Episode 149 - Using Vulnerability to Feed your Creativity with Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh
August 30, 2022
Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh discusses writing as a source of healing; reading reviews and acting on reader input; dealing with the doubt spiral; making vulnerability and fear work for you; tapping into a growth mindset; and how to tell yourself “yes.”
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Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh is the author of HERE BE DRAGONS, a memoir about the sweet and wonderful misery of raising children with someone you love. She also hosts WILD PRECIOUS LIFE, a literary podcast about making the most of the time we have. Annmarie lives in Cleveland, Ohio with a marshmallow dog named Higgins.
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"You don't want to make the mistake of writing about something sad and your reader doesn't feel anything, that they're not along for that ride. And sometimes it's because you haven't let them in. We can be performers as writers. We want to write an exciting story or a fun story or a story that makes us look smart. But I think that the authenticity that you bring, somehow it shows if it isn't there." —Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh
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Links
Annmarie's Links:
evergreenpodcasts.com/wild-precious-life
annmariekellyharbaugh.com
Facebook: @annmarie.kellyharbaugh
Instagram: @annmariek_h
Twitter: @annmariek_h
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
evergreenpodcasts.com/wild-precious-life
annmariekellyharbaugh.com
Facebook: @annmarie.kellyharbaugh
Instagram: @annmariek_h
Twitter: @annmariek_h
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh. Hey Annmarie, how are you doing?
[00:00:07] Annmarie: Hi Matty.
To give our listeners and viewers just a little bit of background on you, Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh is the author of "Here Be Dragons," a memoir about the sweet and wonderful misery of raising children with someone you love. She also hosts "Wild Precious Life," a literary podcast about making the most of the time we have, and Annmarie lives in Cleveland, Ohio with a marshmallow dog named Higgins. I have to ask about the marshmallow part.
[00:00:30] Annmarie: He's sort of like a toasted marshmallow. He's got a kind of a creamy underbelly, but also toasty outside. He's like half German Shepherd, half Golden Retriever. Oh, but he's got the lesser attributes of both dogs. So German Shepherds are known to be very smart, he didn't necessarily get that part. And Golden Retrievers are very loyal, but also shed a lot, so we call him our Golden Shepherd.
[00:00:55] Matty: Oh, that sounds lovely. I'm going to have to rustle up a picture of Higgins at some point.
So I invited Annmarie on the podcast to talk about using vulnerability to feed your creativity. And I just got back from the Writer's Digest conference in New York and all three of the keynote speakers, this was very much a theme of their talks, encouraging writers who are perhaps a little less further along in their careers about tips and the prevalence of fear and vulnerability and tips to avoid it. And so I thought it would be interesting to start out talking Annmarie about your author career. So just provide a little bit of background about your author career, how you got there.
How Annmarie Came to Writing
[00:01:36] Annmarie: Sure, thank you. I've heard about that conference. I'm dying to ask you. We could spend the whole time talking about that, we might circle that to it. I was not one of those kids who scribbled. I talked to a lot of authors on my show and many of them talk about, they were the journal keepers they wrote and wrote and wrote. I was a diary keeper intermittently, but I didn't grow up thinking of myself as a writer. I didn't know any writers. I didn't really know that could be a job. I just didn't know any of them. I took a writing workshop in college as a requirement for my major. And when the professor said, you're going to write every day, I almost dropped the class. Write every day? Who could possibly write every day? What is that about? I'm shocked to discover that this writing teacher wants us to write.
And instead what I found, was the limbing up that habit of writing every day was like stretching every day. No one would say, I'm going to exercise every day, and we're like, oh, why would you do that? It's the health properties for your body. And for me, the health properties for my heart and my mind were myriad. And I never forgot that feeling and I chased it off and on. But I, again, I wasn't going to be a writer when I grew up. I just learned that I liked to write. I was a teacher, I was a mom.
And my second daughter was born with some health issues, and she's in pretty good shape now, but when she was born, the day she was born, we were told that she was going to need multiple surgeries before the age of four. And automatically I thought, I'm not going to go back to my teaching job and I'm going to be with this baby and take care of her. And I looked back to that daily writing practice, which was really just for me. I'm scared and I'm afraid, and I wonder what I did to cause this baby to be broken, and I feel like it's my fault. And so I went back to that daily writing practice, again, just for me just to survive those nights in the NICU, when my daughter was in the crib at the hospital.
