There's just a lot of repetitions required.</p> <p>Some people have the experience that I did, where you're just going along getting better and better, doing it over and over again, learning this, learning that, adding in this, adding in that, moving toward a goal of virtuosity or whatever. And all of a sudden, bang, one day, it all works and your voice emerges.</p> <p>Other people don't have that experience, don't have that one day that it happened or that feeling that it suddenly happened. For some people it takes less than 10,000 hours, but for most people it is a hell of a lot of repetitions.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> I think for me, the most important aspect to finding your own voice is noticing how desperately you don't think your voice is good enough and that you want to write like somebody else.</p> <p>I always mention that when I was coming up, at about 20, I wanted to sound like Isabel Allende because I loved her work so much. Or Ann Beattie, who was writing those wonderful short stories in the <em>New Yorker</em>. Or Salinger, who I'd started reading probably at 10 years old.</p> <p>I had to come to the understanding that I can't tell my stories and my truth and my version of life—which is really what writing is—in somebody else's voice. Unless it's a kind of advanced writing exercise to write in the voice of an alcoholic billionaire in Spain. </p> <p>For most of us, it's about finding out that our voice is what people want to hear. It's hard to believe, but it is absolutely true. If you have a story to tell me, Jo, I just want you to tell me your story. I don't want you to try to sound like Virginia Woolf or Margaret Drabble. I want you to be Jo.</p> <p>If it's the written version you're sending me, I can probably go through and help you maintain your voice while making the writing stronger by following certain really basic rules. But spiritually and psychologically, this is just about the most important rule of all because that's why we're here. </p> <p>That's why we are on this side of eternity—to discover who we are and why we're here. Part of that is discovering who, deep down, when all the layers are peeled away, we are, and then how to communicate that to a reader.</p> <p>Without trying to sound more impressive or more brilliant or more ironic than we actually are, our voice is good enough. It's hard to believe. Our voice is what we want you to tell us your stories in.</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> I distinctly remember the day I found my voice, for odd reasons. I just can remember it, and the first thing I did when this story felt like it had written itself to me was look at it and go, &#8220;Crap. That doesn't sound like Faulkner.&#8221;</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> It sounded like you.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> Or bad Faulkner.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> Do you think we have to find our voice maybe multiple times, depending on genre? For example, I recognised that feeling with one of my novels. It was novel number five. I was like, &#8220;Oh, that's my voice.&#8221; But then it took me a lot longer to find that in memoir because, well, I think memoir is super hard.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Do you think we have to go through these 10,000 hours in different genres?</h3> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> Not for me. I don't think any differently about how I'm entering into a business letter, a text, a novel, a self-help book, or any of the things that I do. I feel like I just have to turn this switch and let it go, and I can trust myself. </p> <p>So that's interesting. I can imagine you could develop a second voice. I haven't ever needed to.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> I would agree that I write my novels and my nonfiction really from a kind of central bus station deep inside of me. </p> <p>One of our rules is write the hard things—write about life and death and loss and grief and relationships and getting old and being here during these incredibly cold, dark times. Because the reader, i.e. me, is just desperate for truth and for real.</p> <p>I started out wanting to sound like John Updike or sound like a New York glitterati male writer, and I can't tell you what is really real in somebody else's voice. I disagree with Malcolm Gladwell. I think it's 10 hours—a little bit different there. </p> <p>But when I'm writing autobiographical spiritual pieces or my novels, I have to kind of settle myself down, like gentling a horse, and find that bus station inside of myself where I'm observing and I'm tugging on the sleeve of the person sitting next to me and saying, &#8220;I just saw something really interesting. Do you have a minute?&#8221;</p> <p>That's really what writing is. I just saw something or thought of something or imagined something or remembered something really interesting. Do you have a minute? If I'm talking to the person next to me, I'm not going to try to sound like Laurence Olivier or anybody else. I'm just going to tell them my story.</p> <p>The best four or five word great quote is from our screenwriter friend, Randy Mayem Singer, and she said: &#8220;Tell me a story. Make me care.&#8221; Those six words really transcend all genres. It's just: I can tell you a story my way if you're interested. Got a minute?</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> You mentioned that, really interesting, you said, &#8220;I need to settle myself down,&#8221; particularly in these dark times. This is not a political show, and obviously we're all from different countries here and we all have different views of what difficult times are, but we all go through them.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">When big things in the world make us feel like perhaps what we are doing is not so important, how do we get through that? </h3> <p>That &#8220;shouldn't I go do something more important than writing a story&#8221; feeling?</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> Everybody is encouraged to be a political scientist nowadays, or to be an ethicist or to be a moralist as their job, and that's kind of ridiculous, right?</p> <p>We've been handed our role. By the time you're 30, you've been handed your role in the world, and that's your productive role. </p> <p>You have certain citizenship requirements, which might include voting or marching or watching the news every day. That's not the rest of your day unless you actually work in parliament as an aide or doing some kind of social policy work.</p> <p>I am not going to let the external world ruin my day. I'm going to keep that to a certain number of minutes of my day that is appropriate to my role in the world. I am perfectly productive in the world. I have lots of things that I do. I work hard. Everybody works hard. </p> <p>There are no lazy people in this world any more—civilisation's too difficult. You want lazy? Go back to 300,000 years of tribal life, where as soon as you had fulfilled your last need for calories for the day, you made it back to camp slowly so you didn't burn calories, and lulled from about 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM. </p> <p>The rest of the day you reclined so you weren't burning calories and gossiped with your fellow tribespeople. None of us is like that now.</p> <p>I'm perfectly productive without having to say I should be more productive and more concerned about the foibles of the species.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> Neal does something with his clients, with whom he does this work on taming the inner critic. It's about having them make a list of what they do every day.</p> <p>Rain or shine or catastrophe or peace or war or whatever, you just do it. I wake up, I pray, I put my glasses on. I get a little bit of work done every day. I meditate for 15 minutes every day. I get outside every day because that is the most nourishing, spiritual reset button I can get to. I catch up with my friends.</p> <p>We have a grandson here. We hang out with him. I do certain things every day, and one of them is I get a little bit of work done.</p> <p>Of course what I'd rather do is just stay glued to CNN and have my tiny opinions on every single thing that is happening and how things would be better if they followed my always excellent advice.</p> <p>Instead, what I do is I will meditate for 50 minutes a day and it won't be really beautiful and inspiring—it'll be like a monkey at the mall who's over-caffeinated. </p> <p>I will also get outside. I don't know if I'll get a really good long walk with 10,000 steps in, but I will get outside and I will pay attention. I will breathe in fresh air. I will have moments of wonder.</p> <p>I will also sit down, and I will be doing it after we talk. I'm going to get my own writing done for the day.</p> <p>I really recommend that to writing students: write down what you do every day. And in it, figure out at least one pod—a 45-minute pod—where you can get a little bit of writing done.</p> <p>Something that may serve the writers in your audience is that I make long lists and I encourage all beginning writers to make long lists of every memory and thought and idea that they've had. But mostly memories, often starting very young.</p> <p>Thinking about early holidays and school are great prompts. Make a list of 25 memories you have that you've told people over the years that are meaningful to you. If you remember them, they're meaningful.</p> <p>You may think that they're meaningful because of this or that, but you sit down and you write about them for 45 minutes and you're going to discover that there was a kernel of insight, or even healing, in them that you hadn't known when you set out to write them.</p> <p>I taught writing forever at this bookstore called Book Passage in Marin. We would spend a part of every hour having the writers, the students, explain to me why they weren't getting any writing done, and they were excellent ideas. </p> <p>Any excuse your listeners have about why they're not getting any writing done—believe me, it's a good excuse and I've heard it 10 times. </p> <p>If you are committed to writing, you have to meet us halfway, and that means that you set aside 45 minutes or an hour and a half or whatever you can give me to get a little bit of writing done. Get one passage written—the first or eighth thing on the list of really important memories that you've carried in your pocket all these years.</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> The typical amount of time that a Booker Prize winner, or a National Book Award winner here in America, spends writing—a novelist—is one to two hours in the morning, getting 45 minutes to an hour and a half of work done, a thousand to 1,500 words. And then they stop.</p> <p>The reason they stop is it's really brain-consuming. To do this is hard work, and it's intellectually vigorous. High-end programmers can work two and a half hours on average before they have to stop because they've used up their brain energy—the blood going to the brain and expending calories and whatever is going on in there.</p> <p>It's not a long time. It's just repetitive time. The Booker Prize winners, they typically work six days a week, not five days a week. An hour and a half a day is about the mean. About 1,200 words is about the mean.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> It's interesting because you mentioned what's stopping people from writing, and you also mentioned it's hard work. </p> <p>One of the things I've heard a lot recently is: &#8220;This is really hard. I thought writing was meant to be this romantic myth where I would sit down and things would stream into my brain and it would be easy. And if it's not easy and fun, then maybe it's wrong for me.&#8221; </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">So maybe you could explain more about the hardness and why hard is still good. Hard doesn't mean it's a bad thing.</h3> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> The interesting thing about writers is that they are really interested in very complex thinking about sentences.</p> <p>A few things distinguish a writer from a subject matter expert or a plotter—who either writes plots and is interested in the movement of plots, or who is a subject matter expert in something and either novelises it or writes nonfiction.</p> <p>It's that a writer is first concerned about the puzzle of a sentence, second concerned about the flow of a paragraph really, and only thirdly concerned about the subject matter.</p> <p>I don't care what the subject matter is. What I want to concentrate on ultimately is the sentence. And getting a sentence to look right in context requires building sentences upon sentences upon sentences. It's more like painting than it is like writing in that sense. </p> <p>If you look at a painter, once they've put one brushstroke down—and usually it takes them a while to figure out what that brushstroke is, how big it is, how wide it is, how thick it is, how grainy it is—then the second brushstroke becomes a puzzle based on what they just did with the first brushstroke and the remaining canvas.</p> <p>A writer thinks that way about each sentence and realises that each sentence has layers of information in it—diction, colour, rhythm, harmony, melody, plot, all sorts of things are happening. How many of those are taken care of in that sentence? Well, that becomes the interest.</p> <p>It's hard in the sense that to be virtuosic at it, to be really good at it, requires a lot of study and a lot of mistakes. Most of the mistakes are getting rid of clichés and finding your way past them, and that's a long, long process.</p> <p>This isn't something that can be just picked up because you have a talent. You were told at a certain time you were a talented writer, so you can just pick it up. As soon as you get into it, you see that the sentences are demanding a heck of a lot of work.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> I would add that I don't find it all that fun and easy—I never find it fun and easy. I've been doing this professionally for 52 years now, since I was 20, when I worked at a magazine.</p> <p>I think that's an illusion. So much of becoming a writer is unlearning what you thought it meant and how it would go. That you would sit alone like Bartleby the Scrivener, hunched over working on your ledger.</p> <p>That was not true at all, because a lot of our book, <em>Good Writing</em>, has to do with the collaboration between you and a writing partner, a writing group or a writing collective, and eventually an editor.</p> <p>It's not about that lonely, hunched-over romantic, <em>Wuthering Heights</em> sense of seriousness. And it's also not giddy. It's not Walt Disney. It's just very real. </p> <p>It's one human sitting down at the desk with paper or at the keyboard, and it is just trying, one day at a time, to write what's on your heart, what's on your mind, what's on your scribbled notes, what you're trying to transcribe from this little bit of a flicker of an idea about something that you've always meant to tell on paper. And then writing it.</p> <p>Some parts of the day's work will be pulling teeth. The secret of writing—and I write about this a lot in <em>Bird by Bird</em>, I write a lot about it in <em>Good Writing</em>—is you just don't give up. Because you wanted to be a writer when you grew up.</p> <p>What that means is that you write a little bit every day and you read about writing. You read good books on writing. You read Stephen King. You read William Zinsser. You read all the <em>Paris Review</em> interviews of writers at work.</p> <p>You enter into the writing life because it's a calling, like a monk to a monastery. You've gotten into the water, it's a little cold at first, and you stay in it. And it starts to be something that is so fulfilling, if maybe not fun. It's fulfilling.</p> <p>You will feel this rare excitement that you're doing what you have put off for so long, or that you're re-entering it in a new way with a different sense of commitment and maybe a little bit more wisdom and probably a lot more stories to tell.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> I did want to ask Anne, because coming back to <em>Bird by Bird</em>, many writers listening will have read it. I've also read over the years about your son and your faith. These are really personal things that you have shared.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">It feels like we live in this age of judgement and cancellation, and writing what you call our truths can be very difficult. People are afraid. What would you say to them? </h3> <p>And obviously also rule 33 is &#8220;write hard stuff&#8221;, so I guess that gets into it too. How do we do this?</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> A lot of people don't have the calling to write personal stuff or autobiographical stuff or stuff about spiritual or emotional or psychological healing. They want to write about England in the 1300s. </p> <p>I've always told my writing students to write what they would love to come upon, because then they're creating it. </p> <p>If they love to read historical romances, or they love to read journals—I have to say, I read every single journal of Virginia Woolf's in my early twenties, and I read every single volume of her letters in my early twenties.</p> <p>It was thrilling to be in that intimate, umbilical connection to a writer that I loved so much, and into the world of Bloomsbury, and into the world of England between the wars. People may not want to write like I write, and I would assume they don't.</p> <p>My calling is that I love to write about real life and I use my immediate experiences of daily living and my family and my husband and our animals and my nation and my recovery and my church. All of that is the stuff that I love to come upon in other people's work, and so I write it.</p> <p>Neal writes differently. He is a journalist and a novelist, and he is writing a lot in a much more sociological way than I am. He is writing with this font of knowledge about socioeconomic and historical understanding of the world. </p> <p>Yet he's just raggedy old Neal Allen, but he loves to come upon different stuff than I love to come upon. Does that answer your question?</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> I think one thing to notice is that the whole bully-victim cycle that we are promoting and living in now—and it's a cycle because if somebody claims that they have been bullied, then their only defence is to become a bully themselves. The victims become the bullies. It just gets worse and worse. It's the old revenge story.</p> <p>What I've noticed when I think about it is the authors who I respect the most tend to be humanists. Humanists tend not to be cancelled, and I've never felt a great danger. Of course, I watch my words in certain ways that are fashionable—you can't use this word any more, and all of that.</p> <p>But in terms of ideas, humanists embrace the world in a funny, different kind of way than people who chase after conflict, chase after separation of people from each other, tribalism, all of that.</p> <p>When I look back, my heroes were always humanists. Some of them might be cancelled now, but just for the weirdest reasons—like Henry Miller or Mark Twain might be cancelled for very strange reasons. These are absolute humanists who love everybody in the world in a certain kind of odd way.</p> <p>Virginia Woolf is the most incredible humanist in the world. She's not going to be cancelled.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> She cancelled herself. </p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> There we go.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> As we come towards the end, I do want to return to something—you've both talked about calling and you've been handed your role, and this sort of &#8220;we are writers now.&#8221; </p> <p>Both of you have had great longevity in the career, and I've been doing this now 20 years. I've noticed so many people who leave the writing life, so I wondered what tips you had on making it long term.</p> <p>How do we do this long term, assuming we are feeling a calling? People have to balance the money side, they're balancing book marketing, which is always a nightmare for all of us, and the writing. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Any tips for longevity?</h3> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> I have no idea. I have lived outside of the writing life, just kind of using it as a secondary skill, for half of my life.</p> <p>I left journalism because it didn't pay well enough to support a family of six. I moved into the corporate world. I loved the corporate world. I didn't have any problem with it, but it wasn't the writing world.</p> <p>When I came out of the corporate world, I first went into &#8220;tame your inner critic&#8221; sessions with people—executive coaching, other kinds of coaching. Only lately, only in the last 10 years, have I really resumed my writing career.</p> <p>I think maintaining a writing career, like anything in the arts, is incredibly difficult financially. It just will be. Annie will tell you—you were, what, 15 years into your career before you had your first home office?</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> Yes.</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> Right.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> More than that. I was 20 years in before I had a door I could close to keep the Huns out—i.e. my child.</p> <p>Here's the thing: nobody cares if you write, if you hate it, or if you've given up. </p> <p>It might be that you would find your creative soul, your imaginative, creative life force at ecstatic dancing on Saturdays in the town park, which we offer here in our tiny town. It might be that you're a painter. My best friend started painting several years ago and she's incredible.</p> <p>If you want to write, the horrible thing is that you just have to keep setting aside a pod. I keep using the word pod because that's how I get any work done at all—an hour. </p> <p>Now, Neal and I can both tell you, and Neal alluded to this: you set aside an hour and that will give you maybe 40 minutes of actual writing. And we'll give the Booker Prize winners 40 minutes of actual writing. You have two hours and that gives you an hour and 15 minutes. That's how it works.