Episode 033 - Overcoming Mental and Emotional Barriers to Creativity with Rachael Herron
June 30, 2020
Rachael Herron discusses the barriers that can block our creativity and strategies and tactics we can use to overcome them. We discuss the idea of trusting that you'll land softly, the role that scaring yourself plays in nurturing creativity, and when and how to let go without shame if an endeavor is not feeding your creative drive.
Rachael Herron is the internationally bestselling author of more than two dozen books, including thriller (under R.H. Herron), mainstream fiction, feminist romance, memoir, and nonfiction about writing. She received her MFA in writing from Mills College, Oakland, and she teaches writing extension workshops at both UC Berkeley and Stanford. She is a proud member of the NaNoWriMo Writer’s Board. She’s a New Zealand citizen as well as an American.
"Just trust yourself that you're going to land softly somehow. There may be a bridge that you can't see, or you may just have to build wings on the way down, but it's, you won't crash." --Rachael Herron
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Rachael Herron. Hey, Rachael, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Rachael: I'm so good, Matty. So nice of you to ask me to be here today. I really am happy to be here.
[00:00:12] Matty: I'm excited to have you here. Let me give a little bit of background on you for our listeners. Rachael Herron is the internationally bestselling author of more than two dozen books, including thriller under R. H. Herron, mainstream fiction, feminist romance, memoir, and nonfiction about writing. She received her MFA in writing from Mills College, Oakland, and she teaches writing extension workshops at both UC Berkeley and Stanford. She's a proud member of the NaNoWriMo Writers Board and she is a New Zealand citizen as well as an American.
[00:00:45] I was excited to have Rachael on the show for a couple of reasons. Recently, I heard her speaking with Mark Lefebvre on the Draft 2Digital Spotlight live event and I also enjoyed Mark's subbing for J. Thorn as a guest on The Writer's Well podcast. The topic of that one was, if you couldn't write books, how would you be creative? And after I heard those two times when Rachael was speaking, I thought she would be the perfect person to talk about the topic that I'd like to address today, which is overcoming mental and emotional barriers to creativity.
[00:01:20] Rachael, before we really dive into that discuss a little bit what got you so interested in the topic of creativity and how did you decide that creative outlets were the right outlets for you?
[00:01:33] Rachael: I love this question. For me, creativity has always been a longing to fill a desire. Even when I was a little girl, I would collect the books that told you how to do a macramé thing using Popsicle sticks and yarn, making God's eyes, or whatever it was. I've always been a hands-on maker. My dad is maker. My mom was a maker. And creativity came naturally and was expected in our lives.
[00:02:02] However, I didn't really realize how important it was to my mental health for many years. It seems like whenever I wasn't making something or writing something, my mental health suffered, even if I hadn't actually thought about it. It just occurred that way. And I can't remember if I discussed this on a podcast that you heard recently or not, but there was a time when I was stuck in some depression and I wasn't writing. And I had found this old battered white table at a thrift shop or something like that, and I got a little pot of paint, just a little pot of blue paint, and I just painted the top of it blue. It was the most simple thing I've ever done and I could actually feel the dopamine hit, the serotonin rise in my body as I was just painting this. And that was the moment I realized that, "Oh, creativity for me has to be part of my life in order to keep myself mentally fit and mentally healthy."
[00:03:00] I have this theory that it's really true for most people. People say, "Oh, I'm not creative at all," but I think when you scratch a person, you'll find a creative in there somewhere.
[00:03:11] Matty: It's interesting that on The Writer's Well podcast, which you cohost with J., you've picked the topic of creativity as one that you guys address a lot, but you've also picked a format that really demands creativity. Describe what the format of The Writer's Well is because it's one that I haven't really heard on any other podcasts.
[00:00:06] Rachael: I'm so good, Matty. So nice of you to ask me to be here today. I really am happy to be here.
[00:00:12] Matty: I'm excited to have you here. Let me give a little bit of background on you for our listeners. Rachael Herron is the internationally bestselling author of more than two dozen books, including thriller under R. H. Herron, mainstream fiction, feminist romance, memoir, and nonfiction about writing. She received her MFA in writing from Mills College, Oakland, and she teaches writing extension workshops at both UC Berkeley and Stanford. She's a proud member of the NaNoWriMo Writers Board and she is a New Zealand citizen as well as an American.
[00:00:45] I was excited to have Rachael on the show for a couple of reasons. Recently, I heard her speaking with Mark Lefebvre on the Draft 2Digital Spotlight live event and I also enjoyed Mark's subbing for J. Thorn as a guest on The Writer's Well podcast. The topic of that one was, if you couldn't write books, how would you be creative? And after I heard those two times when Rachael was speaking, I thought she would be the perfect person to talk about the topic that I'd like to address today, which is overcoming mental and emotional barriers to creativity.
[00:01:20] Rachael, before we really dive into that discuss a little bit what got you so interested in the topic of creativity and how did you decide that creative outlets were the right outlets for you?
[00:01:33] Rachael: I love this question. For me, creativity has always been a longing to fill a desire. Even when I was a little girl, I would collect the books that told you how to do a macramé thing using Popsicle sticks and yarn, making God's eyes, or whatever it was. I've always been a hands-on maker. My dad is maker. My mom was a maker. And creativity came naturally and was expected in our lives.
[00:02:02] However, I didn't really realize how important it was to my mental health for many years. It seems like whenever I wasn't making something or writing something, my mental health suffered, even if I hadn't actually thought about it. It just occurred that way. And I can't remember if I discussed this on a podcast that you heard recently or not, but there was a time when I was stuck in some depression and I wasn't writing. And I had found this old battered white table at a thrift shop or something like that, and I got a little pot of paint, just a little pot of blue paint, and I just painted the top of it blue. It was the most simple thing I've ever done and I could actually feel the dopamine hit, the serotonin rise in my body as I was just painting this. And that was the moment I realized that, "Oh, creativity for me has to be part of my life in order to keep myself mentally fit and mentally healthy."
[00:03:00] I have this theory that it's really true for most people. People say, "Oh, I'm not creative at all," but I think when you scratch a person, you'll find a creative in there somewhere.
[00:03:11] Matty: It's interesting that on The Writer's Well podcast, which you cohost with J., you've picked the topic of creativity as one that you guys address a lot, but you've also picked a format that really demands creativity. Describe what the format of The Writer's Well is because it's one that I haven't really heard on any other podcasts.
read more ...
[00:03:30] Rachael: I don't even remember how we got to it, but J. and I decided to do a podcast together. He had been on my podcast and we just fell in love with each other. Our format is short because people don't have that much time. And one of us brings a question to the other one about writing or the writer's life or about something about the creative life. It's once a month, we talk about health particularly, and we have it divided up into spirituality, mental, physical, all of those.
[00:03:59] And those are not preplanned questions, but they're preplanned segments. So the last episode of each month is about health in some way, but otherwise, one person knows the question, the other one doesn't, and we flip flop back and forth. The person who doesn't know the question is always shocked and sometimes horrified by how good the question is. And we've been doing this now for almost four years.
[00:04:20] So it's interesting that we have already asked each other most of the questions that you can think of regarding writing, but we still keep coming up with more because we're living our lives and we're both full time writers and questions occur to us every week. So even if we have talked about something on a certain level two years ago, our answers have changed a lot of times. We've developed new things to talk about. So the creativity there is always moving around too.
[00:04:47] Matty: When that idea first came up, that one of you would come up with a question and the other one wouldn't know what it was, what was your response to that? Did that seem exciting? Did it seem frightening? A little of both?