And those stories found an audience. I initially thought they would just be for me, but it turns out there are other parents next to their babies in hospital rooms. And so in stepping away from my teaching career and in having a baby who spent a lot of time in the hospital, I stumbled into this great love of writing that I'd had in my pocket. And took it from there. My husband and I wrote a book together. I do this show. I just finished my first fiction book that I'm shopping around and have never looked back.
Transitioning to Professional Writing
The writing that you were doing when you were in the NICU, was that very much tied thematically to the situation you found yourself in? Or was it totally different because you were using it as sort of an escape from that situation?
[00:04:36] Annmarie: Yeah, in the beginning it was just, how are we going to get this baby to eat? How are we going to get this baby to grow? And those were just scribbles and notes to myself. And then I started doing it on a computer while she napped. And it was sometimes about parenting, but it also was about escaping from parenting. My middle daughter's name is Lizzy, as Lizzy grew and got better, then it was just about the nuttiness in general of raising children and seeking other people whose children were peeing in the bath water or whatever it was that I was contending with. The five hours that it was taking to get out the door only to realize you'd forgotten the diapers or the change of clothes or all those things. So I was seeking other people who were in the parenting trenches with me.
[00:05:24] Matty: And were you doing that while you were writing to support your writing? Or were you doing that after the writing was done in order to find an audience for your writing?
[00:05:32] Annmarie: Yeah, I don't think I was very thoughtful about it. In the beginning, it was just survival. And then once I found people would pay for writing, that you could put your writing out there and this was in the era of blogging, but you could blog and then people would pay you for it, I did find a weekly column here and there on various online newspapers and then branched out with what I was willing to talk about. You know, if you're being paid to do a weekly column, you want to flex and see what you can take on. And once the kids were a little bigger, that was easier to do.
The subtitle of the topic that we wanted to talk about was, how vulnerability and fear makes us better writers and what to do when doubt shows up. So I want to get in a minute to the vulnerability and fear that all of us as writers experience at least sometimes, but you were in a very vulnerable and fear-creating position with your daughter. Is this fear both at like internally generated, like we think about with writers and externally generated?
Writing as a Source of Healing
[00:06:33] Annmarie: Yeah, I mean, on an external level, I was just trying to take care of this kid, right? But internally, I was struggling with, I made this baby, and this baby was born with health deficiencies. Was it my fault, and what had I done? And I got in these kinds of cycles of blame. There's absolutely nothing you can do once the baby is born to go back in time and try to figure out, was it that sandwich I ate? Was it? And, but you still try. And so I think I had both, but for me, bringing that doubt and vulnerability and fear to the page actually transformed my writing from just journals that nobody else needed to read but me, into a source of commonality that other people would come to and say, I feel that way too, sometimes. I'm so glad you said it out loud.
[00:07:28] Matty: And do you feel as if the writing has to answer the question? Like if you were writing for other parents with children with health issues, are you trying to convince them that it's not their fault, or are you sharing your experience with the understanding that in itself is going to be helpful to them?
[00:07:47] Annmarie: That's such a good question. I've once been told that good writing, like it, you tell them something and then you say something about what you told them. And you're doing two things at once, you're telling a story and then you're talking about the story you told. And so I do think that often my journals and my writing about my situation were very inward looking.
But then when I would reflect, for instance, I had a miscarriage not too long after my middle daughter was born. And I remember asking some of those same questions. Was it my fault? And asking that out loud and writing it down. And miscarriage is a great example of something that happens to one in four, one in three women, but we don't have a procedure for it. We don't have something that we do. There's not a set way to talk about it. And a lot of women haven't even announced that pregnancy, so they don't announce the miscarriage either.
So I remember when I published that piece, I was both looking inward and wondering if anybody else had undergone that. And I was overwhelmed at the number of people who reached out and said, I thought I was the only one.
I had never heard anyone say that before, thank you so much. So finding that, it turns out that our stories aren't as unique as we think, and that if you are silently suffering, chances are pretty good that there's thousands of other people silently suffering too. And that community fosters healing.
Acting on Reader Input
[00:09:19] Matty: Did you ever find that input you got from readers, maybe beta readers before something was out in the public, or readers after a work had been published. Did that take you in a direction that you hadn't expected when you first put that piece of work out there?
[00:09:35] Annmarie: So I would differentiate there between the book, which went through lots of beta reading and the articles that tended to just be between my editor and I, and that kind of reading was just for clarity, because when you're working for a newspaper, an online journal, you've got to get that content out very quickly. But for the book, absolutely, when we had our first readers, sometimes you'd have something that would really resonate and other times you'd have a story that just wasn't clear at all.