</p> <p>If you care and if you long to be a writer, to immerse yourself in the writing life—I hate to sound like a Nike ad, and I don't know if you have this in England—but you just do it.</p> <p>One thing that gets in everybody's way is this fantasy of getting published and how if they get published, it will be like the world has stamped &#8220;validated&#8221; on their parking ticket and their self-esteem will now be much, much better and more consistently excellent than it ever was before.</p> <p>We can tell you: we've got this book that's out, brand new, and it makes you much more insecure and much more anxious than you were before it got published. Because how's it going to do? Is it going to get reviewed? There are very, very few places reviewing books any more.</p> <p>Carol Shields, who wrote an incredible book 30 years ago called <em>The Stone Diaries</em>. She was teaching large, large writing retreats, a thousand people at a time, and she would tell them that five to 10 of them will be published.</p> <p>Getting published means that you get your book out and you have one week to make it. You have one week in the bookstores for it to get noticed. And there are 180,000 hardback books published in America every year in general interest.</p> <p>So you write a novel that's about a small town. You have great dreams that it's going to be an Oprah book and that this is going to happen and it will lead to a second contract, and then you can start investing in diamonds or buy a set of fish forks.</p> <p>It doesn't happen. My first book that made any money at all for me was my fifth book. It was a journal of my son's first year called <em>Operating Instructions</em>, and it was the first time that I didn't have to have a second job. I was 38, and I had been writing—and writing full time—since I was 20 and publishing since I was 26.</p> <p>If the carrot that is enticing you to get any new work done is publication and finding an agent and getting published, it's not going to happen for you. I can just promise you that.</p> <p>If your dream is to become a writer and to become a member of the writing community and to write—and it will be discouraging—but if you want to write, you just keep pushing back your sleeves. You don't get up. You sit down and you keep your butt in the chair.</p> <p>If your work is really good, it may get published. If your work is excellent, it may not. But that can't be what gets you to commit to being a writer when you grow up.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> Fantastic. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">So where can people find <em>Good Writing</em> and all your books and everything you both do online?</h3> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> On March 17th the book comes out. You can get it online, anywhere online. It's published by Penguin Avery. March 17th, it gets released.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> As we said, it'll be in the bookstores for a while.</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> It'll be in the bookstores in America. You might have to go online in Great Britain at first.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> Oh yes, it's definitely there. And what about your websites as well?</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> I don't have a website.</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> I have a modest website at <a href="https://www.shapesoftruth.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">ShapesOfTruth.com</a>. That tells you about my other books also.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> I'm at <a href="https://substack.com/@annelamott" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="Substack, Anne Lamott">Substack, Anne Lamott</a>. I'm on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/AnneLamott/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Facebook, Anne Lamott</a>. I'm kind of all over the place. But this is kind of terrifying: 80% of books bought in America are bought at Amazon on cell phones.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> Yes, absolutely. Actually, I was going to ask—have you recorded the audiobook as a pair?</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> Yes, we have. It's available if you go—I hate to always be plugging Amazon, but it's so easy. If you go to Amazon, it'll give you a choice of hardback or audio or Kindle.</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> And if you don't want to go to Amazon and want to find another place to buy it that you feel more comfortable with, go to <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/786813/good-writing-by-neal-allen-and-anne-lamott/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Penguin Random House</a> and just put in &#8220;Good Writing, Anne Lamott.&#8221; I think it'll take you to a splash page that gives you a choice of a half dozen online places to order it.</p> <p><strong>Jo:</strong> Brilliant. Well, thanks so much, both of you, for your time. This has been brilliant.</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> Oh, Jo, thank you. Pleasure and an honour. Thank you for having us.</p> <p><strong>Neal:</strong> Thank you, Jo. As you can see, we really get turned on talking about this!</p> <p><strong>Anne:</strong> Yes, we do.</p><p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/03/23/good-writing-finding-your-voice-with-neal-allen-and-anne-lamott/">Strong Verbs And Hard Truths. Good Writing With Anne Lamott and Neal Allen</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p><strong>What makes a character so compelling that readers will forgive almost anything about the plot?</strong> How do you move beyond vague flaws and generic descriptions to create people who feel pulled from real life? In this solo episode, I share 15 actionable tips for writing deep characters, curated from past interviews on the podcast.</p> <p>In the intro, thoughts from London Book Fair [<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DV0iOLYDT10/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Instagram reel @jfpennauthor</a>; <a href="https://publishingperspectives.com/2026/03/london-book-fair-2026-in-opening-keynote-prh-u-k-ceo-talks-book-fairs-ai-and-red-lines/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Publishing Perspectives</a>; <a href="https://publishingperspectives.com/2026/03/audible-expands-platform-to-11-new-markets-including-sweden/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Audible</a>; <a href="https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-03-12/london-book-fair-audiobooks/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Spotify</a>]; Insights from a 7-figure author business [<a href="https://insights.bookbub.com/book-marketing-longevity-seven-figure-author-business/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">BookBub</a>].</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><a href="https://www.patreon.com/thecreativepenn" target="_blank" rel=" noreferrer noopener"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/The-Creative-Penn-Podcast-and-Patreon.png" alt="" class="wp-image-36660" style="aspect-ratio:2.7021493717711587;width:487px;height:auto"/></a></figure> </div> <p>This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.patreon.com/thecreativepenn" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Patreon.com/thecreativepenn</a>&nbsp;</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Books-about-writing-characters.png" alt="" class="wp-image-37418"/></figure> </div> <p>This episode has been created from previous episodes of The Creative Penn Podcast, curated by Joanna Penn, as well as chapters from <em><a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book</a></em>. Links to the individual episodes are included in the transcript below.</p> <p><strong>In this episode:</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Master the &#8216;Believe, Care, Invest' trifecta, how to hook readers on the very first page</li> <li>Define the Dramatic Question: Who is your character when the chips are down?</li> <li>Absolute specificity. Why &#8220;she's controlling&#8221; isn't good enough</li> <li>Understand the Heroine's Journey, strength through connection, not solo action</li> <li>Use &#8216;Metaphor Families' to anchor dialogue and give every character a distinctive voice</li> <li>Find the Diagnostic Detail, the moments that prove a character is real</li> <li>Writing pain onto the page without writing memoir</li> <li>Write diverse characters as real people, not stereotypes or plot devices</li> <li>Give your protagonist a morally neutral &#8216;hero' status. Compelling beats likeable.</li> <li>Build vibrant side characters for series longevity and spin-off potential</li> <li>Use voice as a rhythmic tool</li> <li>Link character and plot until they're inseparable</li> <li>Why discovery writers can write out of order and still build deep character</li> <li>Find the sensory details that make characters live and breathe</li> </ul> <p>More help with <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/write-novel-resources/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">how to write fiction here</a>, or in my book, <a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>How to Write a Novel</em>.</a></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Writing Characters: 15 Tips for Writing Deep Character in Your Fiction</h2> <p>In today’s episode, I’m sharing fifteen tips for writing deep characters, synthesised from some of the most insightful interviews on The Creative Penn Podcast over the past few years, combined with what I’ve learned across more than forty books of my own. I’ll be referencing episodes with Matt Bird, Will Storr, Gail Carriger, Barbara Nickless, and Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer. I’ll also draw on my own book, <em><a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">How to Write a Novel</a></em>, which covers these fundamentals in detail.</p> <p>Whether you’re writing your first novel or your fiftieth, whether you’re a plotter or a discovery writer like me, these tips will help you create characters that readers believe in, care about, and invest in—and keep coming back for more. Let’s get into it.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Master the ‘Believe, Care, Invest’ Trifecta</h3> <p>When I spoke with <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2022/05/23/writing-characters-with-matt-bird/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Matt Bird on episode 624</a>, he laid out the three things you need to achieve on the very first page of your book or in the first ten minutes of a film. He calls it “Believe, Care, and Invest.”</p> <p>First, the reader must believe the character is a real person, somehow proving they are not a cardboard imitation of a human being, not just a generic type walking through a generic plot. Second, the reader must care about the character’s circumstances. And third, the reader must invest in the character’s ability to solve the story’s central problem.</p> <p>Matt used The Hunger Games as his primary example, and it’s brilliant. On the very first page, we believe Katniss’s voice. Suzanne Collins writes in first person with a staccato rhythm—lots of periods, short declarative sentences—that immediately grounds us in a survivalist mentality. We care because Katniss is starving. She’s protecting her little sister. And we invest because she is out there bow hunting, which Matt pointed out is one of the most badass things a character can do. She even kills a lynx two pages in and sells the pelt. We invest in her resourcefulness and grit before the plot has even begun.</p> <p>Matt was very clear that this has nothing to do with the character being “likable.” He said his subtitle, Writing a Hero Anyone Will Love, doesn’t mean the character has to be a good person. He described “hero” as both gender-neutral and morally neutral. A hero can be totally evil or totally good. What matters is that we believe, care, and invest.</p> <p>He demonstrated this beautifully by breaking down the first ten minutes of WeCrashed, where the characters of Adam and Rebekah Neumann are absolutely not likable, but we are completely hooked. Adam steals his neighbour’s Chinese food through a carefully orchestrated con involving an imaginary beer. It’s not admirable behaviour, but the tradecraft involved, as Matt put it—using a term from spy movies—makes us invest in him. We see a character trying to solve the big problem of his life, which is that he’s poor and wants to be rich, and we want to see if he can pull it off.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>Go to the first page of your current work in progress. Does it achieve all three? Does the reader believe this is a real person with a distinctive voice? Do they care about the character’s circumstances? And do they invest in the character’s ability to handle what’s coming? If even one of those three is missing, that’s your revision priority.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Define the Dramatic Question: Who Are They Really?</h3> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2020/05/25/character-flaws-will-storr/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling</a>, came on episode 490 and gave one of the most powerful frameworks I’ve ever heard for character-driven fiction. He explained that the human brain evolved language primarily to swap social information—in other words, to gossip. We are wired to monitor other people, to ask the question: who is this person when the chips are down?</p> <p>That’s what Will calls the Dramatic Question, and it’s what he believes lies at the heart of all compelling storytelling. It’s not a question about plot. It’s a question about the character’s soul. And every scene in your novel should force the character to answer it.</p> <p>His example of Lawrence of Arabia is unforgettable. The Dramatic Question for the entire film is: who are you, Lawrence? Are you ordinary or are you extraordinary? </p> <p>At the beginning, Lawrence is a cocky, rebellious young soldier who believes his rebelliousness makes him superior. Every iconic scene in that three-hour film tests that belief. Sometimes Lawrence acts as though he truly is extraordinary—leading the Arabs into battle, being hailed as a god—and sometimes the world strips him bare and he sees himself as ordinary. Because it’s a tragedy, he never overcomes his flaw. He doubles down on his belief that he’s extraordinary until he becomes monstrous, culminating in that iconic scene where he lifts a bloody dagger and sees his own reflection with horror.</p> <p>Will also used Jaws to demonstrate how this works in a pure action thriller. Brody’s dramatic question is simple: are you going to be old Brody who is terrified of the water, or new Brody who can overcome that fear? Every scene where the shark appears is really asking that question. And the last moment of the film isn’t the shark blowing up. It’s Brody swimming back through the water, saying he used to be scared of the water and he can’t imagine why.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>Write down the Dramatic Question for your protagonist in a single sentence. Is it “Are you ordinary or extraordinary?” or “Are you brave enough to love again?” or “Will you sacrifice your principles for survival?” If you can’t answer this with specificity, your character might still be a sketch rather than a person.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Get rid of Vague Flaws, and use Absolute Specificity</h3> <p>This was one of Will Storr’s most important points. He said that vague thinking about characters is really the enemy. When he teaches workshops and asks writers to describe their character’s flaw, most of them say something like “they’re very controlling.” And Will’s response is: that’s not good enough. Everyone is controlling. How are they controlling? What’s the specific mechanism?</p> <p>He gave the example of a profile he read of Theresa May during the UK’s Brexit chaos. Someone who knew her said that Theresa May’s problem was that she always thinks she’s the only adult in every room she goes into. Will said that stopped him in his tracks because it’s so precise. If you define a character with that level of specificity, you can take them and put them in any genre, any situation—a spaceship, a Victorian drawing room, a school playground—and you will know exactly how they’re going to behave.</p> <p>The same applies to Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, as Will described it: a man who believes absolutely in capitalistic success and the idea that when you die, you’re going to be weighed on a scale, just as God weighs you for sin, but now you’re weighed for success. That’s not a vague flaw. That’s a worldview you can drop into any story and watch it combust.</p> <p>Will made another counterintuitive point that I found really valuable: writers often think that piling on multiple traits will create a complex character, but the opposite is true. Starting with one highly specific flaw and running it through the demands of a relentless plot is what generates complexity. You end up with a far more nuanced, original character than if you’d started with a laundry list of vague attributes.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>Take your protagonist’s flaw and pressure-test it. Is it specific enough that you could place this character in any situation and predict their behaviour? If you’re stuck at “she’s stubborn” or “he’s insecure,” keep pushing. What kind of stubborn? What kind of insecure? Find the diagnostic sentence—the Theresa May level of precision.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Understand the Heroine’s Journey: Strength Through Connection</h3> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2021/05/10/the-heroines-journey-gail-carriger/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Gail Carriger came on episode 550 to discuss her nonfiction book, The Heroine’s Journey</a>, and it completely reframed how I think about some of my own fiction.</p> <p>Gail explained that the core difference between the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey comes down to how strength and victory are defined. The Hero’s Journey is about strength through solo action. The hero must be continually isolated to get stronger. He goes out of civilisation, faces strife alone, and achieves victory through physical prowess and self-actualisation.</p> <p>The Heroine’s Journey is the opposite. The heroine achieves her goals by activating a network. She’s a delegator, a general. She identifies where she can’t do something alone, finds the people who can help, and portions out the work for mutual gain. Gail put it simply: the heroine is very good at asking for help, which our culture tends to devalue but which is actually a powerful form of strength.</p> <p>Crucially, Gail stressed that gender is irrelevant to which journey you’re writing. Her go-to examples are striking: the recent Wonder Woman film is practically a beat-for-beat hero’s journey—Gilgamesh on screen, as Gail described it. Meanwhile, Harry Potter, both the first book and the series as a whole, is a classic heroine’s journey. Harry’s power comes from his network—Dumbledore’s Army, the Order of the Phoenix, his friendships with Ron and Hermione. He doesn’t defeat Voldemort alone. He defeats Voldemort because of love and connection.</p> <p>This distinction has real practical consequences for writers. If you’re writing a hero’s journey and you hit writer’s block, Gail said, the solution is usually to isolate your hero further and pile on more strife. But if you’re writing a heroine’s journey, the solution is probably to throw a new character into the scene—someone who has advice to offer or a skill the heroine lacks. The actual solutions to writer’s block are different depending on which narrative you’re writing.</p> <p>As I reflected on my own work, I realised that my ARKANE thriller protagonist, Morgan Sierra, follows a hero’s journey—she’s a solo operative, a lone wolf like Jack Reacher or James Bond. But my Mapwalker fantasy series follows a heroine’s journey, with Sienna and her group of friends working together. I hadn’t consciously chosen those paths; the stories led me there. But understanding the framework helps me write more intentionally now.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>Identify which journey your protagonist is on. Does your character gain strength by being alone (hero) or by building connections (heroine)? This will inform every plot decision you make, from how they face obstacles to how your story ends.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Use ‘Metaphor Families’ to Anchor Dialogue and Voice</h3> <p>One of the most practical techniques Matt Bird shared on episode 624 is the idea of assigning each character a “metaphor family”—a specific well of language that they draw from. This gives each character a distinctive voice that goes beyond accent or dialect.</p> <p>Matt explained how in The Wire, one of the most beloved TV shows of all time, every character has a different metaphor family. What struck him was that Omar, this iconic character, never utters a single curse word in the entire series. His metaphor family is pirate. He talks about parlays, uses language that feels like it belongs in Pirates of the Caribbean, and it creates this incredible ironic counterpoint against his urban setting. It tells us immediately that this is a character who sees himself in a tradition of people that doesn’t match his immediate surroundings.</p> <p>Matt also referenced the UK version of The Office, where Gareth works at a paper company but aspires to the military. So all of his language is drawn from a military metaphor family. He doesn’t talk about filing and photocopying; he talks about tactics and discipline and being on the front line. This tells us that the character has a life and dreams beyond the immediate scene—and it’s the gap between aspiration and reality that makes him both funny and believable.</p> <p>He pointed out that a metaphor family sometimes comes from a character’s background, but it’s often more interesting when it comes from their aspirations. What does your character want to be? What world do they fantasise about inhabiting? That’s where their language should come from. In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a spiritual hermit, but his metaphor family is military. He uses the language of generals and commanders, and that ironic counterpoint is part of what makes him feel so rich.