[00:04:59] Rachael: No. J. and I have the same reaction to a lot of things, which is normally like, "Yeah, that's great, let's do it." We both liked to scare ourselves a little bit.
[00:05:10] Matty: Do you think that scaring yourself is an important part of nurturing creativity?
[00:05:15] Rachael: Yeah. Now that you say it, I really, really do. That leap that we take daily. And I was just talking about it with some students this week, where you get to the point in your writing where, you know you can't do this anymore. You can't revise this beast, or you can't finish this novel that you've been working on, and you just have to show up anyway and take that footstep into the void. And I was likening it to Indiana Jones, where he gets to the cliff and he says, "No one can jump this far, no one could leap this." And then it's a leap of faith and he puts his foot out and there's actually a stone bridge there that he couldn't see before. It was always there.
[00:05:49] But the terrifying part is putting out your foot and realizing that each footstep will be supported. We don't crash through this. Creativity does support you and it comes up to rescue you. What is the Ray Bradbury quote? Something like "leap and build the wings on the way down." That's the premise of it. Yeah. Just trust yourself that you're going to land softly somehow. There may be a bridge that you can't see, or you may just have to build wings on the way down, but you won't crash.
[00:06:19] Matty: If someone is in that position where they're standing on the edge of the cliff and they can't see that there's a bridge in front of them, or there's not a bridge in front of them, that's a great entree to the topic, which is how do you get past that fear?
[00:06:33] Rachael: I have two immediate gut answers to that.
[00:06:36] One is to start playing with the idea of feeling that fear and really honoring that fear and saying, "Yeah, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I can sit down and do this," and then setting that feeling to the side for half an hour, 15 minutes, or whatever the amount of time you have is, and just doing the work anyway. Ignoring the fear for a little while and doing it. That is one way that, all by yourself, you can start to build that bridge across this chasm that you don't know if you're going to be able to leap.
[00:07:07] But the other thing is, and I think it's not quite as important as that, but it's almost as important, is building community. I couldn't do this job without community. I mean, I probably could, but I would be miserable. You know, I wrote my first book totally alone. I didn't know about writing communities. I didn't find a writing community until after I'd sold my first book. And I wished that I had, because it took me so long to cross that chasm. Whereas if somebody's standing next to you that you trust and they're saying, "Oh yeah, I have that fear too. And I just write another 200 words. I just sit down and do it a little bit more. Everybody feels that fear. You're normal. You're not alone. You can do it." That's the second thing that's really important, I think.
[00:07:52] Matty: Do you feel as if there is both the barriers to creativity when someone has a goal--I want to write a book. I want to write a memoir. I want to write a poem. I want to paint a painting--where they need to reassess the goal in addition to reassessing their creative impetus.
[00:08:10] Rachael: Hmm. When do you think that that normally arises?
[00:08:17] Matty: Well, I'm just thinking about people who I may run into a couple of times a year at conference or something like that, and they're saying, "Oh, I haven't been able to write." And at what point do you decide that they need to keep trying different ways of getting past that creative barrier? Or at what point do you advise them that maybe they should take up painting instead?
[00:08:42] Rachael: Yeah, that's such a good and deep question. John Scalzi says, if someone asks you, "Do you want to write?" and your answer is "yes, but," you're using two words to say "no." And those are the kinds of people that we run into at conferences. So you say, "Have you finish that book yet?" and theirs is a "no, but." "No, but I'm working on it." And if we'd ask them, "Do you want to write?" ... "Yes, but it's just been a really hard year." "Yes, but I've got to get my kid into college." "Yes, but work is really busy."
[00:09:14] I don't think our place is ever to tell anyone that they shouldn't do something. Very very clear about that. However, it is our place, I think sometimes to present to them that truth. Do you want to write? "Yes, but," you're saying no, you're saying no, you don't want to write right now. And that is totally fine. And we can tell them it is absolutely fine if you don't want to write right now, it is also absolutely fine if people decide that they want to write a book and then just change their minds. There was a study that came out that said 81% of Americans when polled said they wanted to write a book and 97% of those who tried never finished a book. So your listeners, the ones who are actually doing the work and showing up, are anomalous. These are not the people in that study. These are the people who are actually getting it done.
[00:10:07] But it's okay to change your mind. I am one of those multi-passionate, multi-obsessive people that I love all things creative and I have basically tried everything, like when I threw myself into my jewelry making endeavor. I am high on input and intellection, so I like to learn everything about everything and buy all the supplies before I start something.
[00:10:29] I never got to the starting point. I learned everything about it. I knew how to hold the torch. I had all the silver equipment. I had literally everything you needed to make jewelry. And I just got over it and I sold everything because I could admit to myself that this was never going to be mine.
[00:10:43] The only things that have ever stuck with me are writing and fiber arts. I'm a knitter and a spinner and a weaver. If it has to do with taking fleece from an animal or a plant, I can make it into clothes. That is my apocalypse skill. But everything else I get really excited about. I'm going to write songs and learn the guitar and become a fabulous folk singer. And I know that I'm going to give it up in two months, but I'm really going to enjoy trying it for a while.
[00:11:12] And other people do that with writing and that's okay. However, I will say again that I think the people who are listening to your podcast and the people who self-select into this intentional study and listening to all the other podcasts too, they're doing it because writers are in this weird way a special breed. If you've known it for a long time, that you need to be a writer, even though you're not writing, people really do know when they should be a writer.
[00:11:38] Matty: I was thinking that there might be learnings that you could share from the experience that you had when you made that decision, that you weren't going to become a jewelry maker. Were there experiences you had or emotions you went through that you now share out with other authors, if they're facing a similar kind of thing, and they're saying "yes, but" or "no, but"?
[00:12:01] Rachael: The thing that I've learned over and over again with that kind of diving in and then giving up, is that there's no shame in giving up. It is a choice and "giving up" actually gives it a pejorative feel. Trying something and deciding it's not for you, there is no shame in that. I had a little bit of shame because I'd spent that much money on the supplies and my wife was like, "Really? You need to sell that stuff." So that was fine.
[00:12:24] But there's another challenge I tried because I've never been able to draw at all. I was like a stick figure person, and my wife is an artist, so she gave me the old book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which really takes you through learning to see things in order to draw them. And I started studying the book and doing the exercises in it, and I decided to post a picture of my drawing every day for a year on Instagram. I would I would draw one thing every day and post it on Instagram. That's actually how I got started on Instagram. If you ever scroll back in my Instagram feed to the very bottom that it's just drawings.
[00:12:59] Matty: It's 365 drawings that you did.
[00:13:01] Rachael: You know what? It's like 186 because number one, I learned that drawing as a skill is learnable, just like writing a first draft is learnable. And just like revision as a set of tools is learnable. These amorphous things that we think are so out there, so nebulous, they actually are a skill set. And I learned from this book, I didn't become great, but I learned how to see, I learned how to put what I saw onto the page.
[00:13:26] And I got okay at it. I was not good, but I could actually draw, and I'd never been able to. And then I think it was on day 187. I was really struggling. I'm like, "God, I've got to draw a picture because I owe Instagram. I've made this promise." And then I thought, but I'm not an artist. I don't want to be an artist, a visual artist. It's okay if I just stop today and all the shame just went away, and I stopped, and I never drew again.
[00:13:53] I don't think I have picked up a pencil and sketched anything since then, even though I enjoyed the practice of it, it was really meditative. but being able to let go without shame, I think is something that is really important.