Like I remember in "Here Be Dragons," the book you referenced, I had a long story about fishing. I thought it was hilarious. This fishing story where my husband claimed that I never did anything fun for him. And so I took him on this fishing trip, it was night fishing and it was from six to eight. We were going to go fishing and we get on the boat, and it turns out it's not from six to eight now, it's from six to eight tomorrow.
So now we're overnight fishing and we're both horribly seasick and at eight o'clock the next morning, I said to the captain, isn't it time to go back? And they said, it's not eight o'clock this morning, it's eight o'clock tonight. It was 26-hour fishing. And I had just neglected to read, we were ill, just throwing up over the side of the boat. And it's an uproarious ridiculous story. And one of my beta readers said, what the heck does this have to do with parenting? And it was entirely true. It was a funny story, but it had nothing to do with parenting.
And I had just put it in there because it was right before I got pregnant. And I thought the echoes of being seasick was like the echoes of morning sickness, but the readers didn't think that. They thought it was a fun story that did not belong in the book. And you know, you don't write the books for yourself, even you're proud of yourself and you do, but you hope that they find an audience and that they get read. So it does help to listen to the people who read your book because they’re smart.
Reading Reviews
[00:11:24] Matty: Do you read the reviews of your book?
[00:11:26] Annmarie: I know you're not supposed to, but I don't know how not to. I just, they're right there. And I do think you can learn a lot. You have to have a thick skin. So I remember years ago writing a piece about Mother's Day, and how I didn't love Mother's Day, I didn't love breakfast in bed and the kids knocking over orange juice and insisting that I eat green scrambled eggs and smoothies that have jellybeans floating in them. So I wrote what I thought was sort of a comedic sketch about Mother's Day and just how all I want is to be left alone.
And I had so much feedback. Mostly from people who had lost their mothers, who said you have no idea what it is like every year to see families in church and know that I'll never hold my mother's hand again. I will never smell her flower that I get her on Mother's Day. That I'll never hug her. And I had to sit with that and think, is there room for both narratives in the world? And I think there is, but making sure that you cue somebody in, because the last thing you want is for someone who's mourning their mother to end up stuck in your humor piece about mothering.
So I do read the reviews when I feel like I can have a thick skin and do better as a writer. But you can also spiral, right? Because doubt shows up for all of us. We all have that voice on our shoulder that takes the form of, oh, who knows, could be your own mother, could be the pastor at your church, it could be that frenemy who says you're not good enough at this, that you shouldn't write, that you have no story to tell. And if you're in a doubt spiral, that's not really the time to read any of your reviews or comments.
Dealing with the Doubt Spiral
[00:13:15] Matty: So the whole doubt spiral, I think is very much tied to this theme about being vulnerable and feeling fearful. What are circumstances that trigger that for you? And then we want to talk about circumstances that might trigger that for other people.
[00:13:30] Annmarie: Oh my goodness, what doesn't trigger it? You read something amazing, and you think, I'll never be able to write like that. Or you read something terrible, and you think, how come they have seven books, and I don't? So good writing and bad writing can both trigger doubt. You show up to the page on one of those days when you've carved out time and you stretch, and you've got a good beverage and you go to the keys, and nothing comes out.
And all of the good things about your writing can also turn into doubt. I tell myself, you joke too much. Why do you think you're so funny? Or why don't you write more? Other people write every day for hours, how come you only write for 15 minutes? Or your book's not in the right, it's not been reviewed by the right places, it hasn't been blurbed by the right authors. It's not in the right shelf on Barnes and Noble, if it's even there at all. Oh my gosh, doubt shows up for everyone all the time.
[00:14:25] Annmarie: And Annie Lamott has that great story in "Bird by Bird" when she's just like, turn all those voices up, and then turn 'em down. And I've had yoga teachers say, be present in your yoga class, just take it and put it on the shelf, it'll be there when you're done.
I do the same thing for writing. Yeah, it's there, but every day I'm going to go to the keyboard or go to my paper and my notebook paper and my pencil. And just kind of do the best I can. I never quite know where I'm going to wander with my words. I never quite know what I think until I write what I wonder. So trusting the process does help. And also knowing that everybody has doubt. We all have doubt. It's part of how we try to do the job better.
[00:15:13] Matty: And so when we talk about how vulnerability and fear make us better writers and what to do when doubt shows up, is there a part of it that is knowing when to set it aside and a part that is knowing when to sit with it and work with it, make it work for you?