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>Assign each of your main characters a metaphor family. It could be based on their job, their background, or—more interestingly—their secret aspirations. Then go through your dialogue and make sure each character is consistently drawing from that well of language. If two characters sound the same when you strip away the dialogue tags, this is the fix.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">6. Find the Diagnostic Detail: The Diagonal Toast</h3> <p>Avoid clichéd character tags—the random scar, the eye patch, the mysterious limp—unless they serve a deep narrative purpose. Matt Bird on episode 624 was very funny about this: he pointed out that Nick Fury, Odin, and eventually Thor all have eye patches in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Eye patches are done, he said. You cannot do eye patches anymore.</p> <p>Instead, look for what I’m calling the “diagonal toast” detail, after a scene Matt described from Captain Marvel. In the film, Captain Marvel is trying to determine whether Nick Fury is who he says he is. She asks him to prove he isn’t a shapeshifting alien. Fury shares biographical details—his history, his mother—but then she pushes further and says, name one more thing you couldn’t possibly have made up about yourself. And Fury says: if toast is cut diagonally, I can’t eat it.</p> <p>Matt said that detail is gold for a writer because it feels pulled from a real life. You can pull it from your own life and gift it to your characters, and the reader can tell it’s not manufactured. He gave another example from The Sopranos: Tony Soprano’s mother won’t answer the phone after dark. The show’s creator, David Chase, confirmed on the DVD commentary that this came from his own mother, who genuinely would not answer the phone after dark and couldn’t explain why.</p> <p>Matt’s practical advice was to keep a journal. Write down the strange, specific things that people do or say. Mine your own life for those hyper-specific details. You just need one per book. In my own writing, I’ve used this approach. </p> <p>In my <a href="https://jfpennbooks.com/collections/arkane-action-adventure-thrillers" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">ARKANE thrillers</a>, my character Morgan Sierra has always been Angelina Jolie in my mind—specifically Jolie in Lara Croft or Mr and Mrs Smith. And Blake Daniel in my <a href="https://jfpennbooks.com/collections/brooke-and-daniel-crime-thriller-series" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">crime thriller series</a> was based on Jesse Williams from Grey’s Anatomy. I paste pictures of actors into my Scrivener projects. It helps with visuals, but also with the sense of the character, their energy and physicality.</p> <p>But visual details only take you so far. It’s the behavioural quirks—the diagonal toast moments—that make a character feel genuinely alive.</p> <p>That said, physical character tags can work brilliantly when they serve the story. As I discuss in <a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>How to Write a Novel</em>,</a> Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike is an amputee, and his pain and the physical challenges of his prosthesis are a key part of every story—it’s not a cosmetic detail, it’s woven into the action and the character’s psychology. </p> <p>My character Blake Daniel always wears gloves to cover the scars on his hands, which provides an angle into his wounded past as well as a visual cue for the reader. And of course, Harry Potter’s lightning-shaped scar isn’t just a mark—it’s a direct connection to his nemesis and the mythology of the entire series.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel=" noreferrer noopener"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/How-to-write-a-novel-Joanna-Penn.png" alt="How to write a novel" class="wp-image-34832"/></a></figure> <p>The rule of thumb is: if the tag tells us something about the character’s interior life or connects to the plot, it’s earning its place. If it’s just there to make the character visually distinctive, it’s probably a crutch. Game of Thrones takes character tags further with the family houses, each with their own mottos and sigils. The Starks say “Winter is coming” and their sigil is a dire wolf. Those aren’t just labels—they’re worldview made visible.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>Start a “diagonal toast” notebook. Every time you notice something strange and specific about someone’s behaviour—something that feels too real to be made up—write it down. Then gift it to a character who needs more texture.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">7. Displace Your Own Trauma into the Work</h3> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2024/01/15/facing-fears-and-writing-unique-characters-with-barbara-nickless/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Barbara Nickless shared something deeply personal on episode 732 </a>that fundamentally changed how I think about putting pain onto the page. While starting At First Light, the first book in her Dr. Evan Wilding series, she lost her son to epilepsy—something called SUDEP, Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy. One day he was there, and the next day he was gone.</p> <p>Barbara said that writing helped her cope with the trauma, that doing a deep dive into Old English literature and the Viking Age for the book’s research became a lifeline. But here’s what’s important: she didn’t give Dr. Evan Wilding her exact trauma. Evan Wilding is four feet five inches, and Barbara described how he has to walk through a world that won’t adjust to him. That’s its own form of learning to cope when circumstances are beyond your control. She displaced her genuine grief into the character’s different but parallel struggle.</p> <p>When I asked her about the difference between writing for therapy and writing for an audience, she drew on her experience teaching creative writing to veterans through a collaboration between the US Department of Defense and the National Endowment for the Arts. She said she’s found that she can pour her heartache into her characters and process it through them, even when writing professionally, and that the genuine emotion is what touches readers. We’ve all been through our own losses and griefs, so seeing how a character copes can be deeply meaningful.</p> <p>I’ve always found that putting my own pain onto the page is the most direct way to connect with a reader’s soul. My character Morgan Sierra’s musings on religion and the supernatural are often my own. Her restlessness, her fascination with the darker edges of faith—those come from me. But her Krav Maga fighting skills and her ability to kill the bad guys are definitely her own. That gap between what’s mine and what’s hers is where the fiction lives.</p> <p>Barbara also said something on that episode that I wrote down and stuck on my wall. She said the act of producing itself is a balm to the soul. I’ve been thinking about that ever since. On my own wall, I have “Measure your life by what you create.” Different words, same truth.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>If you’re carrying something heavy—grief, anger, fear, regret—consider how you might displace it into a character’s different but emotionally parallel struggle. Don’t copy your exact situation; transform it. The emotion will be genuine, and the reader will feel it.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">8. Write Diverse Characters as Real People</h3> <p>When I spoke with <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2023/02/06/writing-choctaw-characters-and-diversity-in-fiction-with-sarah-elisabeth-sawyer/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer on episode 673</a>—Sarah is Choctaw and a historical fiction author honoured by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian—she offered a perspective that every fiction writer needs to hear.</p> <p>The key message was to move away from stereotypes. Don’t write your American Indian character as the “Wise Guide” who exists solely to dispense mystic wisdom to the white protagonist. Don’t limit diverse characters to historical settings, as though they only exist in the past. Place them in normal, contemporary roles. Your spaceship captain, your forensic scientist, your small-town baker—any of them can be American Indian, or Nigerian, or Japanese, and their heritage should be a lived-in part of their identity, not the sole reason they exist in the story.</p> <p>I write international thrillers and dark fantasy, and my fiction is populated with characters from all over the world. I have a multi-cultural family and I’ve lived in many places and travelled widely, so I’ve met, worked with, and had relationships with people from different cultures. I find story ideas through travel, and if I set my books in a certain place, then the story is naturally populated with the people who live there.</p> <p>As I discuss in my book, <em><a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">How to Write a Novel</a></em>, the world is a diverse place, so your fiction needs to be populated with all kinds of people. If I only populated my fiction with characters like me, they would be boring novels. There are many dimensions of difference—race, nationality, sex, age, body type, ability, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, class, culture, education level—and even then, don’t assume that similar types of people think the same way.</p> <p>Some authors worry they will make mistakes. We live in a time of outrage, and some authors have been criticised for writing outside their own experience. So is it too dangerous to try? Of course not. The media amplifies outliers, and most authors include diverse characters in every book without causing offence because they work hard to get it right. It’s about awareness, research, and intent.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>Audit the cast of your current work in progress. Have you written a mono-cultural perspective for all of them? If so, consider who could bring a different background, perspective, or set of cultural specifics to the story. Not as a token addition, but as a real person with a real life.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">9. Respect Tribal and Cultural Specificity</h3> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2023/02/06/writing-choctaw-characters-and-diversity-in-fiction-with-sarah-elisabeth-sawyer/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer on episode 673 was emphatic about one thing: never treat diverse groups as monolithic</a>. If you’re writing a Native American character, you must research the specific nation. Choctaw is not Navajo, just as British is not French.</p> <p>Sarah described the distinct cultural markers of the Choctaw people—the diamond pattern you’ll see on traditional shirts and dresses, which represents the diamondback rattlesnake. They have distinct dances and songs. She said that if she saw someone in traditional dress at a distance, she would know whether they were Choctaw based on what they were wearing.</p> <p>She encouraged writers who want to write specifically about a nation to get to know those people. Go to events, go to a powwow, learn about the individual culture. She noted that a big misconception is that American Indians exist only in the past—she stressed that they are still here, still living their cultures, and fiction should reflect that present reality.</p> <p>I took a similar approach when writing <em><a href="https://jfpennbooks.com/collections/destroyer-of-worlds" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Destroyer of Worlds</a></em>, which is set mostly in India. I read books about Hindu myth, watched documentaries about the sadhus, and had one of my Indian readers from Mumbai check my cultural references. For Risen Gods, set in New Zealand with a young Maori protagonist, I studied books about Maori mythology and fiction by Maori authors, and had a male Maori reader check for cultural issues. Research is simply an act of empathy.</p> <p>The practical takeaway is this: if you’re going to include a character from a specific cultural background, do the work. Use specific cultural details rather than generic signifiers. Sarah talked about how even she fell into stereotypes when she was first writing, until her mother pointed them out. If someone from within a culture can fall into those traps, the rest of us certainly can. Do the research, try your best, ask for help, and apologise if you need to.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>If you’re writing a character from a specific culture, identify three to five sensory or behavioural details that are particular to that culture—not the generic version, but the real, researched, lived-in version. Consider hiring a sensitivity reader from that community to check your work.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">10. Give Your Protagonist a Morally Neutral ‘Hero’ Status</h3> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2022/05/23/writing-characters-with-matt-bird/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Matt Bird was clear about this on episode 624</a>: the word “hero” simply means the protagonist, the person we follow through the story. It’s a functional role, not a moral label. We don’t have to like them. We don’t even have to root for their goals in a moral sense. We just have to find them compelling enough to invest our attention in their problem-solving.</p> <p>Think of <em>Succession</em>, where every member of the Roy family is varying degrees of awful, and yet the show was utterly compelling. Or <em>WeCrashed</em>, where Adam Neumann is a narcissistic con artist, but we can’t look away because he’s trying to solve the enormous problem of building an empire from nothing, and the tradecraft he employs is fascinating.</p> <p>As I wrote in <a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>How to Write a Novel</em>,</a> readers must want to spend time with your characters. They don’t have to be lovable or even likable—that will depend on your genre and story choices—but they have to be captivating enough that we want to spend time with them. A character who is trying to solve a massive problem will naturally draw investment from the audience, even if we wouldn’t want to have tea with them.</p> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2020/05/25/character-flaws-will-storr/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Will Storr extended this idea</a> by pointing out that the audience will actually root for a character to solve their problem even if the audience doesn’t actually want the character’s goal to be achieved in the real world. We don’t really want more billionaires, but we invested in Adam Neumann’s rise because that was the problem the story posed, and our brains are wired to invest in problem-solving.</p> <p>This connects to something deeper: what does your character want, and why? As I explore in <em>How to Write a Novel</em>, desire operates on multiple levels. </p> <p>Take a character like Phil, who joins the military during wartime. On the surface, she wants to serve her country. But she also wants to escape her dead-end town and learn new skills. Deeper still, her father and grandfather served, and by joining up, she hopes to finally earn their respect. And perhaps deepest of all, her father died on a mission under mysterious circumstances, and she wants to find out what happened from the inside.</p> <p>That layering of motivation is what turns a flat character into a three-dimensional one. The audience doesn’t need to be told all of this explicitly. It can emerge through action, dialogue, and the choices the character makes under pressure. But you, the writer, need to know it. You need to know what your character really wants deep down, because that desire—more than any external plot device—is what drives the story forward.</p> <p>And your antagonist needs the same depth. They also want something, often diametrically opposed to your protagonist, and they need a reason that makes sense to them. In my <a href="https://jfpennbooks.com/collections/tree-of-life" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">ARKANE thriller <em>Tree of Life</em></a>, my antagonist is the heiress of a Brazilian mining empire who wants to restore the Earth to its original state to atone for the destruction caused by her father’s company. She’s part of a radical ecological group who believe the only way to restore Nature is to end all human life. It’s extreme, but in an era of climate change, it’s a motivation readers can understand—even if they disagree with the solution.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>If you’re struggling to make a morally grey character work, make sure their problem is big enough and their methods are specific and interesting enough that we invest in the how, even if we’re ambivalent about the what.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">11. Build Vibrant Side Characters</h3> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2021/05/10/the-heroines-journey-gail-carriger/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Gail Carriger made a point on episode 550</a> that was equal parts craft advice and business strategy. In a Heroine’s Journey model, side characters aren’t just fodder to be killed off to motivate the hero. They form a network. And because you don’t have to kill them—unlike in a hero’s journey, where allies are often betrayed or removed so the hero can be further isolated—you can pick up those side characters and give them their own books.</p> <p>Gail said this creates a really voracious reader base. You write one series with vivid side characters, and then readers fall in love with those side characters and want their stories. So you write spin-offs. The romance genre does this brilliantly—think of the Bridgerton books, where each sibling gets their own novel. The side character in one book becomes the protagonist in the next.</p> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2024/01/15/facing-fears-and-writing-unique-characters-with-barbara-nickless/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Barbara Nickless experienced this firsthand</a> with her Dr. Evan Wilding series. She has River Wilding, Evan’s adventurous brother, and Diana, the axe-throwing research assistant, and her editor has already expressed interest in a spin-off series with those characters. Barbara described creating characters she wants to spend time with, or characters who give her nightmares but also intrigue her. That’s the dual test: are they interesting enough for you to write, and interesting enough for readers to demand more?</p> <p>As I wrote in <em>How to Write a Novel,</em> characters that span series can deepen the reader’s relationship with them as you expand their backstory into new plots. Readers will remember the character more than the plot or the book title, and look forward to the next instalment because they want more time with those people. </p> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2022/05/09/writing-a-successful-crime-thriller-series/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">British crime author Angela Marsons</a> described it as readers feeling like returning to her characters is like putting on a pair of old slippers.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>Look at your supporting cast. Is there a side character who is vivid enough to carry their own story? If not, what could you add—a specific hobby, a distinct voice, a compelling backstory—that would make readers want more of them?</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">12. Use Voice as a Rhythmic Tool</h3> <p>Voice is one of the most important elements of novel writing, and <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2022/05/23/writing-characters-with-matt-bird/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Matt Bird helped me think about it in a technical, mechanical way t</a>hat I found really useful. He pointed out that the ratio of periods to commas defines a character’s internal reality.</p> <p>A staccato rhythm—lots of periods, short sentences—suggests a character who is certain, grounded, or perhaps survivalist and traumatised. Katniss in The Hunger Games has a period-heavy voice. She’s in survival mode. She doesn’t have time for complexity or qualification.</p> <p>A flowing, comma-heavy style suggests someone more academic, more nuanced, or possibly more scattered and manipulative. The character who qualifies everything, who adds sub-clauses and digressions, is a different kind of person from the character who speaks in declarations.</p> <p>This is something you can actually measure. Pull up a passage of your character’s dialogue or internal monologue and count the periods versus the commas. If the rhythm doesn’t match who the character is supposed to be, you’ve found a mismatch you can fix. Sentence length is the heartbeat of your character’s persona.</p> <p>And voice extends beyond rhythm to the words themselves. As I discussed in the metaphor families tip, each character should draw from a distinctive well of language. But voice also encompasses their relationship to silence. Some characters talk around the thing they mean; others say it straight. Some are self-deprecating; others are blunt to the point of rudeness. All of these choices are character choices, not just style choices.</p> <p>I find it useful to read my dialogue aloud—and not just to check for naturalness, but to hear whether each character sounds distinct. If you could swap dialogue lines between two characters and nobody would notice, you have a voice problem. One practical test: cover the dialogue tags and see if you can tell who’s speaking from the words alone.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>Choose a key passage from your protagonist’s point of view and read it aloud. Does the rhythm match the character? A soldier under fire should not sound like a philosophy professor at a wine tasting. Adjust the ratio of periods to commas until the voice feels right.