[00:14:07] Writers though, again, that special breed. There are writers who show up that want to write a book because they want to make money. Ha. Or they want to write a memoir. Those are the non-writers who show up and take classes and suddenly get really interested. Those are the people I think for whom it is most dangerous that they're going to stop and that's fine, that hasn't been their dream all their life.
[00:14:30] But the writers who show up and say, "Oh my gosh, I've wanted to be a writer since I was 10," you know, "and I know that." Those are the people that, when they say "yes, but," these are the people I encourage you to start thinking about, "All right, you've been saying no, you've been actually saying no by saying 'yes, but,' so now how do you say yes, just a yes." Yes, and. "Yes, and I'm going to sit down tomorrow for 45 minutes and just bash something out."
[00:14:55] Matty: I really like what you were saying before about, you scratch a person and you find creativity there because in some cases, the putting the writing aside might be easier if it was framed up as, you're ostensibly spending time on writing and by choosing to spend some time on writing, you're choosing not to spend time on something else. Is it that you have a creative outlet, but you haven't found it yet? It's not like, "I tried writing and I failed," it's that "I experimented with writing and then it turned out what I really wanted to be doing was ...
[00:15:26] Rachael: Sculpting ...
[00:15:26] Matty: ... making bird whistles." Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:29] Rachael: Is there another part of creativity that will scratch that itch for you, because I think most of us really do have this. And I've heard from people who say, "No, when I get off work, I go home, and I really liked to watch TV. I'm never going to be a creative person." And I was just wanting to shake them and say, "It's in there. It's in there somewhere."
[00:15:47] Matty: Yeah. When people mentioned things like, "yes, but," or "no, but I have a job / a spouse / children / hobbies / have to take the kids to soccer," whatever those things that are sort of the practical or logistical barriers, do you think that that's legitimate, that they're practical logistical barriers? Or do you think that under all of them there's always a mental or emotional thing?
[00:16:14] Rachael: Yes, I would say 98% of the time, it is an emotional mental barrier. And it is real. It's a real thing. Their barrier that they're putting up, they really feel it. However, it's not valid. It's a real feeling, but it doesn't, it doesn't really matter.
[00:16:30] The people who are off scot-free in my book are single mothers. Single full-time, working mothers who don't have another spouse for support, and they are taking care of three or five children. I've seen people in my classes who are single mothers of three to five children who are working full time and they're still managing to write books because they write in 15 minutes a day, they can find that, they do it in the time while their kid is in the tub. They scratch by hand on a piece of paper. I have never found anybody who has told me that they're too busy to write for whom it is actually true. I have a student who works three jobs. She's a teacher. She's a full time junior high school teacher and she has two other part time teaching jobs. She has five children and she suddenly had to do everything at home during COVID, and during COVID in the last 90 days, she wrote her first book.
[00:17:20] Matty: Oh, my gosh.
[00:17:21] Rachael: And so she did it. I teach them 90 Days to Done course. I'm thinking if she can do it, anyone can do it.
[00:17:29] I don't ever advocate for losing sleep. That's the one thing that I don't like to see when people start actually losing sleep that they need to try to fit writing in, because I think that negatively affects the body and then your mental state and everything that goes along with it. But we all have something we can do less of. For me, it's usually Twitter, or looking at Instagram, something like that.
[00:17:50] Before I went full time, I worked in 911 for 17 years and I worked never fewer than 60 hours. It was usually more than 80, more like 80 to a hundred hours a week. And I think I did my first 12 or 15 books while I was still doing that job. It can be done.
[00:18:04] Matty: Can you write a book while you're at work at 911--like, are there downtimes?
[00:18:09] Rachael: There are downtimes. Sometimes I would steal some of that time, which was totally legal in my employer's eyes because of my peers, who were watching TV or reading books, their only job was to stay awake in case the airplane crashed or in case the building burned down or case somebody needed CPR instructions, they had to stay awake. They were doing things that made them happy and sometimes I would write. Those were the best days.
[00:18:33] Matty: Now that's opens up a whole other interesting topic, which is that I would imagine that working as a 911 dispatcher gives you a whole bunch of fodder for creative work. And I've also heard people say, "Well, my life isn't very interesting. Nothing interesting happens to me, so I don't have anything to write about." How would you address that kind of barrier?
[00:18:59] Rachael: 911 was very good fodder, and it's one of the reasons I got into it after I got my MFA, rather than teaching. I wanted to go into a job where I could take a headset off at the end of the day and leave it there. But I did write several books that were inspired by true events that happened while I was on the job.
[00:19:17] But the majority of my books are not like that. They've just been something that flies into my brain when I'm on a walk. I think I've written two books that were inspired by People magazine articles, the feature in People magazine at the back. I loved those and I think, "Oh gosh, what would that be like?"
[00:19:34] And I think that any of us run out of our own interesting stuff after a book or two, honestly. We keep putting ourselves as characters and character traits into our books, but in terms of what really happened to us, we just, we run out. You don't have to be an interesting person. A good friend of mine writes the most exciting, scary, crazy books. And she would be the first person to tell you she's the most boring person on the planet. And I think she actually is. Like finding a slug in the garden for her big, big day, but she writes books that will just chill you, things that are much scarier than I could ever--
[00:20:11] Matty: Well, a slug. You just expand on the slug experience. You've got a horror movie or a horror book.
[00:20:18] Rachael: That's true though. We're still talking about that visceral internal eech response. She's really putting that into books. Yeah, very good point. There is no life that is too boring to be an incredible writer. And also, along that line, people who want to write memoir who say, "Well, my life is too boring," there's no such thing. There was a beautiful memoir by a woman with a chronic illness who wrote a memoir about watching her snail, it was in a little terrarium right next to her. That is the memoir and it is incredible. It's a whole world just watching the snail basically eat vegetables. <The Sounds of a Wild Snail Eating>
[00:20:55] Matty: We've been talking about people who are maybe beginner writers or beginner authors, and maybe trying to just get to that first book. I had polled some of my author friends when I knew we were going to have this conversation to find out what their mental and emotional creative barriers were. And one of them said, and this is a woman who's a very successful thriller writer, "Sometimes I worry too much about how what I'm writing now is going to hold up to what I have written in the past." How would you respond to someone who has that concern?
[00:21:36] Rachael: I think that that is a very natural concern. I have a lot of fears around writing, a lot of people do, but one of my biggest fears is resting on my laurels and not trying to write a better book than the one that came before it. And if the one that came before it, you either know was excellent or it was really critically acclaimed, I think there's a lot of tension wrapped up in the writing of the next book.
[00:22:04] But I really rest in and believe in the fact that I am a smarter human being, I am a better writer than I was during my last book. I could be lazy and not do the work, and that would be letting myself down, but as long as I'm not lazy, and as long as I believe I've written a better book than the one that came before it, I know that I am succeeding. That's not to say that readers will always agree. I've had some books come out, some of my older books, I'm like, "Why do people love that one so much?" This one that came after it is 10 times better and has lower stars on Amazon" or whatever. And I can see that, but it's all a matter of taste. You can't explain how people react to a book, but you can live up to your own expectations. Does that make sense? Yeah.
[00:22:48] Matty: You had talked about the importance of community, which is a topic I'm very interested in and the readers are of course as much a part of that community as fellow writers and authors. And it's probably a fine line when you start thinking about reader reactions and do readers like one book better than the other, or did they like your last book better than the current book? And if someone is wrestling with that, having put out a book that the readers didn't love, and now they're struggling with that, "How can I keep going when I've gotten this negative feedback from my readers?" What's your counsel there?