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">13. Link Character and Plot Until They’re Inseparable</h3> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2020/05/25/character-flaws-will-storr/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Will Storr made the case on episode 490</a> that the number one problem he sees in the writing he encounters—in workshops, in submissions, even in published books—is that the characters and the plots are unconnected. There’s a story happening, and there are people in it, but the story isn’t a product of who those people are.</p> <p>He said a story should be like life. In our lives, the plots are intimately connected to who we are as characters. The goals we pursue, the obstacles we face, the same problems that keep recurring—these are products of our personalities, our flaws, our specific ways of being in the world.</p> <p>His framework is that your plot should be designed specifically to plot against your character. You’ve got a character with a particular flaw; the plot exists to test that flaw over and over until the character either transforms or doubles down and explodes. Jaws is the perfect example. Brody is afraid of water. A shark shows up in the coastal town he’s responsible for protecting. The entire plot is engineered to force him to confront the one thing he cannot face.</p> <p>Will pointed out that the whole plot of Jaws is structured around Brody’s flaw. It begins with the shark arriving, the midpoint is when Brody finally gets the courage to go into the water, and the very final scene isn’t the shark blowing up—it’s Brody swimming back through the water. Even a film that’s ninety-eight percent action is, at its core, structured around a character with a character flaw.</p> <p>This is the standard I aspire to in my own work, even in my action-heavy thrillers. The external plot should be a mirror of the internal struggle. When those two are aligned, the story becomes irresistible.</p> <p>Will also made an important point about series fiction, which is where most commercial authors live. I asked him how this works when your character can’t be transformed at the end of every book because there has to be a next book. His answer was elegant: you don’t cure them. Episodic TV characters like Fleabag or David Brent or Basil Fawlty never truly change—and the fact that they don’t change is actually the source of the comedy. But every episode throws a new story event at them that tests and exposes their flaw. You just keep throwing story events at them again and again. That’s a soap opera, a sitcom, and a book series.</p> <p>As I wrote in <a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>How to Write a Novel</em>, </a>character flaws are aspects of personality that affect the person so much that facing and overcoming them becomes central to the plot. </p> <p>In Jaws, the protagonist Brody is afraid of the water, but he has to overcome that flaw to destroy the killer shark and save the town. But remember, your characters should feel like real people, so never define them purely by their flaws. The character addicted to painkillers might also be a brilliant and successful female lawyer who gets up at four in the morning to work out at the gym, likes eighties music, and volunteers at the local dog shelter at weekends.</p> <p>Character wounds are different from flaws. They’re formed from life experience and are part of your character’s backstory—traumatic events that happened before the events of your novel but shape the character’s reactions in the present. In my ARKANE thrillers, Morgan Sierra’s husband Elian died in her arms during a military operation. This happened before the series begins, but her memories of it recur when she faces a firefight, and she struggles to find happiness again for fear of losing someone she loves once more.</p> <p>And then there’s the perennial advice: show, don’t tell. Most writers have heard this so many times that it’s easy to nod and then promptly write scenes that tell rather than show. Basically, you need to reveal your character through action and dialogue, rather than explanation. </p> <p>In my thriller <a href="https://jfpennbooks.com/collections/day-of-the-vikings" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>Day of the Vikings</em>,</a> Morgan Sierra fights a Neo-Viking in the halls of the British Museum and brings him down with Krav Maga. That fight scene isn’t just about showing action. It opens up questions about her backstory, demonstrates character, and moves the plot forward. Telling would be something like: “Morgan was an expert in Krav Maga.” Showing is the reader discovering it through the scene itself.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>Look at the main plot events of your novel. For each major turning point, ask: does this scene specifically test my protagonist’s flaw? If not, can you redesign the scene so that it does? The tighter the connection between character and plot, the more powerful the story.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">14. The ‘Maestra’ Approach: Write Out of Order</h3> <p>If you’re a discovery writer like me, you may feel like the deep character work I’ve been describing sounds more suited to plotters. But <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2024/01/15/facing-fears-and-writing-unique-characters-with-barbara-nickless/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Barbara Nickless gave me a beautiful metaphor on episode 732</a> that reframes it entirely.</p> <p>Barbara described her evolving writing process as being like a maestra standing in front of an orchestra. Sometimes you bring in the horns—a certain theme—and sometimes you bring in the strings—a certain character—and sometimes you turn to the soloist. It’s a more organic and jumping-around process than linear writing, and Barbara said she’s only recently given herself permission to work this way.</p> <p>When I told her that I use <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/scrivenersoftware" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Scrivener</a> to write in scenes out of order and then drag and drop them into a structure later, she was genuinely intrigued. And this is how I’ve always worked. I’ll see the story in my mind like a movie trailer—flashes of the big emotional scenes, the pivotal confrontations, the moments of revelation—and I write those first. I don’t know how they hang together until quite late in the process. Then I’ll move scenes around, print the whole thing out, and figure out the connective tissue.</p> <p>The point is that discovery writers can absolutely build deep characters. Sometimes writing the big emotional scenes first is how you discover who the character is before you fill in the rest. You don’t need a twenty-page character worksheet or a 200-page outline like Jeffery Deaver. You need to be willing to follow the character into the unknown and trust that the structure will emerge.</p> <p>As Barbara said, she writes to know what she’s thinking. That’s the discovery writer’s credo. And I would add: I write to know who my characters are.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>If you’re stuck on your current chapter, skip it. Write the scene that’s burning in your imagination, even if it’s from the middle or the end. That scene might be the key to unlocking who your character really is.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">15. Use Research to Help with Empathy</h3> <p>Research shouldn’t just be about factual accuracy—it’s a tool for finding the sensory details that create empathy. <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2024/01/15/facing-fears-and-writing-unique-characters-with-barbara-nickless/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Barbara Nickless described research</a> as almost an excuse to explore things that fascinate her, and I feel exactly the same way. I would go so far as to say that writing is an excuse for me to explore the things that interest me.</p> <p>Barbara and I both travel for our stories. For her Dr. Evan Wilding books, she did deep research into Old English literature and the Viking Age. For my thriller <em><a href="https://jfpennbooks.com/collections/end-of-days" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">End of Days</a></em>, I transcribed hours of video from Appalachian snake-handling churches on YouTube to understand the worldview of the worshippers, because my antagonist was brought up in that tradition. I couldn’t just make that up. I had to hear their language, feel their conviction, understand why they would hold venomous serpents as an act of faith.</p> <p>Barbara also mentioned getting to Israel and the West Bank for research, and I’ve been to both places too. Finding that one specific sensory detail—the smell of a particular location, the specific way an expert handles a tool, the sound of a particular kind of music—makes the character’s life feel lived-in. It’s the difference between a character who is described as living in a place and a character who inhabits it.</p> <p>As I wrote in <a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>How to Write a Novel</em>,</a> don’t write what you know. Write what you want to learn about. I love research. It’s part of why I’m an author in the first place. I take any excuse to dive into a world different from my own. Research using books, films, podcasts, and travel, and focus particularly on sources produced by people from the worldview you want to understand.</p> <p><strong>Actionable step: </strong>For your next piece of character research, go beyond reading. Watch a documentary, visit a location, talk to someone who lives the experience. Find one sensory detail—a smell, a sound, a texture—that you couldn’t have invented. That detail will make your character feel real.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Bonus: Measure Your Life by What You Create</h3> <p>In an age of AI and a tsunami of content, your ultimate brand protection is the quality of your human creation. <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2024/01/15/facing-fears-and-writing-unique-characters-with-barbara-nickless/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Barbara Nickless said that the act of producing itself is a balm to the soul,</a> and I believe that with every fibre of my being.</p> <p>Don’t be afraid to take that step back, like I did with my deadlifting. Take the time to master these deeper craft skills. It might feel like you’re slowing down or going backwards by not chasing the latest marketing trend, but it’s the only way to step forward into a sustainable, high-quality career.</p> <p>Your characters are your signature. No AI can replicate the specificity of your lived experience, the emotional truth of your displaced trauma, or the sensory details you’ve gathered from a life of curiosity and travel. Those are yours. Pour them into your characters, and they will resonate for years to come.</p> <p>Actionable Takeaway:</p> <p>Identify the Dramatic Question for your current protagonist. Can you state it in a single sentence with the kind of specificity Will Storr described? Is it as clear as “Are you ordinary or extraordinary?” or “Are you the only adult in the room?”</p> <p>If you can’t answer it with that kind of precision, your character might still be a sketch. Give them a diagonal toast moment today. Find the one hyper-specific detail that proves they are not an imitation of life.</p> <p>And then ask yourself: does your plot test your character’s flaw in every major scene? If you can align those two things—a precisely defined character and a plot that exists to test them—you will have a story that readers cannot put down.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">References and Deep Dives</h3> <p>The episodes I’ve referenced today are all available with full transcripts at TheCreativePenn.com:</p> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2024/01/15/facing-fears-and-writing-unique-characters-with-barbara-nickless/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><strong>Episode 732</strong> — Facing Fears, and Writing Unique Characters with Barbara Nickless</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2023/02/06/writing-choctaw-characters-and-diversity-in-fiction-with-sarah-elisabeth-sawyer/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><strong>Episode 673</strong> — Writing Choctaw Characters and Diversity in Fiction with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2022/05/23/writing-characters-with-matt-bird/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><strong>Episode 624</strong> — Writing Characters with Matt Bird</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2021/05/10/the-heroines-journey-gail-carriger/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><strong>Episode 550</strong> — The Heroine’s Journey with Gail Carriger</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2020/05/25/character-flaws-will-storr/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><strong>Episode 490</strong> — How Character Flaws Shape Story with Will Storr</a></p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Books mentioned:</h3> <p><a href="https://amzn.to/37ZAact" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>The Secrets of Character: Writing a Hero Anyone Will Love</em> by Matt Bird</a></p> <p><a href="https://amzn.to/4lqXykz" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>The Science of Storytelling</em> by Will Storr</a></p> <p><a href="https://amzn.to/41870Qd" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>The Heroine’s Journey</em> by Gail Carriger</a></p> <p><a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title=""><em>How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book</em> by Joanna Penn</a></p> <p>You can find all my books for authors at <a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">CreativePennBooks.com</a> and my fiction and memoir at <a href="https://jfpennbooks.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">JFPennBooks.com</a></p> <p>Happy writing!</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">How was this episode created? </h3> <p>This episode was initiated created by <a href="https://notebooklm.google.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">NotebookLM</a> based on YouTube videos of the episodes linked above from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/thecreativepenn" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">YouTube/TheCreativePenn</a>, plus my text chapters on character from <a href="https://creativepennbooks.com/collections/how-to-write-a-novel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">How to Write a Novel</a>. NotebookLM created a blog post from the material and then I expanded it and fact checked it with <a href="https://claude.ai/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Claude.ai 4.6 Opus</a>, and then I used my voice clone at <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/11labs" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">ElevenLabs</a> to narrate it. </p><p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/03/16/writing-characters-15-actionable-tips-for-writing-deep-character/">Writing Characters: 15 Actionable Tips For Writing Deep Character</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p><strong>How do you capture something as enormous and personal as the feeling of &#8220;home&#8221; in a book?</strong> How can you navigate the chaotic discovery period in writing something new? With Roz Morris.</p> <p>In the intro, KU vs Wide [<a href="https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/ku-vs-wide-what-the-data-actually-says/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Written Word Media</a>]; Podcasts Overtake Radio, book marketing implications [<a href="https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/2026/02/28/podcasts-overtake-radio-publishing-strategy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">The New Publishing Standard</a>]; <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2025/06/23/how-to-pitch-podcasts-and-be-a-great-podcast-guest-with-matty-dalrymple/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Tips for podcast guests</a>; <br><a href="https://www.ncregister.com/cna/vatican-to-use-ai-to-translate-masses-at-st-peter-s-into-60-languages-in-real-time" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">The Vatican embraces AI for translation</a>, but <a href="https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/pope-leo-tells-priests-not-use-ai-write-homilies-or-seek-likes-tiktok" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">not for sermons</a> [National Catholic Reporter]; <a href="https://notebooklm.google.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">NotebookLM</a>; <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/perytonpress/self-publishing-in-german-new-fully-updated-edition" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Self-Publishing in German</a>; <em><a href="https://www.jfpenn.com/bones" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Bones of the Deep</a></em>.</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://www.publisherrocket.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><img decoding="async" width="400" height="85" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/PublisherRocket.png" alt="" class="wp-image-33606" srcset="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/PublisherRocket.png 400w, https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/PublisherRocket-300x64.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" /></a></figure> </div> <p><a href="http://www.publisherrocket.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>This episode is sponsored by&nbsp;<a href="https://publisherrocket.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Publisher Rocket</a>, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at&nbsp;<a href="https://publisherrocket.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">www.PublisherRocket.com</a></p> <p>This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.patreon.com/thecreativepenn" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Patreon.com/thecreativepenn</a>&nbsp;</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><a href="https://rozmorris.org/" target="_blank" rel=" noreferrer noopener"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Roz-Morris.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-37410"/></a></figure> </div> <p>Roz Morris is an award-nominated literary fiction author, memoirist, and previously a bestselling ghostwriter. She writes writing craft books for authors under the <em>Nail Your Novel</em> brand, and is also an editor, speaker, and writing coach. Her latest travel memoir is <em>Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Diary of House-Hunting, Happenstance <em>& </em>Home</em>.</p> <p>You can listen above or on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/podcasts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">your favorite podcast app</a>&nbsp;or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Show Notes</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>How being an indie author has evolved over 15 years, from ebooks-only to special editions, multi-voice audiobooks and tools to help with everything</li> <li>Why &#8220;home&#8221; is such a powerful emotional theme and how to turn personal experiences into universal memoir</li> <li>Practical craft tips on show-don't-tell, writing about real people, and finding the right book title</li> <li>The chaotic discovery writing phase — why some books take seven years and why that's okay</li> <li>Building a newsletter sustainably by finding your authentic voice (and the power of a good pet story)</li> <li>Low-key book marketing strategies for memoir, including Roz's community-driven &#8220;home&#8221; collage campaign</li> </ul> <p>You can find Roz at <a href="https://rozmorris.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">RozMorris.org</a>.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Transcript of the interview with Roz Morris</h3> <p><strong>JOANNA</strong>: Roz Morris is an award-nominated literary fiction author, memoirist, and previously a bestselling ghostwriter. She writes writing craft books for authors under the <em>Nail Your Novel</em> brand, and is also an editor, speaker, and writing coach.</p> <p>Her latest travel memoir is <em>Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Diary of House-Hunting, Happenstance & Home</em>.</p> <p>Welcome back to the show, Roz.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Hi, Jo. It's so lovely to be back. I love that we managed to catch up every now and again on what we're doing. We've been doing this for so long.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> In fact, if people don't know, the first time you came on this show was 2011, which is 15 years.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> I know!</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> It is so crazy. I guess we should say, we do know each other in person, in real life, but realistically we mainly catch up when you come on the podcast.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Yes, we do, and by following what we're doing around the web. So I read your newsletters, you read mine.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Exactly. So good to return. You write all kinds of different things, but let's first take a look back. The first time you were on was 2011, 15 years ago. You've spanned traditional and indie, you've seen a lot. You know a lot of people in publishing as well. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">What are the key things you think have shifted over the years, and why do you still choose indie for your work?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Well, lots of things have shifted. Some things are more difficult now, some things are a lot easier.</p> <p>We were lucky to be in right at the start and we learned the ropes and managed to make a lot of contacts with people. Now it's much more difficult to get your work out there and noticed by readers. You have to be more knowledgeable about things like marketing and promotions.</p> <p>But that said, there are now much better tools for doing all this. Some really smart people have put their brains to work about how authors can get their work to the right readers, and there's also a lot more understanding of how that can be done in the modern world.</p> <p>Everything is now much more niche-driven, isn't it? People know exactly what kind of thriller they like or what kind of memoir they like. In the old days it was probably just, &#8220;Well, you like thrillers,&#8221; and that could be absolutely loads of things.</p> <p>Now we can find far better who might like our work. The tools we have are astonishing. To start with, in about 2011, we could only really produce ebooks and paperbacks. That was it. Anything else, you'd have to get a print run that would be quite expensive. </p> <p>Now we can get amazing, beautiful special editions made. We can do audiobooks, multi-voice audiobooks. We can do ebooks with all sorts of enhancements. We can even make apps if we want to. There's absolutely loads that creators can do now that they couldn't before, so it's still a very exciting world.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> When we first met, there was still a lot of negativity here in the UK around indie authors or self-publishing. That does feel like it's shifted. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Do you think that stigma around self-publishing has changed?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> I think it has really changed, yes. To start with, we were regarded as a bit of the Wild West. We were just tramping in and making our mark in places that we hadn't been invited into.</p> <p>Now it's changed entirely. I think we've managed to convince people that we have the same quality standards. </p> <p>Readers don't mind—I don't think the readers ever minded, actually, so long as the book looked right, felt right, read right. It's much easier now. It's much more of a level playing field. We can prove ourselves. In fact, we don't necessarily have to prove ourselves anymore. We just go and find readers.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Yes, I feel like that. I have nothing to prove. I just get on with my work and writing our books and putting them out there. We've got our own audiences now. I guess I always think of it as perhaps not a shadow industry, but almost a parallel industry. </p> <p>You have spanned a lot of traditional publishing and you still do editing work. You know a lot of trad pub authors too. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Do you still actively choose indie for a particular reason?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> I do. I really like building my own body of work, and I'm now experienced enough to know what I do well, what I need advice with, and help with. I mean, we don't do all this completely by ourselves, do we? We bring in experts who will give us the right feedback if we're doing a new genre or a genre that's new to us.</p> <p>I choose indie because I like the control. Because I began in traditional publishing—I was making books for other people—I just learned all the trades and how to do everything to a professional standard. I love being able to apply that to my own work.</p> <p>I also love the way I can decide what I'm going to write next. If I was traditionally published, I would have to do something that fitted with whatever the publisher would want of me, and that isn't necessarily where my muse is taking me or what I've become interested in.</p> <p>I think creative humans evolve throughout their lives. They become interested in different things, different themes, different ways of expressing themselves. I began by thinking I would just write novels, and now I've found myself writing memoirs as well. </p> <p>That shift would have been difficult if someone else was having to make me fit into their marketing plans or what their imprint was known for. But because I've built my own audience, I can just bring them with me and say, &#8220;You might like this. It's still me. I'm just doing something different.&#8221;</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> I like that phrase: &#8220;creative humans.&#8221; That's what we are. As you say, I never thought I would write a memoir, and then I wrote <em>Pilgrimage</em>, and I think there's probably another one on its way. We do these different things over time.</p> <p>Let's get into this new book, <em>Turn Right at the Rainbow</em>. It's about the idea of home. I've talked a lot about home on my <a href="https://www.booksandtravel.page/listen/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Books And Travel Podcast</a>, but not so much here.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why is home such an emotional topic, for both positive and negative reasons? Why did you want to explore it?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> I think home is so emotional because it grows around you and it grows on you very slowly without you really realising it. As you are not looking, you suddenly realise, &#8220;Oh, it means such a lot.&#8221;</p> <p>I love to play this mind game with myself—if you compare what your street looks like to you now and how it looked the first time you set eyes on it, it's a world of difference. </p> <p>There are so many emotional layers that build up just because of the amount of time we spend in a place. It's like a relationship, a very slow-growing friendship. And as you say, sometimes it can be negative as well.</p> <p>I became really fascinated with this because we decided to move house and we'd lived in the same house for about 30 years, which is a lot of time. It had seen a lot of us—a lot of our lives, a lot of big decisions, a lot of good times, a lot of difficult times. I felt that was all somehow encapsulated in the place.</p> <p>I know that readers of certain horror or even spiritual fiction will have this feeling that a place contains emotions and pasts and all sorts of vibes that just stay in there. When we were going around looking at a house to buy, I was thinking, &#8220;How do we even know how we will feel about it?&#8221; </p> <p>We're moving out of somewhere that has immense amounts of feelings and associations, and we're trying to judge whether somewhere else will feel right. It just seemed like we were making a decision of cosmic proportions.</p> <p>It comes down so much to chance as well. You're not only just deciding, &#8220;Okay, I'd like to buy that one,&#8221; and pressing a button like on eBay and you've won it. It doesn't happen like that. There are lots of middle steps. </p> <p>The other person's got to agree to sell to you, not do the dirty on you and sell to someone else. You've got all sorts of machinations going on that you have no idea about. And you only have what's on offer—you only get an opportunity to buy a place because someone else has decided to let it go.</p> <p>All this seemed like immense amounts of chance, of dice rolling. I thought, yet we end up in these places and they mean so much to us. It just blew my mind. I thought, &#8220;I've got to write about this.&#8221;</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> It's really interesting, isn't it? I really only started using the word &#8220;home&#8221; after the pandemic and living here in Bath. We had luckily just bought a house before then, and I'd never really considered anywhere to be a home. </p> <p>I've talked about this idea of third culture kids—people who grow up between cultures and don't feel like there's a home anywhere.</p> <p>I was really interested in your book because there's so much about the functional things that have to happen when you move house or look for a house, and often people aren't thinking about it as deeply as you are. </p> <p>So did you start working on the memoir as you went to see places, or was it something you thought about when you were leaving? </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Was it a &#8220;moving towards&#8221; kind of memoir or a &#8220;sad nostalgia&#8221; memoir?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Well, it could have been very sad and nostalgic because I do like to write really emotional things, and they're not necessarily for sharing with everybody, but I was very interested in the emotions of it.</p> <p>I started keeping diaries. Some of them were just diaries I'd write down, some of them were emails I'd send to friends who were saying, &#8220;How's it going?&#8221; And then I'd find I was just writing pieces rather than emails, and it built up really.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> It's interesting, you said you write emotional things. We mentioned nostalgia, and obviously there are memories in the home, but it's very easy to say a word like &#8220;nostalgia&#8221; and everyone thinks that means different things. One of the important things about writing is to be very specific rather than general. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Can you give us some tips about how we can turn big emotions into specific written things that bring it alive for our readers?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> It's really interesting that you mention nostalgia, because what we have to be careful of is not writing just for ourselves. It starts with us—our feelings about something, our responses, our curiosities—but we then have to let other people in. </p> <p>There's nothing more boring than reading something that's just a memoir manuscript that doesn't reach out to anyone in any way. It's like looking through their holiday snaps.</p> <p>What you have to do is somehow find something bigger in there that will allow everyone to connect and think, &#8220;Oh, this is about me too,&#8221; or &#8220;I've thought this too.&#8221;</p> <p>As I said, we start with things that feel powerful and important for us, and I think we don't necessarily need to go looking for them. They emerge the more deeply we think about what we're writing. We find they're building. </p> <p>Certainly for me, it's what pulls me back to an idea, thinking, &#8220;There's something in this idea that's really talking to me now. What is it?&#8221;</p> <p>Often I'll need to go for walks and things to let the logical mind turn off and ideas start coming in. But I'll find that something is building and it seems to become more and more something that will speak to others rather than just to me. </p> <p>That's one way of doing it—by listening to your intuition and delving more and more until you find something that seems worth saying to other people.</p> <p>But you could do it another way. If you decided you wanted to write a book about home, and you'd already got your big theme, you could then think, &#8220;Well, how will I make this into something manageable?&#8221; So you start with something big and build it into smaller-scale things that can be related to.</p> <p>You might look at ideas of homes—situations of people who have lost their home, like the kind of displacement we see at the moment. Or we might look at another aspect, such as people who sell homes and what they must feel like being these go-betweens between worlds, between people who are doing these immense changes in their lives. </p> <p>Or we might think of an ecological angle—the planet Earth and what we're doing to it, or our place in the cosmos.</p> <p>We might start with a thing we want to write about and then find, &#8220;How are we going to treat it?&#8221; That usually comes down to what appeals to us. It might be the ecological side. It might be the story of a few estate agents who are trying to sell homes for people. Or it might be like mine—just a personal story of trying to move house.</p> <p>From that, we can create something that will have a wider resonance as well as starting with something that's personally interesting to you. The big emotions will come out of that wider resonance.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Trying to go deeper on that—</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">It's the &#8220;show, don't tell&#8221; idea, isn't it? </h3> <p>If you'd said, &#8220;I felt very sad about leaving my house&#8221; or &#8220;I felt very sad about the prospect of leaving my house,&#8221; that is not a whole book.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Yes. It's <em>why</em> you felt sad, <em>how</em> you felt sad, what it made you think of. That's a very good point about &#8220;show, don't tell,&#8221; which is a fundamental writing technique. </p> <p>It basically tells people exactly how you feel about a particular thing, which is not the same as the way anyone else would feel about it—but still, curiously, it can be universal and something that we can all tap into.</p> <p>Funnily enough, by being very specific, by saying, &#8220;I realised when we'd signed the contract to sell the house that it wasn't ours anymore, and it had been, and I felt like I was betraying it,&#8221; that starts to get really personal. </p> <p>People might think, &#8220;Yes, I felt like that too,&#8221; or &#8220;I hadn't thought you'd feel like that, but I can understand it.&#8221; Those specifics are what really let people into the journey that you're taking them on.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> And isn't this one of the challenges, that we're not even going to use a word like &#8220;sad,&#8221; basically.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Yes. It's like, who was it who said, &#8220;Don't tell me if they got wet—tell me how it felt to get wet in that particular situation.&#8221; Then the reader will think, &#8220;Oh yes, they got wet,&#8221; but they'll also have had an experience that took them somewhere interesting.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Yes. Show me the raindrops on the umbrella and the splashing through the puddles. I think this is so important with big emotions.</p> <p>Also, when we say nostalgia—we've talked before about <em>Stranger Things</em> and Kate Bush and the way <em>Stranger Things</em> used songs and nostalgia. Oh, I was watching <em>Derry Girls</em>—have you seen <em>Derry Girls</em>?</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> No, I haven't yet.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Oh, it's brilliant. It's so good. It's pretty old now, but it's a nineties soundtrack and I'm watching going, &#8220;Oh, they got this so right.&#8221; They just got it right with the songs. You feel nostalgic because you feel an emotion that is linked to that music. </p> <p>It makes you feel a certain way, but everyone feels these things in different ways. I think that is a challenge of fiction, and also memoir. Certainly with memoir and fiction, this is so important.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Yes, and I was just thinking with self-help books, it's even important there because self-help books have to show they understand how the reader is feeling.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Yes, and sometimes you use anecdotes to do that.</p> <p>Another challenge with memoir—in this book, you're going round having a look at places, and they're real places and there are real people. This can be difficult. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">What are things that people need to be wary of if using real people in real places? Do you need permissions for things?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> That book was particularly tricky because, as you said, I was going around real places and talking about real people. With most of them, they're not identifiable. Even though I was specific about particular aspects of particular houses, it would be very hard for anyone to know where those houses were.</p> <p>I think possibly the only way you would recognise it is if that happened to be your own house. The people, similarly—there's a lot about estate agents and other professionals. They were all real incidents and real things that happened, but no one is identifiable.</p> <p>A very important thing about writing a book like this is you're always going to have antagonists, because you have to have people who you're finding difficult, people who are making life a bit difficult for you. You have to present them in a way that understands what it's like to be them as well.</p> <p>If you're writing a book where your purpose is to expose wrongdoing or injustices, then you might be more forthright about just saying, &#8220;This is wrong, the way this person behaved was wrong.&#8221; You might identify villains if that's appropriate, although you'd have to be very careful legally.</p> <p>This kind of book is more nuanced. The antagonists were simply people who were trying to do the right thing for them. You have to understand what it's like to be them. </p> <p>Quite a lot of the time, I found that the real story was how ill-equipped I sometimes felt to deal with people who were maybe covering something up, or maybe not, but just not expressing themselves very clearly.</p> <p>Estate agents who had an agenda, and I was thinking, &#8220;Who are they acting for? Are they acting for me, or are they acting for someone else that we don't even know about?&#8221; There's a fair bit of conflict in the book, but it comes from people being people and doing what they have to do. </p> <p>I just wanted to find a good house in an area that was nice, a house I could trust and rely on, for a price that was right. The people who were selling to me just wanted to sell the house no matter what because that was what they needed to do.</p> <p>You always have to understand what the other person's point of view is. Often in this kind of memoir, even though you might be getting very frustrated, it's best to also see a bit of a ridiculous side to yourself—when you're getting grumpy, for instance. </p> <p>It's all just humans being humans in a situation where ultimately you're going to end up doing a life-changing and important thing. I found there's quite a lot of humour in that. </p> <p>We were shuffling things around and, as I said, we were eventually going to be making a cosmic change that would affect the place we called home. I found that quite amusing in a lot of ways. I think you've got to be very levelheaded about this, particularly about writing about other people.</p> <p>Sometimes you do have to ask for permission. I didn't have to do that very much in this book. There were people I wrote about who are actually friends, who would recognise themselves and their stories. I checked that they didn't mind me quoting particular things, and they were all fine with that.</p> <p>In my previous memoir, <em>Not Quite Lost</em>, I actually wrote about a group of people who were completely identifiable. They would definitely have known who they were, and other people would have known who they were. There was no hiding them. </p> <p>They were the people near Brighton who were cryonicists—preserving dead bodies, freezing them, in the hope that they could be revived at a much later date when science had solved the problem that killed them.</p> <p>I went to visit this group of cryonicists, and I'd written a diary about it at the time. Then I followed up when I was writing the book to find out what happened to them. I thought, I've simply got to contact them and tell them I'm going to write this. &#8220;I'll send it to you, you give me your comments,&#8221; and I did.</p> <p>They gave me some good comments and said, &#8220;Oh, please don't put that,&#8221; or &#8220;Let me clarify this.&#8221; Everything was fine. So there I did actually seek them out and check that what I was going to write was okay.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Yes, in that situation, there can't be many cryonicists in that area.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> They really were identifiable.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> There's probably only one group! But this is really interesting, because obviously memoir is a personal thing. You're curating who you are as well in the book, and your husband. I think it's interesting, because I had the problem of &#8220;Am I giving away too much about myself?&#8221;</p> <p>Do you feel like with everything you've written, you've already given away everything about yourself by now? </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Are you just completely relaxed about being personal, for yourself and for your husband?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> I think I have become more relaxed about it. My first memoir wasn't nearly as personal as yours was. You were going to some quite difficult places.</p> <p>With <em>Turn Right at the Rainbow</em>, I was approaching some darker places, actually, and I had to consider how much to reveal and how much not to. But I found once I started writing, the honesty just took over. </p> <p>I thought, &#8220;This is fine. I have read plenty of books that have done this, and I've loved them. I've loved getting to know someone on that deeper level.&#8221; It was just something I took my example from—other writers I'd enjoyed.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Yes. I think that's definitely the way memoir has to happen, because it can be very hard to know how to structure it.</p> <p>Let's come to the title. <em>Turn Right at the Rainbow</em>. Really great title, and obviously a subtitle which is important as well for theme. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Talk about where the title came from and also the challenges of titling books of any genre. </h3> <p>You've had some other great titles for your novels—at least titles I've thought, &#8220;Oh yes, that's perfect.&#8221; Titling can be really hard.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Oh, thank you for that. Yes, it is hard. <em>Ever Rest</em>, which was the title of my last novel, just came to me early on. I was very lucky with that. It fitted the themes and it fitted what was going on, but it was just a bolt from the blue. </p> <p>I found that also with <em>Turn Right at the Rainbow</em>, it was an accident. It slipped out. I was going to call it something else, and then this incident happened. &#8220;Turn Right at the Rainbow&#8221; is actually one of the stories in the book. I call it the title track, as if it's an album.</p> <p>We were going somewhere in the car and the sat nav said, &#8220;Turn right at the rainbow.&#8221; And Dave and I just fell about, &#8220;What did it just say?!&#8221; It also seemed to really sum up the journey we were on. We were looking for rainbows and pots of gold and completely at the mercy of chance.</p> <p>It just stayed with me. It seemed the right thing. I wrote the piece first and then I kept thinking, &#8220;Well, this sounds like a good title.&#8221; Dave said it sounded like a good title. And then a friend of mine who does a lot of beta reading for me said, &#8220;Oh, that is the title, isn't it?&#8221; When several people tell you that's the title, you've got to take notice.