[00:23:27] Rachael: My counsel would be something I've never said before, but it just came to me. We all know that there's that cognitive bias that we can hear a hundred things praising us for one thing, but if one person says, "Nah, you're not really good at that," that's going to be the one thing we remember. So trying to write while thinking about your past bad reviews is I find just debilitating. Absolutely debilitating. And that is the point at which I would say to that person, "Look, get a printout. Print out every five-star review you ever got on Amazon and put it in a file folder. And every time you're tempted to look at any other review, instead open that and look at it. Those people telling you about your strengths will bolster you and you will still continue to use those strengths."
[00:24:19] Thinking about what other people didn't like about your work is sometimes ... it's honestly sometimes okay. If a majority of people say one thing about your work, like, "Love this book, but really hated how the heroin never had her own agency, her own autonomy in this book." If everybody says that know it might be good to think about, "Oh, I'll give my next character more autonomy." But that's only if you can do that healthily. If you are really stuck and beating yourself up with those one, two, and three stars, it's time for tough love. That's when your community should step in and they should save you. Have somebody change your Amazon password so you can't even order toilet paper.
[00:24:57] I just finished my 27th book and I'm honest to God at the place now where I never look at reviews. The exception to that is that sometimes I'll look at one-star reviews because I find them incredibly hilarious and amusing. But I don't believe really any review. They either loved my book and think it's the best thing ever, which isn't true, it's not the best thing ever, or they hate it and think it's the worst thing ever. And that's also not true. I look at the star rating and that's about it, but if it's being debilitating, print out the good stuff and just read it until that's the only thing you can remember and keep going, because that's so hard.
[00:25:29] Matty: That's great advice. You had been nice enough to send me some examples of some of the mental and emotional barriers to creativity that you had encountered and one of them was you're not sure you're the one to tell the story. I can understand that as far as nonfiction goes, "Oh, somebody else is more of an expert, who am I ..." Talk a little bit about how that plays out in the fiction world.
[00:25:54] Rachael: In the fiction world, the idea that I'm not the person to tell this story, there's two ways of looking at that. The first is, I'm trying to tell a story that maybe it has a heritage of a lot of other stories, you're trying to retell a Jane Austen story and you're asking yourself, do I really have the knowledge that it takes to do this kind of thing. I might not be the right person for that. That's another one of those feelings that we have to think about, accept, feel in our bodies, set aside, and do the work. There will never be another person who can tell the story in your voice. There will never be.
[00:26:30] I've always wanted to do this challenge with a couple of my best writing friends, where we all get the same logline premise for a book, and then we all write the book and it would be completely different even though the plot beats might be the same, but the book would be completely different. You are the only person who can ever tell the story and that's why you should do it.
[00:26:51] The question nowadays, though, if it comes up, why am I the right person to tell this story is something to be careful with. If you are trying to write outside, especially outside of your own race, especially if you are white and you're trying to write a black story or a Hispanic story, there has to be a lot of dialogue with yourself over why you are trying to do that and not allowing the room for somebody else who is in that race to write that story. Those people have been marginalized in publishing. So if that's the actual question, that's a completely different conversation to have with yourself.
[00:27:27] But I think you and I were really talking about the feeling of inferiority that I'm just not good enough. I'm not the best writer for this story. And that, we're always going to feel that, we're always gonna feel that about every book that we write. It's like, "Oh, I'm just not good enough. I can't do this." Yeah.
[00:27:41] Matty: There were two that I wanted to discuss. I'm going to pull one from a blog post and one from another episode of The Writer's Well. The one I wanted to pull from the blog post is a very funny one about the danger of making resolutions. And there were the three things that you advised against, the dangers of resolutions. The first one is, I'm not in my right mind when I make them. The second one was everyone else does them better. And the third one is I always pick the wrong things to resolve.
[00:28:15] Rachael: Did I really write that. Is that from me? Or is it somebody else? That sounds familiar. I agree with all of those things, but I also have a very limited memory when it comes to my old blog posts.
[00:28:25] Matty: It's at Rachael Herron.com, so you might have a guest blogger.
[00:28:29] Rachael: I don't have guests.
[00:28:32] Matty: Do you think that resolutions can be a support of creativity or do you think that there's always just a problem with deciding you're going to be creative on January 1st.
[00:28:45] Rachael:
[00:28:45] Actually now I'm remembering writing that because none of us are in our right minds, that calendar that we live by makes us think that arbitrarily January 1st is unblotted. We haven't screwed anything up about this year and January 1st, we're going to be able to become a new person. Those kinds of resolutions normally don't stick.
[00:29:04] However, I do love a challenge resolution, which is a limited time-based kind of resolution like drawing a picture every day for a month, or NaNoWriMo is a perfect example. You make a resolution arbitrarily on November 1st to write a novel in the month of November. And you can see the end of it but waking up on January 1st and becoming the writer you always meant to be, you will let yourself down. And when we let ourselves down, that is when we're training ourselves with negative consequences. Right? Every time we don't sit down to write during the day we're self-flagellating, we're beating ourselves up because again another day passed by, "I'm still not a good enough person, I still didn't do what I wanted to do."
[00:29:46] Whereas in NaNoWriMo, you set a little--well, it's not a little goal, --you set a goal of words and every time you hit it, you're getting that big dopamine hit and those positive vibes. For me, I like to set resolutions a couple a week and make the bar for hitting them so low.
[00:30:01] I've already talked a few times on this podcast about writing for 15 minutes. There was a time where I was depressed, working too much, and I had a book due, and I literally wrote the whole book in 15-minute bursts. I'm using the little app, Write or Die, which I really love, because I couldn't--have you ever heard of that one?
[00:30:19] Matty: I have not.
[00:30:19] Rachael: It's pretty great. It negatively rewards you if you stop writing, so the whole goal of this thing is to keep writing without thinking, and then you have something to revise.
[00:30:29] Matty: It sounds kind of like a horror story, too--we'll have to turn that over to Stephen King. He's probably already done that.
[00:30:35] Rachael: It has ratcheting up levels of punishment. But the worst one is if you don't type, it'll start scrambling your words backwards and then erasing them and you can't get them back. There's no controls and just eat them. I would turn it on for 15 minutes and I would have to write, and I wrote my book this way.
[00:30:53] Matty: It sounds horrifying.
[00:30:55] Rachael: Yeah, it is horrifying! It's great. There's also something called Written? Kitten! And I think every 200 words, a kitten will pop up on your screen if you're better with positive reinforcement, but just the knowledge that we can set these tiny, tiny, tiny little goals and hit them and win, and then that means every day it feels good to do what you're doing.
[00:31:16] I am actually trying to learn the guitar and the way I'd always tried to learn the guitar in the past was I would sit down until I got frustrated and stop. I was negatively rewarding myself every single time I sat down. Right now, my goal is to do it for 10 minutes a day. And even though in 10 minutes I'm not tired of it, I'm really still having a good time, I put the guitar down because now my brain is getting associated with, "Oh my gosh. Every time I touch the guitar, it's really fun." And I'm not frustrated. We should do the same things with our writing and just these tiny little goals, tiny little resolutions that add up into long extended habits over the course of a lifetime.
[00:31:52] Matty: Are there other tips like that? That if people are not saying "yes, but" or "no, but," but they're not making progress, and one of the reasons is they've trained themselves to be angsty whenever they approach the keyboard, are there other tips you can offer to try to get past that?