</p> <p>But how we find these things is more difficult, as you said. You just work and work at it, beating your head against the wall. I find they always come to me when I'm not looking. It really helps to do something like exercise, which will put you in a bit of a different mind state. Do you find this as well?</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Yes, I often like a title earlier on that then changes as the book goes. I mean, we're both discovery writers really, although you do reverse outlines and other things. You have a chaotic discovery phase. </p> <p>I feel like when I'm in that phase, it might be called something, and then I often find that's not what it ends up being, because the book has actually changed in the process.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Yes, very much. That's part of how we realise what we should be writing. I do have working titles and then something might come along and say, &#8220;This seems actually like what you should call it and what you've been working towards, what you've been discovering about it.&#8221;</p> <p>I think a good title has a real sense of emotional frisson as well. With memoir, it's easier because we can add a subtitle to explain what we mean. With fiction, it's more difficult. We've got to really hope that it all comes through those few words, and that's a bit harder.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Let's talk about your next book. On your website it says it might be a novel, it might be narrative nonfiction, and you have a working title of <em>Four</em>. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">I wondered if you'd talk a bit more about this chaotic discovery writing phase when we just don't know what's coming.</h3> <p>I feel like you and I have been doing this long enough—you longer than me—so maybe we're okay with it. But newer writers might find this stage really difficult. Where's the fun in it? Why is it so difficult? And how can people deal with it?</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> You've summed that up really well. It's fun and it's difficult, and I still find it difficult even after all these years. I have to remind myself, looking back at where <em>Ever Rest</em> started, because that was a particularly difficult one. It took me seven years to work out what to do with it, and I wrote three other books in the meantime.</p> <p>It just comes together in the end. What I find is that something takes root in my mind and it collects things. The title you just picked out there—the book with working title of <em>Four</em>—it's now two books. One possibly another memoir and one possibly fiction.</p> <p>It's evolving all the time. I'm just collecting what seems to go with it for now and thinking, &#8220;That belongs with it somehow. I don't yet know how, but my intuition is that the two work well together.&#8221; There's a harmony there that I see.</p> <p>In the very early stages, that's what I find something is. Then I might get a more concrete idea, say a piece of story or a character, and I'll have the feeling that they really fit together. </p> <p>Once I've got something concrete like that, I can start doing more active research to pursue the idea. But in the beginning, they're all just little twinkles in the eye and you just have to let them develop.</p> <p>If you want to get started on something because you feel you want to get started and you don't feel happy if you're not working on something, you could do a far more active kind of discovery. Writing lists. Lists are great for this.</p> <p>I find lists of what you <em>don't</em> want it to be are just as helpful as what you <em>do</em> want it to be because that certainly narrows down a lot and helps you make good choices.</p> <p>You've got a lot of choices to make at the beginning of a book. You've got to decide: What's it going to be about? What isn't it going to be about? What kind of characters am I interested in? What kind of situations am I interested in? </p> <p>What <em>doesn't</em> interest me about this situation? Very important—saves you a lot of time. What <em>does</em> interest me?</p> <p>If you can start by doing that kind of thing, you will find that you start gathering stuff that gets attracted to it. It's almost like the world starts giving it to you. This is discovery writing, but it's also chivvying it along a bit and getting going. It does work.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Joanna: I like the idea of listing what you don't want it to be. </h3> <p>I think that's very useful because often writers, especially in the early stages—or even not, I still struggle with this—it's knowing what genre it might actually be.</p> <p>With <em>Bones of the Deep</em>, which is my next thriller, it was originally going to be horror and I was writing it, and then I realised one of the big differences between horror and thriller is the ending and how character arcs are resolved and the way things are written. </p> <p>I was just like, &#8220;Do you know what? I actually feel like this is more thriller than horror,&#8221; and that really shaped the direction. Even though so much of it was the same, it shaped a lot about the book. </p> <p>It's always hard talking about this stuff without giving spoilers, but I think deciding, &#8220;Okay, this is not a horror,&#8221; actually helped me find my way back to thriller.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Yes, I do know what you mean. That makes perfect sense to me, with no spoilers either. It's so interesting how a very broad-strokes picture like that can still be very helpful. Just trying to make something a bit different from the way you've been envisaging it can lead to massive breakthroughs. </p> <p>&#8220;Oh no, it's not a thriller—I don't have to be aiming for that kind of effect.&#8221; Or try changing the tone a little bit and see if that just makes you happier with what you're making, more comfortable with it.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> You mentioned the seven years that <em>Ever Rest</em> took. We should say the title is in two words—&#8221;Ever&#8221; and &#8220;Rest&#8221;—but it is also about Everest the mountain in many ways. That's why it's such a perfect title.</p> <p>If that took seven years and you were doing all this other stuff and writing other books along the way, how do you keep your research under control? How do you do that? I still use Scrivener projects as my main research place. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">How do you do your research and organisation?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> A lot of scraps of paper. My desk is massive. It used to be a dining table with leaves in it. It's spread out to its fullest length, and it's got heaps of little pieces of paper. I know what's on them all, and there are different areas, different zones.</p> <p>I'm very much a paper writer because I like the tangibility of it. I also like the creativity of taking a piece of paper and tearing it into an odd shape and writing a note on that. It seems as sort of profound and lucky as the idea. I really like that.</p> <p>I do make text files and keep notes that way. Once something is starting to get to a phase where it's becoming serious, it will then be a folder with various files that discuss different aspects of it. </p> <p>I do a lot of discussing with myself while writing, and I don't necessarily look at it all again. The writing of it clarifies something or allows me to put something aside and say, &#8220;No, that doesn't quite belong.&#8221;</p> <p>Gradually I start to look at things, look at what I've gathered, and think, &#8220;How does this fit with this?&#8221; And it helps to look away as well. As I said with finding titles, sometimes the right thing is in your subconscious and it's waiting to just sail in if you look at it in a different way.</p> <p>There's a lot to be said for working on several ideas, not looking at some of them for a while, then going back and thinking, &#8220;Oh, I know what to do with this now.&#8221;</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Yes. My <em>Writing the Shadow</em>, I was talking about that when we met, and that definitely took about a decade.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Yes.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> I kept having to come back to that, and sometimes we're just not ready. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Even as experienced writers, we're not ready for a particular book. </h3> <p>With <em>Bones of the Deep</em>, I did the trip that it's based on in 1999. Since I became a writer, I've thought I have to use that trip in some way, and I never found the right way to use it. I came at it a couple of times and it just never sat right with me. </p> <p>Then something on this master's course I'm doing around human remains and indigenous cultures just suddenly all clicked. You can't really rush that, can you?</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> You absolutely can't. It's something you develop a sense for, the more you do—whether something's ready or whether you should just let it think about itself for a while whilst you work on something else.</p> <p>It really helps to have something else to work on because I panic a bit if I don't have something creative to do. I just have to create, I have to make things, particularly in writing. But I also like doing various little arty things as well. I need to always have something to be writing about or exploring in words.</p> <p>Sometimes a book isn't ready for that intense pressure of being properly written. So it helps to have several things that I can play with and then pick one and go, &#8220;Okay, now I'm going to really perform this on the page.&#8221;</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Do you find that nonfiction—because you have some craft books as well—do you find the nonfiction side is quite different? Can you almost just go and write a nonfiction book or work on someone else's project? </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Does that use a different kind of creativity?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Yes, it does. Creativity where you're trying to explain something to creative people is totally different from creativity where you're trying to involve them in emotions and a journey and nuances of meaning. They're very different, but they're still fun.</p> <p>So, yes, I am an editor as well, and that feeds my creativity in various unexpected ways. I'll see what someone has done and think, &#8220;Oh, that's very interesting that they did that.&#8221; </p> <p>It can make me think in different ways—different shapes for stories, different kinds of characters to have. It really opens your eyes, working with other creative people.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> I wanted to return to what you said at the beginning, that it is more difficult these days to get our work noticed. There's certainly a challenge in writing a travel memoir about home. What are you doing to market this book? </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">What have you learned about book marketing for memoir in particular that might help other people?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Partly I realised it was quite a natural progression for me because in my newsletter I always write a couple of little pieces. I think they're called &#8220;life writing.&#8221; Just little things that have happened to me. That's sort of like memoir, creative nonfiction, personal essays.</p> <p>I was quite naturally writing that sort of thing to my newsletter readers, and I realised that was already good preparation for the kind of way that I would write in a memoir.</p> <p>As for the actual campaign, I actually came up with an idea which quite surprised me because I didn't think I was good at that. I'm making a collage of the word &#8220;home&#8221; written in lots of different handwriting, on lots of different things, in lots of different languages. </p> <p>I'm getting people to contribute these and send them to me, and I'm building them into a series of collages that's just got the word &#8220;home&#8221; everywhere. People have been contributing them by sending them by email or on Facebook Messenger, and I've been putting them up on my social platforms. </p> <p>They look stunning. It's amazing. People are writing the word &#8220;home&#8221; on a post-it or sticking it to a picture of their radiator. Someone wrote it in snow on her car when we had snow. </p> <p>Someone wrote it on a pottery shard she found in her drive when she bought the house. She thought it was mysterious. There are all these lovely stories that people are telling me as well.</p> <p>I'm making them into little artworks and putting them up every day as the book comes to launch. It's so much fun, and it also has a deeper purpose because it shows how home is different for all of us and how it builds as uniquely as our handwriting. Our handwriting has a story. I should do a book about that!</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> That's a weird one. Handwriting always gets me, although it'd be interesting these days because so many people don't handwrite things anymore. You can probably tell the age of someone by how well-developed their handwriting is.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Except mine has just withered. I can barely write for more than a few minutes.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Oh, I know what you mean. Your hand gets really tired.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> We used to write three-hour exams. How did we do that?</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> I really don't know.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Just coming back on that. You mentioned mainly you're doing your newsletter and connecting with your own community. You've done podcasts with me and with other people. But I feel like in the indie community, the whole &#8220;you must build your newsletter&#8221; thing is described as something quite frantic. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">How have you built a newsletter in a sustainable manner?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> I've built it by finding what suited me. To start with I thought, &#8220;What will I put in it? News, obviously.&#8221; But I wasn't doing that much that was newsworthy. Then I began to examine what news could actually be.</p> <p>The turning point really happened when I wrote the first memoir, <em>Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction</em>. I thought, &#8220;I have to explain to people why I'm writing a memoir,&#8221; because it seemed like a very audacious thing to do—&#8221;Read about me!&#8221; I thought I had to explain myself. </p> <p>So I told the story of how I came to think about writing such an audacious book. I just found a natural way to tell stories about what I was doing creatively. </p> <p>I thought, &#8220;I like this. I like writing a newsletter like this.&#8221; And it's not all me, me, me. It's &#8220;I'm discovering this and it makes me think this,&#8221; and it just seems to be generally about life, about little questions that we might all face.</p> <p>From then, I found I really enjoyed writing a newsletter because I felt I had something to say. I couldn't put lists of where I was speaking, what I was teaching, what special offers I had, because that wasn't really how my creative life worked. </p> <p>Once I found something I could sustainably write about every month, it really helped. Oh, it also helps to have a pet, by the way.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Yes, you have a horse!</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> I've got a horse. People absolutely love hearing the stories about my ongoing relationship with this horse. Even if they're not horsey, they write to me and say, &#8220;We just love your horse.&#8221; It helps to have a human interest thing going on like that.</p> <p>So that works for me. Everyone's got different things that will work for them. But for me, it builds just a sense of connection, human connection. I'm human, making things.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> In terms of actually getting people signed up—has it literally just been over time? People have read your book, signed up from the link at the back? </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Have you ever done any specific growth marketing around your newsletter?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> I tried a little bit of growth marketing. I have a freebie version of one of my <em>Nail Your Novel</em> books and I put that on a promotion site. I got lots of newsletter signups, but they sort of dwindled away. </p> <p>When I get unsubscribes, it's usually from that list, because it wasn't really what they came for. They just came for a free book of writing tips. While I do writing tips on my blog—I'm still doing those—it wasn't really what my newsletter was about.</p> <p>What I found was that that wasn't going to get people who were going to be interested long-term in what I was writing about in my newsletter. Whatever you do, I found, has got to be true to what you are actually giving them.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Yes, I think that's really key. I make sure I email once every couple of weeks. And you welcome the unsubscribes. You have to welcome them because those people are not right for you and they're not interested in what you're doing. </p> <p>At the end of the day, we're still trying to sell books. As much as you're enjoying the connection with your audience, you are still trying to sell <em>Turn Right at the Rainbow</em> and your other books, right?</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Absolutely, yes. And as you say, someone who decides, &#8220;No, not for me anymore,&#8221; and that's good. There are still people who you are right for.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Mm-hmm.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> I do market my newsletter in a very low-key way. I make a graphic every month for the newsletter, it's like a magazine cover. &#8220;What's in it?&#8221; And I put that around all my social media. I change my Facebook page header so it's got that on it, my Bluesky header.</p> <p>People can see what it's like, what the vibe is, and they know where to find it if they're interested. I find that kind of low-key approach works quite well for what I'm offering. It's got to be true to what you offer.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Yes, and true for a long-term career, I think. When I first met you and your husband Dave, it was like, &#8220;Oh, here are some people who are in this writing business, have already been in it for a while.&#8221; And both of you are still here. I just feel like—</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">You have to do it in a sustainable way, whether it's writing or marketing or any of this. </h3> <p>The only way to do it is to, as you said, live as a creative human and not make it all frantic and &#8220;must be now.&#8221;</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Yes. I mean, I do have to-do lists that are quite long for every week, but I've learned to pace myself. I've learned how often I can write a good blog post. I could churn out blog posts that were far more frequent, but they wouldn't be as good. They wouldn't be as properly thought through.</p> <p>In the old days with blogs, you had an advantage if you were blogging very frequently, I think you got more noticed by Google because you were constantly putting up fresh content. But if that's not sustainable for you, it's not going to do you any good.</p> <p>Now there's so much content around that it's probably fine to post once a month if that is what you're going to do and how you're going to present the best of yourself. </p> <p>I see a lot on Substack—I've recently started Substack as well—I see people writing every other day. I think they're good, that's interesting, but I don't have time to read it. I would love to have the time, but I don't.</p> <p>So there's actually no sin in only posting once a month—one newsletter a month, one blog post a month, one Substack a month. That's plenty. People will still find that enough if they get you.</p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Fantastic. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?</h3> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> My website is probably the easiest place, <a href="https://rozmorris.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">RozMorris.org</a>. </p> <p><strong>JOANNA:</strong> Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time, Roz. As ever, that was great.</p> <p><strong>ROZ:</strong> Thank you, Jo.</p><p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/03/09/writing-emotion-discovery-writing-and-slow-sustainable-book-marketing-with-roz-morris/">Writing Emotion, Discovery Writing, And Slow Sustainable Book Marketing With Roz Morris</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p>How do you build a creative life that spans music, writing, film, and spiritual practice? Alicia Jo Rabins talks about <strong>weaving multiple creative strands into a sustainable career</strong> and why the best advice for any creator might simply be: just make the thing.</p> <p>In the intro, backlist promotion strategy [<a href="https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/backlist-author-sales-how-to-sell-more-books/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Written Word Media</a>]; Successful author business [<a href="https://www.authormedia.com/how-to-become-a-professional-writer-with-joanna-penn/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Novel Marketing Podcast</a>]; Alliance of Independent Authors <a href="https://bookstore.allianceindependentauthors.