[00:32:11] Rachael: The whole idea of rewards, I think, is incredibly valuable. I'm pretty good at removing things from myself and giving them back to myself as a reward. So on the days that I need to write, I do not allow myself to read for pleasure until my words are done, and reading for pleasure is basically the whole goal of my life. I will write my words to get it. And that is my positive reinforcement, giving yourself that goal.
[00:32:36] The problem does come though, because we are human beings and we are all, in a very Buddhist way, trying to avoid suffering, nobody wants to be physically hurt. Unless it is actually producing pleasure, but we will not go down that path ...
[00:32:51] Matty: That's a whole other podcast.
[00:32:53] Rachael: That's a different podcast. But all of us as human beings are trying to avoid suffering. Writing is suffering. Writing is always a little piece of suffering because we are having to make decisions.
[00:33:04] We're having to make decisions at a first draft of the words that we put down and we're having to make decisions in revision in fixing things. Those are not comfortable things to do. They are pleasurable. They give us really deep pleasure because we can get in flow. We enjoy the writing process once we get there.
[00:33:19] But when we think about doing it, it produces anxiety in most of us, because it's going to require brainwork, which is hard. Or you could sit down and watch Netflix. Given a 50 / 50 chance, would you rather do this or this? I'm going to choose Netflix all day long because I'm trying to avoid suffering.
[00:33:36] So for me, for that person who has that angst, one of the really big things for me to know is that, "Oh, I feel like this every single day." Starting my 28th book, I still don't want to write every single day and I just ignore it and I show up and five minutes into a writing session, I'm happy to be there.
[00:33:56] It's just that preceding 15 minutes of getting there. And that's why, personally, I try to get to the page as soon as I can in the morning, because I'm not quite awake enough and smart enough to talk myself out of it. And once I've talked myself out of it a couple of times during the day, even though I hope I'll get to it during the rest of the day, I won't. I won't. I should just give up. I'm not going to write that day. Accepting that nobody really wants to write and doing it anyway.
[00:34:24] Matty: Rachael, this has been so helpful and you and J. and the other people that you do podcasting with have been so helpful. And we were never going to be able to cover all the tips that I'm sure that you have in this time we have together, but tell people where they can go to find out more about you, your work and your great advice online
[00:34:43] Rachael: Thank you. I do have, an email newsletter that I send out to writers that is just encouragement to get your work done. And you can find that by going to RachaelHerron.com/write. And for people who are really interested in the process of creativity, I am very proud of my Patreon essays that I send out once a month on creativity, some aspect of it, and they're long, well thought out essays, and I'm slowly collecting them into collections, but they are right now available nowhere else. I think there's probably 40 of them up there and they're like 4,000 words each, so there's a lot of back material you can get on Patreon for just a dollar a month. And that's patreon.com/Rachael if anybody's interested in those kinds of things.
[00:35:29] Or come see me at The Writer's Well, which you mentioned, or my other podcast, which is called How Do You Write? where I talk about how basically it's all that we're talking about today is how do you get yourself to write? I talked to authors about their processes.
[00:35:42] I'll just say this on your podcast. I'm going to invite you to be on my podcast because I want to talk about how you write and it's very nice to talk to you.
[00:35:48] Matty: I would love to do that. Thank you so much.
[00:35:50] Rachael: Happy writing.
[00:03:59] And those are not preplanned questions, but they're preplanned segments. So the last episode of each month is about health in some way, but otherwise, one person knows the question, the other one doesn't, and we flip flop back and forth. The person who doesn't know the question is always shocked and sometimes horrified by how good the question is. And we've been doing this now for almost four years.
[00:04:20] So it's interesting that we have already asked each other most of the questions that you can think of regarding writing, but we still keep coming up with more because we're living our lives and we're both full time writers and questions occur to us every week. So even if we have talked about something on a certain level two years ago, our answers have changed a lot of times. We've developed new things to talk about. So the creativity there is always moving around too.
[00:04:47] Matty: When that idea first came up, that one of you would come up with a question and the other one wouldn't know what it was, what was your response to that? Did that seem exciting? Did it seem frightening? A little of both?
[00:04:59] Rachael: No. J. and I have the same reaction to a lot of things, which is normally like, "Yeah, that's great, let's do it." We both liked to scare ourselves a little bit.
[00:05:10] Matty: Do you think that scaring yourself is an important part of nurturing creativity?
[00:05:15] Rachael: Yeah. Now that you say it, I really, really do. That leap that we take daily. And I was just talking about it with some students this week, where you get to the point in your writing where, you know you can't do this anymore. You can't revise this beast, or you can't finish this novel that you've been working on, and you just have to show up anyway and take that footstep into the void. And I was likening it to Indiana Jones, where he gets to the cliff and he says, "No one can jump this far, no one could leap this." And then it's a leap of faith and he puts his foot out and there's actually a stone bridge there that he couldn't see before. It was always there.
[00:05:49] But the terrifying part is putting out your foot and realizing that each footstep will be supported. We don't crash through this. Creativity does support you and it comes up to rescue you. What is the Ray Bradbury quote? Something like "leap and build the wings on the way down." That's the premise of it. Yeah. Just trust yourself that you're going to land softly somehow. There may be a bridge that you can't see, or you may just have to build wings on the way down, but you won't crash.
[00:06:19] Matty: If someone is in that position where they're standing on the edge of the cliff and they can't see that there's a bridge in front of them, or there's not a bridge in front of them, that's a great entree to the topic, which is how do you get past that fear?
[00:06:33] Rachael: I have two immediate gut answers to that.
[00:06:36] One is to start playing with the idea of feeling that fear and really honoring that fear and saying, "Yeah, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I can sit down and do this," and then setting that feeling to the side for half an hour, 15 minutes, or whatever the amount of time you have is, and just doing the work anyway. Ignoring the fear for a little while and doing it. That is one way that, all by yourself, you can start to build that bridge across this chasm that you don't know if you're going to be able to leap.
[00:07:07] But the other thing is, and I think it's not quite as important as that, but it's almost as important, is building community. I couldn't do this job without community. I mean, I probably could, but I would be miserable. You know, I wrote my first book totally alone. I didn't know about writing communities. I didn't find a writing community until after I'd sold my first book. And I wished that I had, because it took me so long to cross that chasm. Whereas if somebody's standing next to you that you trust and they're saying, "Oh yeah, I have that fear too. And I just write another 200 words. I just sit down and do it a little bit more. Everybody feels that fear. You're normal. You're not alone. You can do it." That's the second thing that's really important, I think.
[00:07:52] Matty: Do you feel as if there is both the barriers to creativity when someone has a goal--I want to write a book. I want to write a memoir. I want to write a poem. I want to paint a painting--where they need to reassess the goal in addition to reassessing their creative impetus.
[00:08:10] Rachael: Hmm. When do you think that that normally arises?
[00:08:17] Matty: Well, I'm just thinking about people who I may run into a couple of times a year at conference or something like that, and they're saying, "Oh, I haven't been able to write." And at what point do you decide that they need to keep trying different ways of getting past that creative barrier? Or at what point do you advise them that maybe they should take up painting instead?
[00:08:42] Rachael: Yeah, that's such a good and deep question. John Scalzi says, if someone asks you, "Do you want to write?" and your answer is "yes, but," you're using two words to say "no." And those are the kinds of people that we run into at conferences. So you say, "Have you finish that book yet?" and theirs is a "no, but." "No, but I'm working on it." And if we'd ask them, "Do you want to write?" ... "Yes, but it's just been a really hard year." "Yes, but I've got to get my kid into college." "Yes, but work is really busy."
[00:09:14] I don't think our place is ever to tell anyone that they shouldn't do something. Very very clear about that. However, it is our place, I think sometimes to present to them that truth. Do you want to write? "Yes, but," you're saying no, you're saying no, you don't want to write right now. And that is totally fine. And we can tell them it is absolutely fine if you don't want to write right now, it is also absolutely fine if people decide that they want to write a book and then just change their minds. There was a study that came out that said 81% of Americans when polled said they wanted to write a book and 97% of those who tried never finished a book. So your listeners, the ones who are actually doing the work and showing up, are anomalous. These are not the people in that study. These are the people who are actually getting it done.
[00:10:07] But it's okay to change your mind. I am one of those multi-passionate, multi-obsessive people that I love all things creative and I have basically tried everything, like when I threw myself into my jewelry making endeavor. I am high on input and intellection, so I like to learn everything about everything and buy all the supplies before I start something.
[00:10:29] I never got to the starting point. I learned everything about it. I knew how to hold the torch. I had all the silver equipment. I had literally everything you needed to make jewelry. And I just got over it and I sold everything because I could admit to myself that this was never going to be mine.
[00:10:43] The only things that have ever stuck with me are writing and fiber arts. I'm a knitter and a spinner and a weaver. If it has to do with taking fleece from an animal or a plant, I can make it into clothes. That is my apocalypse skill. But everything else I get really excited about. I'm going to write songs and learn the guitar and become a fabulous folk singer. And I know that I'm going to give it up in two months, but I'm really going to enjoy trying it for a while.
[00:11:12] And other people do that with writing and that's okay. However, I will say again that I think the people who are listening to your podcast and the people who self-select into this intentional study and listening to all the other podcasts too, they're doing it because writers are in this weird way a special breed. If you've known it for a long time, that you need to be a writer, even though you're not writing, people really do know when they should be a writer.
[00:11:38] Matty: I was thinking that there might be learnings that you could share from the experience that you had when you made that decision, that you weren't going to become a jewelry maker. Were there experiences you had or emotions you went through that you now share out with other authors, if they're facing a similar kind of thing, and they're saying "yes, but" or "no, but"?
[00:12:01] Rachael: The thing that I've learned over and over again with that kind of diving in and then giving up, is that there's no shame in giving up. It is a choice and "giving up" actually gives it a pejorative feel. Trying something and deciding it's not for you, there is no shame in that. I had a little bit of shame because I'd spent that much money on the supplies and my wife was like, "Really? You need to sell that stuff." So that was fine.
[00:12:24] But there's another challenge I tried because I've never been able to draw at all. I was like a stick figure person, and my wife is an artist, so she gave me the old book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which really takes you through learning to see things in order to draw them. And I started studying the book and doing the exercises in it, and I decided to post a picture of my drawing every day for a year on Instagram. I would I would draw one thing every day and post it on Instagram. That's actually how I got started on Instagram. If you ever scroll back in my Instagram feed to the very bottom that it's just drawings.
[00:12:59] Matty: It's 365 drawings that you did.
[00:13:01] Rachael: You know what? It's like 186 because number one, I learned that drawing as a skill is learnable, just like writing a first draft is learnable. And just like revision as a set of tools is learnable. These amorphous things that we think are so out there, so nebulous, they actually are a skill set. And I learned from this book, I didn't become great, but I learned how to see, I learned how to put what I saw onto the page.
[00:13:26] And I got okay at it. I was not good, but I could actually draw, and I'd never been able to. And then I think it was on day 187. I was really struggling. I'm like, "God, I've got to draw a picture because I owe Instagram. I've made this promise." And then I thought, but I'm not an artist. I don't want to be an artist, a visual artist. It's okay if I just stop today and all the shame just went away, and I stopped, and I never drew again.
[00:13:53] I don't think I have picked up a pencil and sketched anything since then, even though I enjoyed the practice of it, it was really meditative. but being able to let go without shame, I think is something that is really important.
[00:14:07] Writers though, again, that special breed. There are writers who show up that want to write a book because they want to make money. Ha. Or they want to write a memoir. Those are the non-writers who show up and take classes and suddenly get really interested. Those are the people I think for whom it is most dangerous that they're going to stop and that's fine, that hasn't been their dream all their life.
[00:14:30] But the writers who show up and say, "Oh my gosh, I've wanted to be a writer since I was 10," you know, "and I know that." Those are the people that, when they say "yes, but," these are the people I encourage you to start thinking about, "All right, you've been saying no, you've been actually saying no by saying 'yes, but,' so now how do you say yes, just a yes." Yes, and. "Yes, and I'm going to sit down tomorrow for 45 minutes and just bash something out."
[00:14:55] Matty: I really like what you were saying before about, you scratch a person and you find creativity there because in some cases, the putting the writing aside might be easier if it was framed up as, you're ostensibly spending time on writing and by choosing to spend some time on writing, you're choosing not to spend time on something else. Is it that you have a creative outlet, but you haven't found it yet? It's not like, "I tried writing and I failed," it's that "I experimented with writing and then it turned out what I really wanted to be doing was ...
[00:15:26] Rachael: Sculpting ...
[00:15:26] Matty: ... making bird whistles." Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:29] Rachael: Is there another part of creativity that will scratch that itch for you, because I think most of us really do have this. And I've heard from people who say, "No, when I get off work, I go home, and I really liked to watch TV. I'm never going to be a creative person." And I was just wanting to shake them and say, "It's in there. It's in there somewhere."
[00:15:47] Matty: Yeah. When people mentioned things like, "yes, but," or "no, but I have a job / a spouse / children / hobbies / have to take the kids to soccer," whatever those things that are sort of the practical or logistical barriers, do you think that that's legitimate, that they're practical logistical barriers? Or do you think that under all of them there's always a mental or emotional thing?
[00:16:14] Rachael: Yes, I would say 98% of the time, it is an emotional mental barrier. And it is real. It's a real thing. Their barrier that they're putting up, they really feel it. However, it's not valid. It's a real feeling, but it doesn't, it doesn't really matter.
[00:16:30] The people who are off scot-free in my book are single mothers. Single full-time, working mothers who don't have another spouse for support, and they are taking care of three or five children. I've seen people in my classes who are single mothers of three to five children who are working full time and they're still managing to write books because they write in 15 minutes a day, they can find that, they do it in the time while their kid is in the tub. They scratch by hand on a piece of paper. I have never found anybody who has told me that they're too busy to write for whom it is actually true. I have a student who works three jobs. She's a teacher. She's a full time junior high school teacher and she has two other part time teaching jobs. She has five children and she suddenly had to do everything at home during COVID, and during COVID in the last 90 days, she wrote her first book.
[00:17:20] Matty: Oh, my gosh.
[00:17:21] Rachael: And so she did it. I teach them 90 Days to Done course. I'm thinking if she can do it, anyone can do it.
[00:17:29] I don't ever advocate for losing sleep. That's the one thing that I don't like to see when people start actually losing sleep that they need to try to fit writing in, because I think that negatively affects the body and then your mental state and everything that goes along with it. But we all have something we can do less of. For me, it's usually Twitter, or looking at Instagram, something like that.
[00:17:50] Before I went full time, I worked in 911 for 17 years and I worked never fewer than 60 hours. It was usually more than 80, more like 80 to a hundred hours a week. And I think I did my first 12 or 15 books while I was still doing that job. It can be done.