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Indie Author Bookstore</a>; <em><a href="https://www.jfpenn.com/bones" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">Bones of the Deep</a></em> &#8211; J.F. Penn</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter"><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/kwl" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/KWL-Primary_Colour-1024x176.png" alt="" class="wp-image-35982"/></a></figure> </div> <p><a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/kwl" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>This podcast is sponsored by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/kwl" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kobo Writing Life</a>, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the&nbsp;<a href="http://kobowritinglife.com/category/kwl-podcast/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kobo Writing Life podcast</a>&nbsp;for interviews with successful indie authors.</p> <p>This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.patreon.com/thecreativepenn" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Patreon.com/thecreativepenn</a>&nbsp;</p> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="aligncenter size-full"><a href="https://www.aliciajo.com/" target="_blank" rel=" noreferrer noopener"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Alicia-Jo-Rabins.png" alt="" class="wp-image-37387"/></a></figure> </div> <p>Alicia Jo Rabins is an award-winning writer, musician, performer, as well as a Torah teacher and ritualist. She's the creator of <em>Girls In Trouble</em>, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women, and the award-winning film, <em>A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff</em>. Her latest book is a memoir, <em>When We Are Born We Forget Everything</em>.</p> <p>You can listen above or on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/podcasts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">your favorite podcast app</a>&nbsp;or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Show Notes</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Building a sustainable multi-disciplinary creative career through teaching, performance, grants, and donations</li> <li>Trusting instinct in the early generative stages of creativity and separating generation from editing</li> <li>Adapting and reimagining religious and cultural source material through music, writing, and performance</li> <li>The challenges of transitioning from poetry to long-form prose memoir, including choosing a lens for your story</li> <li>Making an independent film on a shoestring budget without waiting for Hollywood's permission</li> <li>Finding your creative voice and building confidence by leaning into vulnerability and returning to the practice of making</li> </ul> <p>You can find Alicia at <a href="https://www.aliciajo.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">AliciaJo.com</a>.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Transcript of the interview with Alicia Jo Rabins</h3> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Alicia Jo Rabins is an award-winning writer, musician, performer, as well as a Torah teacher and ritualist. She's the creator of <em>Girls In Trouble</em>, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women, and the award-winning film, <em>A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff</em>. Her latest book is a memoir, <em>When We Are Born We Forget Everything</em>.</p> <p>So welcome to the show, Alicia.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> There is so much we could talk about. But first up—</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Tell us a bit more about you and how you've woven so many strands of creativity into your life and career.</h3> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Yes, well, I am a maximalist. What happened in terms of my early life is that I started writing on my own, just extremely young.</p> <p>I'm one of those people who always loved writing, always processed the world and managed my emotions and came to understand myself through writing. So from a very young age, I felt really committed to writing.</p> <p>Then I had the good fortune that my mother saw a talk show about the Suzuki method of learning violin—when you start really young and learn by ear, which is modelled after language learning. It's so much less intellectual and much more instinctual, learning by copying.</p> <p>She was like, that looks like a cool thing. I was three years old at the time and she found out that there was a little local branch of our music conservatory that had a Suzuki violin programme. So when I was three and a half, getting close to four, she took me down and I started playing an extremely tiny violin.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Oh, cute!</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Yes, and because it was part of this conservatory that was downtown, and we were just starting at the suburban branch where we lived, there was this path that I was able to follow. As I got more and more interested in violin, I could continue basically up through the conservatory level during high school.</p> <p>So I had a really fantastic music education without any pressure, without any expectations or professional goals. I just kept taking these classes and one thing led to another.</p> <p>I grew up being very immersed in both creative writing and music, and I think just having the gift of those two parts of my brain trained and stimulated and delighted so young really changed my brain in some ways. I'll always see the world through this creative lens, which I think I'm also just set up to do personally.</p> <p>Then the last step of my multi-practice career is that in college I got very interested in Jewish spirituality. I'm Jewish, but I didn't grow up very religious. I didn't grow up in a Jewish community really. So I knew some basics, but not a ton.</p> <p>In college I started to study it and also informally learned from other people I met. I ended up going on a pretty intense spiritual quest, going to Jerusalem and immersing myself after college for two years in traditional Jewish study and practice.</p> <p>So that became the third strand of the braid that had already been started with music and writing. Torah study, spiritual study, and teaching became the third, and they all interweave.</p> <p>The last thing I'll say is that because I work in both words and music, and naturally performance because of music, it began to branch a little bit into plays, theatre, and film, just because that's where the intersection of words, performance, and music is. </p> <p>So that's really what brought me into that, as opposed to any specific desire to work in film. It all happened very organically.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> I love this. This is so cool. We are going to circle back to a lot of this, but I have to ask you—</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">What about work for money at any point? How did this turn into more than just hobbies and lifestyle?</h3> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Yes, absolutely. Well, I'm very fortunate that I did not graduate college with loans because my parents were able to pay for college. That was a big privilege that I just want to name, because in the States that's often not the case. So that allowed me to need to support myself, but not also pay loans, which was a real gift.</p> <p>What happened was I went straight from college to that school in Jerusalem, and there I was on loans and scholarship, so I didn't have to worry yet about supporting myself.</p> <p>Then when I came back to the States, I actually found on Craigslist a job teaching remedial Hebrew. It was essentially teaching kids at a Jewish elementary school who either had learning differences or had just entered the school late and needed to be in a different Hebrew class than the other kids in their grade.</p> <p>That was my first experience of really teaching, and I just absolutely fell in love with it. Although in the end, my passion is much more for teaching the text and rituals and the wrestling with the concepts, as opposed to teaching language.</p> <p>So all these years, while doing performance and writing and all these things, I have been teaching Jewish studies. That has essentially supported me, I would say, between 50 and 70 per cent. </p> <p>Then the rest has been paid gigs as a musician, whether as a front person leading a project or as what we call a sideman, playing in someone else's band. Sometimes doing theatre performances, sometimes teaching workshops.</p> <p>That's how I've cobbled it together. I have not had a full-time job all these years and I have supported myself through both earned income and also grants and donations. </p> <p>I've really tried to cultivate a little bit of a donor base, and I took some workshops early on about how to welcome donations. So I definitely try to always welcome that as well.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> That is so interesting that you took a workshop on how to welcome donations. Way back in, I think 2013, I said on this show, I just don't know if I can accept people giving to support the show. Then someone on the podcast challenged me and said, but people want to support creatives. </p> <p>That's when I started Patreon in 2014. It was when <em>The Art of Asking</em> by Amanda Palmer came out and—</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">It was this realisation that people do want to support people. </h3> <p>So I love that you said that.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> It's not easy. It's still not easy for me, and I have to grit my teeth every time I even put in my end-of-year newsletter. I just say, just a reminder that part of what makes this possible is your generous donations, and I'm so grateful to you. It's not easy.</p> <p>I think some people enjoy fundraising. I certainly don't instinctively enjoy it, but I have learned to think of it exactly the way that you're saying. I mean, I love donating to support other people's projects. Sometimes it's the highlight of my day.</p> <p>If I'm having a bad day and someone asks for help, either to feed a family or to complete a creative project, I just feel like, okay, at least I can give $36 or $25 and feel like I did something positive in the last hour, even if my project is going terribly and I'm in a fight with my kid or something.</p> <p>So I have to keep in mind that it is actually a privilege to give as well as a privilege to receive.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Absolutely. So let's get back into your various creative projects. The first thing I wanted to ask you, because you do have so many different formats and forms of your creativity—how do you know when an idea that comes to you should be a song, or something you want to do as a performance, or written, or a film?</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Tell us a bit about your creative process.</h3> <p>Because a lot of your projects are also longer-term.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Yes. It's funny, I love planning and in some ways I'm an extreme planner. I really drive people in my family bonkers with planning, like family vacations a year in advance.</p> <p>In terms of my creativity, I'm very planful towards goals, but in that early generative state, I am actually pure instinct. </p> <p>I don't think I ever sit down and say, &#8220;I have this idea, which genre would it match with?&#8221; It's more like I sit on my bed and pick up my guitar, which is where I love to do songwriting, just sitting on my bed cross-legged, and I pick up my guitar and something starts coming out. Then I just work with that kernel.</p> <p>So it's very nebulous at first, very innate, and I just follow that creative spirit. Often I don't even know what a project is, sometimes if it's a larger project, until a year or two in.</p> <p>Once things emerge and take shape, then my planning brain and my strategy brain can jump on it and say, &#8220;Okay, we need three more songs to fill out the album, and we need to plan the fundraising and the scheduling.&#8221; Then I might take more of an outside-in approach. At the beginning it's just all instinct.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Joanna: So if you pick up your guitar, does that mean it always starts in music and then goes into writing? </h3> <p>Or is that you only pick up a guitar if it's going to be musical?</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> I think I'm responding to what's inside me. It's almost like a need, as opposed to, &#8220;I'm going to sit down and work.&#8221; </p> <p>I mean, obviously I sit down and work a lot, but I think in that early stage of anything, it's more like my fingers are itching to play something, and so I sit down and pick up my guitar. Sometimes nothing comes out and sometimes the kernel of a song comes out.</p> <p>Or I'm at a café, and I often like to write when I'm feeling a little bit discombobulated, just to go into the complexity of things or use challenging emotions as fuel. I really do use it as a—I don't know if therapeutic is the word, but I think it maybe is. </p> <p>I write often, as I always have, as I said before, to understand what I'm thinking. Like Joan Didion said—to process difficult emotions, to let go of stuck places.</p> <p>So I think I create almost more out of a sense of just what I need in the moment. Sometimes it's just for fun. Sometimes picking up a guitar, I just have a moment so I sit down and mess around. Sometimes it's to help me struggle with something.</p> <p>It doesn't always start in music. That was a random example. I might sit down to write because I have an hour and I think, I haven't written in a while. Or I do have an informal daily writing thing where I'll try to generate one loose draft of something a day, even if it's only ten pages.</p> <p>I mean, sorry, ten words.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> I was going to say!</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> No, no. Ten words. I'm sorry. It's often poetry, so it feels like a lot when it's ten words.</p> <p>I'll just sit down with no pressure, no goal, no intention to make anything specific. Just open the floodgates and see what comes out. That's where every single project of mine has started.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Yes, I do love that. Obviously, I'm a discovery writer and intuitive, same as you. I think very much this idea of, especially when you said you feel discombobulated, that's when you write. I almost feel like I need that.</p> <p>I'm not someone who writes every day. I don't do ten lines or whatever. It's that I'll feel that sense of pressure building up into &#8220;this is going to be something.&#8221; I will really only write or journal when that spills over into— </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">&#8220;I now need to write and figure out what this is.&#8221;</h3> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Yes. It's almost a form of hunger. It feels to me similar to when you eat a great meal and then you're good for a while. You're not really thinking of it, and then it builds up, like you said, and then there's a need—at least the first half of creativity. I really separate my generation and my editing.</p> <p>So my generative practice is all openness, no critique, just this maybe therapeutic, maybe curious, wandering and seeing what happens. Then once I have a draft, my incisive editing mind is welcome back in, which has been shut out from that early process. So that's a really different experience.</p> <p>Those early stages of creativity are almost out of need more than obligation.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Well, just staying with that generative practice. Obviously you've mentioned your study of and practice of Jewish tradition and Jewish spirituality. </p> <p>Steven Pressfield in his books has talked about his prayer to the muse, and I've got on my wall here—I don't talk about this very often, actually — I have a muse picture, a painting of what I think of as a muse spirit in some form.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">So do you have any spiritual practices around your generative practice and that phase of coming up with ideas?</h3> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> I love that question, and I wish I had a beautiful, intentional answer. My answer is no.</p> <p>I think I experience creativity as its own spiritual practice itself. I do love individual prayer and meditation and things like that, but for me those are more to address my specifically spiritual health and happiness and connectedness.</p> <p>I'm just a dive-in kind of person. As a musician, I have friends who have elaborate backstage rituals. I have to do certain things to take care of my voice, but even that, it's mostly vocal rest as opposed to actively doing things. There's a bit of an on/off switch for me.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> That's interesting. Well, I do want to ask you about one of your projects, this collaboration with a high school on a musical performance, <em><a href="https://www.aliciajo.com/i-was-a-desert-songs-of-the-matriarchs" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">I Was a Desert: Songs of the Matriarchs</a></em>, and also your Girls in Trouble songs about women in the Torah.</p> <p>On your website, I had a look at the school, the high school, and the musical performance. It was extraordinary. I was watching you in the school there and it's just such extraordinary work. It very much inspired me—not to do it myself, but it was just so wonderful.</p> <p>I do urge people to go to your website and just watch a few minutes of it.</p> <p>I'm inspired by elements of religion, Christian and Jewish, but I wondered if you've come up against any issues with adaptation—respecting your heritage but also reinventing it. How has this gone for you.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Any advice for people who want to incorporate aspects of religion they love but are worried about responses?</h3> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Well, I have to say, coming from the Jewish tradition, that is a core practice of Judaism—reinterpreting our texts and traditions, wrestling with them, arguing with them, reimagining them.</p> <p>I don't know if you're familiar with Midrash, but just in case some of your listeners aren't sure I'll explain it.</p> <p>There's essentially an ancient form of fanfic called Midrash, which was the ancient rabbis, and we still do it today, taking a biblical story that seems to have some kind of gap or inconsistency or question in it and writing a story to fill that gap or recast the story in an interestingly different light.</p> <p>So we have this whole body of literature over thousands of years that are these alternate or added-on adventures, side quests of the biblical characters. What I'm doing from a Jewish perspective is very much in line with a traditional way of interacting with text.</p> <p>I've certainly never gotten any pushback, especially as I work in progressive Jewish communities. I think if I were in an extremely fundamentalist community, there would be a lot of different issues around gender and things like that. The interpretive process, even in those communities, is part of how we show respect for the text.</p> <p>When I was working with the high school—and I just want to call out the choir director, Ethan Chen, who has an incredible project where he brings in a different artist every two years to work with the choir, and they tend to have a different cultural focus each time. </p> <p>He invited me specifically to integrate my songwriting about biblical women with his amazing high school choir. I was really worried at first because most of them are not Jewish—very few of them, if any. I wanted to respect their spiritual paths and their religious heritages and not impose mine on them.</p> <p>So I spent a lot of time at the beginning saying, this project has religious source material, but essentially it is a creative reinterpretive project. I am not coming to you to bring the religious material to you. </p> <p>I'm coming to take the shared Hebrew Bible myths and then reinterpret those myths through a lens of how they might reflect our own personal struggles, because that's always my approach to these ancient stories. I wanted to really make that clear to the students. It was such a joy to work with them.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> It's such an interesting project. Also, I find with musicians in general this idea of performance. You've written this thing—or this thing specifically with the school—and it doesn't exist again, right? You're not selling CDs of that, I presume. Whereas compared to a book, when we write a book, we can sell it forever.</p> <p>It doesn't exist as a performance generally for an author of a memoir or a novel. It carries on existing. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">So how does that feel, the performance idea versus the longer-lasting thing? </h3> <p>I mean, I guess the video's there, but the performance itself happened.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> I do know what you mean. Absolutely. We did, for that reason, record it professionally. We had the sound person record it and mix it, so it is available to stream. I'm not selling CDs, but it's out there on all the streaming services, if people want to listen. I do also have the scores, so if a choir wanted to sing it.</p> <p>The main point that you're making is so true. I think there's actually something very sacred about live performance—that we're all in the moment together and then the moment is over.</p> <p>I love the artefacts of the writing life. I love writing books. I love buying and reading books and having them around, and there's piles of them everywhere in this room I'm standing in. </p> <p>I feel like being on stage, or even teaching, is a very spiritual practice for me, because it's in some ways the most in-the-moment I ever am. The only thing that matters is what's happening right then in that room.</p> <p>It's fleeting as it goes. I'm working with the energy in the room while we're there. It's different every time because I'm different, the atmosphere is different, the people are different. There's no way to plan it. The kind of micro precision that we all try to bring to our editing—you can't do that.</p> <p>You can practice all you want and you should, but in the moment, who knows? A string breaks or there's loud sound coming from the other room. It is just one of those things.</p> <p>I love being reminded over and over again of the truth that we really don't control what happens. The best that we can do is ride it, surf it, be in it, appreciate it, and then let it go.