[00:18:04] Matty: Can you write a book while you're at work at 911--like, are there downtimes?
[00:18:09] Rachael: There are downtimes. Sometimes I would steal some of that time, which was totally legal in my employer's eyes because of my peers, who were watching TV or reading books, their only job was to stay awake in case the airplane crashed or in case the building burned down or case somebody needed CPR instructions, they had to stay awake. They were doing things that made them happy and sometimes I would write. Those were the best days.
[00:18:33] Matty: Now that's opens up a whole other interesting topic, which is that I would imagine that working as a 911 dispatcher gives you a whole bunch of fodder for creative work. And I've also heard people say, "Well, my life isn't very interesting. Nothing interesting happens to me, so I don't have anything to write about." How would you address that kind of barrier?
[00:18:59] Rachael: 911 was very good fodder, and it's one of the reasons I got into it after I got my MFA, rather than teaching. I wanted to go into a job where I could take a headset off at the end of the day and leave it there. But I did write several books that were inspired by true events that happened while I was on the job.
[00:19:17] But the majority of my books are not like that. They've just been something that flies into my brain when I'm on a walk. I think I've written two books that were inspired by People magazine articles, the feature in People magazine at the back. I loved those and I think, "Oh gosh, what would that be like?"
[00:19:34] And I think that any of us run out of our own interesting stuff after a book or two, honestly. We keep putting ourselves as characters and character traits into our books, but in terms of what really happened to us, we just, we run out. You don't have to be an interesting person. A good friend of mine writes the most exciting, scary, crazy books. And she would be the first person to tell you she's the most boring person on the planet. And I think she actually is. Like finding a slug in the garden for her big, big day, but she writes books that will just chill you, things that are much scarier than I could ever--
[00:20:11] Matty: Well, a slug. You just expand on the slug experience. You've got a horror movie or a horror book.
[00:20:18] Rachael: That's true though. We're still talking about that visceral internal eech response. She's really putting that into books. Yeah, very good point. There is no life that is too boring to be an incredible writer. And also, along that line, people who want to write memoir who say, "Well, my life is too boring," there's no such thing. There was a beautiful memoir by a woman with a chronic illness who wrote a memoir about watching her snail, it was in a little terrarium right next to her. That is the memoir and it is incredible. It's a whole world just watching the snail basically eat vegetables. <The Sounds of a Wild Snail Eating>
[00:20:55] Matty: We've been talking about people who are maybe beginner writers or beginner authors, and maybe trying to just get to that first book. I had polled some of my author friends when I knew we were going to have this conversation to find out what their mental and emotional creative barriers were. And one of them said, and this is a woman who's a very successful thriller writer, "Sometimes I worry too much about how what I'm writing now is going to hold up to what I have written in the past." How would you respond to someone who has that concern?
[00:21:36] Rachael: I think that that is a very natural concern. I have a lot of fears around writing, a lot of people do, but one of my biggest fears is resting on my laurels and not trying to write a better book than the one that came before it. And if the one that came before it, you either know was excellent or it was really critically acclaimed, I think there's a lot of tension wrapped up in the writing of the next book.
[00:22:04] But I really rest in and believe in the fact that I am a smarter human being, I am a better writer than I was during my last book. I could be lazy and not do the work, and that would be letting myself down, but as long as I'm not lazy, and as long as I believe I've written a better book than the one that came before it, I know that I am succeeding. That's not to say that readers will always agree. I've had some books come out, some of my older books, I'm like, "Why do people love that one so much?" This one that came after it is 10 times better and has lower stars on Amazon" or whatever. And I can see that, but it's all a matter of taste. You can't explain how people react to a book, but you can live up to your own expectations. Does that make sense? Yeah.
[00:22:48] Matty: You had talked about the importance of community, which is a topic I'm very interested in and the readers are of course as much a part of that community as fellow writers and authors. And it's probably a fine line when you start thinking about reader reactions and do readers like one book better than the other, or did they like your last book better than the current book? And if someone is wrestling with that, having put out a book that the readers didn't love, and now they're struggling with that, "How can I keep going when I've gotten this negative feedback from my readers?" What's your counsel there?
[00:23:27] Rachael: My counsel would be something I've never said before, but it just came to me. We all know that there's that cognitive bias that we can hear a hundred things praising us for one thing, but if one person says, "Nah, you're not really good at that," that's going to be the one thing we remember. So trying to write while thinking about your past bad reviews is I find just debilitating. Absolutely debilitating. And that is the point at which I would say to that person, "Look, get a printout. Print out every five-star review you ever got on Amazon and put it in a file folder. And every time you're tempted to look at any other review, instead open that and look at it. Those people telling you about your strengths will bolster you and you will still continue to use those strengths."
[00:24:19] Thinking about what other people didn't like about your work is sometimes ... it's honestly sometimes okay. If a majority of people say one thing about your work, like, "Love this book, but really hated how the heroin never had her own agency, her own autonomy in this book." If everybody says that know it might be good to think about, "Oh, I'll give my next character more autonomy." But that's only if you can do that healthily. If you are really stuck and beating yourself up with those one, two, and three stars, it's time for tough love. That's when your community should step in and they should save you. Have somebody change your Amazon password so you can't even order toilet paper.
[00:24:57] I just finished my 27th book and I'm honest to God at the place now where I never look at reviews. The exception to that is that sometimes I'll look at one-star reviews because I find them incredibly hilarious and amusing. But I don't believe really any review. They either loved my book and think it's the best thing ever, which isn't true, it's not the best thing ever, or they hate it and think it's the worst thing ever. And that's also not true. I look at the star rating and that's about it, but if it's being debilitating, print out the good stuff and just read it until that's the only thing you can remember and keep going, because that's so hard.
[00:25:29] Matty: That's great advice. You had been nice enough to send me some examples of some of the mental and emotional barriers to creativity that you had encountered and one of them was you're not sure you're the one to tell the story. I can understand that as far as nonfiction goes, "Oh, somebody else is more of an expert, who am I ..." Talk a little bit about how that plays out in the fiction world.
[00:25:54] Rachael: In the fiction world, the idea that I'm not the person to tell this story, there's two ways of looking at that. The first is, I'm trying to tell a story that maybe it has a heritage of a lot of other stories, you're trying to retell a Jane Austen story and you're asking yourself, do I really have the knowledge that it takes to do this kind of thing. I might not be the right person for that. That's another one of those feelings that we have to think about, accept, feel in our bodies, set aside, and do the work. There will never be another person who can tell the story in your voice. There will never be.
[00:26:30] I've always wanted to do this challenge with a couple of my best writing friends, where we all get the same logline premise for a book, and then we all write the book and it would be completely different even though the plot beats might be the same, but the book would be completely different. You are the only person who can ever tell the story and that's why you should do it.
[00:26:51] The question nowadays, though, if it comes up, why am I the right person to tell this story is something to be careful with. If you are trying to write outside, especially outside of your own race, especially if you are white and you're trying to write a black story or a Hispanic story, there has to be a lot of dialogue with yourself over why you are trying to do that and not allowing the room for somebody else who is in that race to write that story. Those people have been marginalized in publishing. So if that's the actual question, that's a completely different conversation to have with yourself.
[00:27:27] But I think you and I were really talking about the feeling of inferiority that I'm just not good enough. I'm not the best writer for this story. And that, we're always going to feel that, we're always gonna feel that about every book that we write. It's like, "Oh, I'm just not good enough. I can't do this." Yeah.
[00:27:41] Matty: There were two that I wanted to discuss. I'm going to pull one from a blog post and one from another episode of The Writer's Well. The one I wanted to pull from the blog post is a very funny one about the danger of making resolutions. And there were the three things that you advised against, the dangers of resolutions. The first one is, I'm not in my right mind when I make them. The second one was everyone else does them better. And the third one is I always pick the wrong things to resolve.
[00:28:15] Rachael: Did I really write that. Is that from me? Or is it somebody else? That sounds familiar. I agree with all of those things, but I also have a very limited memory when it comes to my old blog posts.
[00:28:25] Matty: It's at Rachael Herron.com, so you might have a guest blogger.
[00:28:29] Rachael: I don't have guests.
[00:28:32] Matty: Do you think that resolutions can be a support of creativity or do you think that there's always just a problem with deciding you're going to be creative on January 1st.
[00:28:45] Rachael:
[00:28:45] Actually now I'm remembering writing that because none of us are in our right minds, that calendar that we live by makes us think that arbitrarily January 1st is unblotted. We haven't screwed anything up about this year and January 1st, we're going to be able to become a new person. Those kinds of resolutions normally don't stick.
[00:29:04] However, I do love a challenge resolution, which is a limited time-based kind of resolution like drawing a picture every day for a month, or NaNoWriMo is a perfect example. You make a resolution arbitrarily on November 1st to write a novel in the month of November. And you can see the end of it but waking up on January 1st and becoming the writer you always meant to be, you will let yourself down. And when we let ourselves down, that is when we're training ourselves with negative consequences. Right? Every time we don't sit down to write during the day we're self-flagellating, we're beating ourselves up because again another day passed by, "I'm still not a good enough person, I still didn't do what I wanted to do."
[00:29:46] Whereas in NaNoWriMo, you set a little--well, it's not a little goal, --you set a goal of words and every time you hit it, you're getting that big dopamine hit and those positive vibes. For me, I like to set resolutions a couple a week and make the bar for hitting them so low.
[00:30:01] I've already talked a few times on this podcast about writing for 15 minutes. There was a time where I was depressed, working too much, and I had a book due, and I literally wrote the whole book in 15-minute bursts. I'm using the little app, Write or Die, which I really love, because I couldn't--have you ever heard of that one?
[00:30:19] Matty: I have not.
[00:30:19] Rachael: It's pretty great. It negatively rewards you if you stop writing, so the whole goal of this thing is to keep writing without thinking, and then you have something to revise.
[00:30:29] Matty: It sounds kind of like a horror story, too--we'll have to turn that over to Stephen King. He's probably already done that.
[00:30:35] Rachael: It has ratcheting up levels of punishment. But the worst one is if you don't type, it'll start scrambling your words backwards and then erasing them and you can't get them back. There's no controls and just eat them. I would turn it on for 15 minutes and I would have to write, and I wrote my book this way.
[00:30:53] Matty: It sounds horrifying.
[00:30:55] Rachael: Yeah, it is horrifying! It's great. There's also something called Written? Kitten! And I think every 200 words, a kitten will pop up on your screen if you're better with positive reinforcement, but just the knowledge that we can set these tiny, tiny, tiny little goals and hit them and win, and then that means every day it feels good to do what you're doing.
[00:31:16] I am actually trying to learn the guitar and the way I'd always tried to learn the guitar in the past was I would sit down until I got frustrated and stop. I was negatively rewarding myself every single time I sat down. Right now, my goal is to do it for 10 minutes a day. And even though in 10 minutes I'm not tired of it, I'm really still having a good time, I put the guitar down because now my brain is getting associated with, "Oh my gosh. Every time I touch the guitar, it's really fun." And I'm not frustrated. We should do the same things with our writing and just these tiny little goals, tiny little resolutions that add up into long extended habits over the course of a lifetime.
[00:31:52] Matty: Are there other tips like that? That if people are not saying "yes, but" or "no, but," but they're not making progress, and one of the reasons is they've trained themselves to be angsty whenever they approach the keyboard, are there other tips you can offer to try to get past that?
[00:32:11] Rachael: The whole idea of rewards, I think, is incredibly valuable. I'm pretty good at removing things from myself and giving them back to myself as a reward. So on the days that I need to write, I do not allow myself to read for pleasure until my words are done, and reading for pleasure is basically the whole goal of my life. I will write my words to get it. And that is my positive reinforcement, giving yourself that goal.
[00:32:36] The problem does come though, because we are human beings and we are all, in a very Buddhist way, trying to avoid suffering, nobody wants to be physically hurt. Unless it is actually producing pleasure, but we will not go down that path ...
[00:32:51] Matty: That's a whole other podcast.
[00:32:53] Rachael: That's a different podcast. But all of us as human beings are trying to avoid suffering. Writing is suffering. Writing is always a little piece of suffering because we are having to make decisions.
[00:33:04] We're having to make decisions at a first draft of the words that we put down and we're having to make decisions in revision in fixing things. Those are not comfortable things to do. They are pleasurable. They give us really deep pleasure because we can get in flow. We enjoy the writing process once we get there.
[00:33:19] But when we think about doing it, it produces anxiety in most of us, because it's going to require brainwork, which is hard. Or you could sit down and watch Netflix. Given a 50 / 50 chance, would you rather do this or this? I'm going to choose Netflix all day long because I'm trying to avoid suffering.
[00:33:36] So for me, for that person who has that angst, one of the really big things for me to know is that, "Oh, I feel like this every single day." Starting my 28th book, I still don't want to write every single day and I just ignore it and I show up and five minutes into a writing session, I'm happy to be there.
[00:33:56] It's just that preceding 15 minutes of getting there. And that's why, personally, I try to get to the page as soon as I can in the morning, because I'm not quite awake enough and smart enough to talk myself out of it. And once I've talked myself out of it a couple of times during the day, even though I hope I'll get to it during the rest of the day, I won't. I won't. I should just give up. I'm not going to write that day. Accepting that nobody really wants to write and doing it anyway.
[00:34:24] Matty: Rachael, this has been so helpful and you and J. and the other people that you do podcasting with have been so helpful. And we were never going to be able to cover all the tips that I'm sure that you have in this time we have together, but tell people where they can go to find out more about you, your work and your great advice online
[00:34:43] Rachael: Thank you. I do have, an email newsletter that I send out to writers that is just encouragement to get your work done. And you can find that by going to RachaelHerron.com/write. And for people who are really interested in the process of creativity, I am very proud of my Patreon essays that I send out once a month on creativity, some aspect of it, and they're long, well thought out essays, and I'm slowly collecting them into collections, but they are right now available nowhere else. I think there's probably 40 of them up there and they're like 4,000 words each, so there's a lot of back material you can get on Patreon for just a dollar a month. And that's patreon.com/Rachael if anybody's interested in those kinds of things.
[00:35:29] Or come see me at The Writer's Well, which you mentioned, or my other podcast, which is called How Do You Write? where I talk about how basically it's all that we're talking about today is how do you get yourself to write? I talked to authors about their processes.
[00:35:42] I'll just say this on your podcast. I'm going to invite you to be on my podcast because I want to talk about how you write and it's very nice to talk to you.
[00:35:48] Matty: I would love to do that. Thank you so much.
[00:35:50] Rachael: Happy writing.
Links
The Writer's Well Podcast
How Do You Write? Podcast
Rachael's blog post about the danger of making resolutions
Draft 2Digital Spotlight live event with Rachael and Mark Leslie Lefebvre
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
The Sounds of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Writing apps Write or Die and Written? Kitten!
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