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> I think maybe I get a glimpse of that when I speak professionally, but I'm far more in control in that situation than I guess you were with—I don't know how many—was it a hundred kids in that choir? It looked pretty big.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> It was amazing. It was 130 kids. Yes.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> 130 kids! I mean, it was magic listening to it. And yes, of course, showing my age there with buying a CD, aren't I?</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Well, I do still sell some CDs of Girls in Trouble on tour, because I have a bunch of them and people still buy them. I'm always so grateful because it was an easier life for touring musicians when we could just bring CDs. Now we have to be very creative about our merch.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Yes, that's a good point because people are like, &#8220;Oh yes, I'll scan your QR code and stream it,&#8221; but you might not get the money for that for ages, and it might just be five cents or whatever.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Streaming is terrible for live musicians. I mean, I don't know if you know the site Bandcamp, but it's essentially self-publishing for musicians.</p> <p>Bandcamp is a great way around that, and a lot of independent musicians use it because that's a place you can upload your music and people can pay $8 for an album. They can stream it on there if they want, or they can download it and have it. But, yes, it's hard out there for touring musicians.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Yes, for sure. Well, let's come to the book then. Your memoir, <em>When We Are Born We Forget Everything</em>. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Tell us about some of the challenges of a book as opposed to these other types of performances.</h3> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Well, I come out of poetry, so that was my first love. That's what I majored in in college. That's what my MFA is in.</p> <p>Poetry is famously short, and I'm not one of those long-form poets. I have been trained for many years to think in terms of a one-page arc, if at all. Arc isn't even really a word that we use in poetry.</p> <p>So to write a full-length prose book was really an incredible education. Writing it basically took ten years from writing to publication, so probably seven years of writing and editing. I felt like there was an MFA-equivalent process in the number of classes I took, books I read, and work that went into it.</p> <p>So that was one of my main joys and challenges, really learning on the job to write long-form prose coming out of poetry. </p> <p>How to keep the engine going, how to think about ending one chapter in a way that leaves you with some torque or momentum so that you want to go into the next chapter. How many characters is too many? Who gets names and who doesn't?</p> <p>Some of these things that are probably pretty basic for fiction writers were all very new to me. That was a big part of my process.</p> <p>Then, of course, poets don't usually have agents. So once it was done, I began to query agents. It was the normal sort of 39 rejections and then one agent who really understood what I was trying to do. She's incredible, and she was able to sell the book.</p> <p>The longevity of just working on something for that long—I have a lot of joy in that longevity—but it does sometimes feel like, is this ever going to happen, or am I on a fool's errand?</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> I guess, again, the difference with performance is you have a date for the performance and it's done then. I suppose once you get a contract, then for sure it has to be done. But memoir in particular, you do have to set boundaries, because of course your life continues, doesn't it? </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">So what were the challenges in curating what went into the book? </h3> <p>Because many people listening know memoir is very challenging in terms of how personal it can be.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Yes, and one thing I think is so fascinating about memoir is choosing which lens to put on your story, on your own story.</p> <p>I heard early on that the difference between autobiography and memoir is that autobiography tries to give a really comprehensive view of a life, and memoir is choosing one lens and telling the story of a life through that lens, which is such a beautiful creative concept.</p> <p>I knew early on that I wanted this to be primarily a spiritual memoir, and also somewhat of an artistic memoir, because my creativity and my spirituality are so intertwined.</p> <p>It started off being spiritual, and also about my musical life, and also about my writing life. In the end, I edited out the part about my writing life, because writing about writing was just too navel-gazing. </p> <p>So there's nothing in there about me coming of age as a writer, which used to be in there, but that whole thing got taken out. Now it's spiritual and musical.</p> <p>For me, it really helped to start with those focuses, because I knew there may be things that were hugely important in my life, absolutely foundational, that were not really going to be either mentioned or gone deeply into in the book.</p> <p>For example, my husband teases me a lot about how few pages and words he gets. He's very important in my life, but I actually met him when I was 29, and this book really mainly takes place in the years leading up to that.</p> <p>There's a little bit of winding down in the first few years of my thirties, but this is not a book about my life with him. He is mentioned in it. That story is in there.</p> <p>Having those kinds of limitations around the canvas—there's a quote, I forget if it was Miranda July, but somebody said something like, basically when you put a limitation on your project, that's when it starts to be a work of art. </p> <p>Whatever it is, if you say, &#8220;I'm taking this canvas and I'm using these colours,&#8221; that's when it really begins, that initial limitation. That was very helpful.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> It's also the beauty of memoir, because of course you can write different memoirs at different times. You can write something about your writing life. You can write something else about your marriage and your family later on. That doesn't all have to be in one book. </p> <p>I think that's actually something I found interesting. And I would also say in my memoir, <em>Pilgrimage</em>, my husband is barely mentioned either.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Does he tease you too?</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> No, I think he's grateful. He is grateful for the privacy.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> That's why I keep saying, you should be grateful!</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Yes. You really should. Like, maybe stop talking now.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Yes, exactly. I know. Marriage, memoir—those words should strike fear into his heart.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> They definitely should. But let's just come back. When I look at your career—</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">You just seem such an independent creative, and so I wondered why you decided to work with a traditional publisher instead of being an independent.</h3> <p>How are you finding it as someone who's not in charge of everything?</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> It's a great question. The origin story for this memoir is that I was actually reading poetry at a writing conference called Bread Loaf in the States. This was 16 years ago or something.</p> <p>I was giving a poetry reading and afterwards an agent, not my agent, came up to me and said, you know, you have a voice. You should try writing nonfiction because you could probably sell it.</p> <p>Back to your question about how I support myself, I am always really hustling to make a living. It's not like I have some separate well-paying job and the writing has no pressure on it. So my ears kind of perked up. </p> <p>I thought, wait, getting paid for writing? Because poetry is literally not in the world. It's just not a concept for poets. That's not why we write and it's not a possibility.</p> <p>So a little light turned on in my brain. I thought, wow, that could be a really interesting element to add to my income stream, and it would be flexible and it would be meaningful.</p> <p>For a few years I thought, what nonfiction could I write? And I came up with the idea of writing a book about biblical women from a more scholarly perspective, because I teach that material and I've studied it.</p> <p>I went to speak to another agent and she said, well, you could do that, but if you actually want to sell a book, it's going to have to be more of a trade book. So if you don't want an academic press, which wouldn't pay very much, you would have to have some kind of memoir-like stories in there to just sweeten it so it doesn't feel academic.</p> <p>So then I began writing a little bit of spiritual memoir. I thought, okay, well, I'll write about a few moments. Then once I started writing, I couldn't stop. The floodgates really opened. That's how it ended up being a spiritual memoir with interwoven stories of biblical women. It became a hybrid in that sense.</p> <p>I knew from the beginning that this project—for all my saying earlier that I never plan anything and only work on instinct, I was thinking as I said that, that cannot be true. </p> <p>This time, I actually thought, what if, instead of coming from this pure, heart-focused place of poetry, I began writing with the intention of potentially selling a book? The way my fiction writer friends talked about selling their books.</p> <p>So that was always in my mind. I knew I would continue writing poetry, continue publishing with small presses, continue putting my own music out there independently, but this was a bit of an experiment. What if I try to interface with the publishing world, in part for financial sustainability?</p> <p>And because I had a full draft before I queried, I never felt like anyone was telling me what to write. I can't imagine personally selling a book on proposal, because I do need that full capacity to just swerve, change directions, be responsive to what the project is teaching me. </p> <p>I can't imagine promising that I'll write something, because I never know what I'll write. But writing at least a very solid draft first, I'm always delighted to get notes and make polish and rewrite and make things better. I took care of that freedom in the first seven years of writing and then I interfaced with the agent and publisher.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> I was going to say, given that it's taken you seven to ten years to do this and I can't imagine that you're suddenly a multimillionaire from this book. It probably hasn't fulfilled the hourly rate that perhaps you were thinking of in terms of being paid for your work.</p> <p>I think some people think that everyone's going to end up with the massive book deal that pays for the rest of their life. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">I guess this book does just fit into the rest of your portfolio career.</h3> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Yes. One of the benefits of these long arcs that I like to work on is, one of them—and probably the primary one—is that the project gets to unfold on its own time. I don't think I could have rushed it if I wanted. The other is that it never really stopped me from doing any of my other work.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Mm-hmm.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> So it's not like, oh, I gave up months of my life and all I got was this advance or something. It's like, I was living my life and then when I had a little bit of writing time—and I will say, it impacted my poetry. I haven't written as much poetry because I was working on this. </p> <p>So it wasn't like I just added it on top of everything I was already doing, but it was a pleasure to just switch to prose for a while. It was just woven into my life. </p> <p>I appreciated having this side project where no one was waiting for it. There were no deadlines, there was no stress around it, because I always have performances to promote and due dates for all kinds of work. It was just this really lovely arena of slow growth and play.</p> <p>When I wanted a reader, I could do a swap with a writer friend, but no one was ever waiting for it on deadline. So there's actually a lot of pleasure in that.</p> <p>Then I will say, I think I've made more from selling this than my poetry. Probably close to ten times more than I've ever made from any of my poetry. </p> <p>So on a poetry scale, it's certainly not going to pay for my life, but it actually does make a true financial difference in a way that much of my other work is a little more bit by bit by bit. It's actually a different scale.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Well, that's really good. I'm glad to hear that. I also want to ask you, because you've done so many things, and—</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">I'm fascinated by your independent film, <em>A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff</em>.</h3> <p>I have only watched the trailer. You are in it, you wrote it, directed it, and it's also obviously got other people in, and it's fascinating. It's about this particular point in history.</p> <p>I've written quite a lot of screenplay adaptations of my novels, and I've had some various amounts of interest, but the whole film industry to me is just a complete nightmare, far bigger nightmare than the book industry. So I wonder if you could maybe talk about this, because it just seems like you made a film, which is so cool.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Oh yes, thank you.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> And it won awards, yes, we should say.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Did we win awards? Yes. It really, for an extremely low-budget indie film, went far further than my team and I could ever have imagined.</p> <p>I will say I never intended to make a film. Like most of the best things in my life, it really happened by accident.</p> <p>When I was living in New York— I lived there for many years—the 2008 financial collapse happened and I happened to have an arts grant that gave a bunch of artists workspace, studio space, in essentially an abandoned building in the financial district.</p> <p>It was an empty floor of a building. The floor had been left by the previous tenant, and there's a nonprofit that takes unused real estate in the financial district and lets artists work in it for a while.</p> <p>So I was on Wall Street, which was very rare for me, but for this year I was working on Wall Street. Even though I was working on poems, the financial collapse happened around me, and I did get inspired by that to create a one-woman show, which was more of a theatre show.</p> <p>That was already a huge leap for me because I had no real theatre experience, but it was experimental and growing out of my poetry practice and my music. It was a musical one-woman show about the financial collapse from a spiritual perspective, apparently.</p> <p>So I performed that. I documented it, and then a friend who lives in Portland, Oregon, where I now live, said, &#8220;I'm a theatre producer, I'd like to produce it here.&#8221; So then I rewrote it and did a run here in Portland of that show.</p> <p>Essentially, I started to tour it a little bit, but I got tired of it. It was too much work and it never really paid very much, and I thought, this is impacting my life negatively. I just want to do a really good documentation of the show.</p> <p>So I wanted to hire a theatre documentarian to just document the show so that it didn't disappear, like you were saying before about live performance. But one of the people I talked to actually ended up being an artistic filmmaker, as opposed to a documentarian. </p> <p>She watched the archival footage, just a single camera of the show, and said, &#8220;I don't think you should do this again and film it with three cameras. I think you should make it into a feature film. And in fact, I think maybe I should direct it, because there's all this music in it and I also direct music videos.&#8221; We had this kind of mind meld.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Mm.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> I never intended to make a film, but she is a visionary director and I had this piece of IP essentially, and all the music and the writing.</p> <p>We adapted it together. We did it here in Portland. We did all the fundraising ourselves. We did not interface with Hollywood really. I think that would be, I just can't imagine. </p> <p>I love Hollywood, but I'm not really connected, and I can't imagine waiting for someone to give us permission or a green light to make this. It was experimental and indie, so we just really did it on the cheap.</p> <p>We had an amazing producer who helped us figure out how to do it with the budget that we had. We worked really hard fundraising, crowdfunding, asking for donations, having parties to raise money, and then we just did it and put it out there.</p> <p>I think my main advice—and I hear this a lot on screenwriting podcasts—is just make the thing. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Make something, as opposed to trying to get permission to make something. </h3> <p>Because unless you're already in that system, it's going to be really hard to get permission to make it. </p> <p>Once you make something, that leads to something else, which leads to something else. So even if it's a very short thing, or even if it's filmed on your phone, just actually make the thing. That turned out to be the right thing for us.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Yes, I mean, I feel like that is what underpins us as independent creatives in general. As an independent author, I feel the same way. I'm never asking permission to put a book in the world. No, thank you.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Exactly. We have a vision and we do it. It's harder in some ways, but that liberation of being able to really fully create our vision without having to compromise it or wait for permission, I think it's such a beautiful thing.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Well, we're almost out of time, but I do want to ask you about creative confidence.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Hmm.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> I feel I'm getting a lot of sense about this at the moment, with all the AI stuff that's happening. When you've been creating a long time, like you and I have, we know our voice and we can lean into our voice. We are creatively confident. We'll fail a lot, but we'll just push on and try things and see what happens.</p> <p>Newer creators are struggling with this kind of confidence. How do I know what is my voice? How do I know what I like? How do I lean into this? </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">So give us some thoughts about how to find your voice and how to find that creative confidence if you don't feel you have it.</h3> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> I love that. One thing I will say is that I always think whatever is arising is powerful material to create from. So if a lack of confidence is arising, that's a really powerful feeling to directly explore and not just try to ignore.</p> <p>Although sometimes one has to just ignore those feelings. But to actually explore that feeling, because AI can't have that, right? AI can't really feel a crisis of confidence, and humans can. </p> <p>So that's a gift that we have, those kinds of sensitivities. I think to go really deep into whatever is arising, including the sense that we don't have the right to be creating, or we're not good enough, or whatever it is.</p> <p>Then I always do come back to a quote. I think it might have been John Berryman, but I'm forgetting which poet said it. A younger poet said, &#8220;How will I ever know if I'm any good?&#8221; And this famous poet said something like—I'm paraphrasing—&#8221;You'll never know if you're any good. If you have to know, don't write.&#8221;</p> <p>That has been really liberating to me, actually. It sounds a little harsh, but it's been really liberating to just let go of a sense of &#8220;good enough.&#8221; There is no good enough. The great writers never know if they're good enough.</p> <p>Coming back to this idea of just making without permission—the practice of doing the thing is being a writer. Caring and trying to improve our craft, that's the best that we can have.</p> <p>There's never going to be a moment where we're like, yes, I've nailed this. I am truly a hundred per cent a writer and I have found my voice. Everything's always changing anyway.</p> <p>I would say, either go into those feelings or let those feelings be there. Give them a little tea. Tell them, okay, you're welcome to be here, but you don't get to drive the boat. And then return to the practice of making.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Absolutely. Great. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?</h3> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Everything is on my website, which is <a href="https://aliciajo.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">AliciaJo.com</a>, and also on Instagram at <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ohaliciajo/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" title="">@ohaliciajo</a>. I'd love to say hello to anyone who's interested in similar topics.</p> <p><strong>Joanna:</strong> Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Alicia. That was great.</p> <p><strong>Alicia:</strong> Thank you. I love your podcast. I'm so grateful for all that you've given the writing world, Jo.</p><p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/03/02/creative-confidence-portfolio-careers-and-making-without-permission-with-alicia-jo-rabins/">Creative Confidence, Portfolio Careers, And Making Without Permission with Alicia Jo Rabins</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>