Tapping into Vulnerability and Fear
I'm of the opinion, however, unpopular that it might be, and I don't actually think it's that unpopular, I'm of the opinion that vulnerability and fear often transform a story into what it was meant to be anyway. I started off telling a story once about third grade recess, and how we like to play four square, and there was sensory imagery about the bouncy ball and the kids I played with and how it felt to whack the ball and get the top square. And it was a fine story about four square. And then I went back to it, and I added the vulnerability, and I talked about one particular day when the third-grade teacher didn't pick my poster to win the poster contest, and how, when I went outside with my friends, we decided we were going to play three square that day, because the girl who won the poster contest was our fourth.
[00:16:28] Annmarie: And then that's a different story I'm telling. It's no longer a story about four square, and I don't think it was a story about four square to begin with. It was a story about the competitive nature that I brought to things. It was a story about how girls wound one another. It became a very different story. So often, when the vulnerability shows up or when the fear shows up, we try to write around it to make sure we don't say that one thing, the unsayable thing. But often that's where the story is.
[00:16:58] Matty: Is there a flag that you could advise writers look for as they're rereading something they've written and it's feeling fine, but maybe flat, as I imagine your original four-square story was. Should writers be looking for opportunities to tap into the fear, even if they're not feeling it on the surface?
[00:17:23] Annmarie: That's a good question. I've heard of so many different ways that people revise. I've heard people will read a paragraph and they'll be like, it's great, it's terrible. And you have to choose, this is good or bad. And that you could be a ruthless reviser with your own work. And sometimes, if you go through eight or nine paragraphs in a row and they're all no good, then I suppose I would look to see where's the feeling? Where's the vulnerability, where's the risk that you're taking?
You don't want to make the mistake of writing about something sad and your reader doesn't feel anything, that they're not along for that ride. And sometimes it's because you haven't let them in. We can be performers as writers. We want to write an exciting story or a fun story or a story that makes us look smart. But I think that the authenticity that you bring, somehow it shows if it isn't there. And so I don't know what the test would be. I just know that sometimes readers aren't along for the ride because you're riding around the very thing that you need to say, the itch that you need to scratch.
[00:18:30] Matty: Yeah, I periodically think that it would be fun to have some tool that you could give to beta readers and give them a piece of work and say, I want you to insert an emoji when you have a certain feeling, like a smiley face or laughing or crying or whatever, and think about what you expect them to get out of it. And if somebody's reading the four-square story and it's just smiley face, and you read it and you think, first of all, that's, maybe that's not what I expected, or smiley face isn't what I'm going for here. And then you insert the part about it became three square and suddenly you're getting a sad face or a surprised face.
I always just wish there's was a better way to just get the emotional reaction of the reader without asking them to say, at this point, I was feeling as if, then you're taking them out of the train of thought or train of experience, if you're asking them to do that. At some point, I'm going to develop that tool and market it, and that will be my retirement fund.
Tossing It and Starting Again
[00:19:30] Annmarie: Oh, that reminds me. I went to a talk by the writer John Keane, brilliant poet, brilliant everything, and he talked about the flow state that musicians often get to when they're just flowing, and how as writers, every once in a while, we'll get to a place, and just the time just went away, and he was just flowing, and we wish we could tap into that flow more often. And he had us do an exercise for getting unstuck and for feeling your way into a piece, rather than with your brain, just feeling your way in. And it was to write, in this case it was just a paragraph, but write the paragraph, then flip the page and without looking, try to write it again.
And then you find right away that you can't remember what you said. So you tell the story a different way. And then we flipped the page and he said, try to write it again. And by then, you're getting bored with trying to write the same thing. And the language got really free. And I wrote some wacky sentences that, because I was tired of trying to write the same thing, I played with language and even got into kind of a flowing state. I mean, I've heard writers do this, right? That you write it, and you toss it, and you start again. I wonder if that gets more at the feelings, once you've gotten the wave.
[00:20:47] Matty: Yeah, that's really interesting. I've never heard that specific exercise, but that is a great idea.
A Collaboration that was Romantic and Weirdly Easy
[00:20:54] Matty: I wanted to find out about the process of writing your book, which you wrote with your husband, and how that differed from the writing of the articles. Were all the articles written by you? Did you coauthor any of your articles with anyone?
All the articles were written by me, when I wrote for newspapers and NPR and things like that. With the exception of one. My husband and I co-wrote something about a Christmas tree. We were talking about how badly children decorate Christmas trees. It looked like the Christmas tree got drunk and started decorating and then passed out halfway and it was just a lot of fun. And then when we submitted it, they would only let one of us read it.
[00:21:36] Annmarie: And we had a conversation, and we just went with, well, he was the one who sent the email. So, yeah, he can read it. And it ended up being one of our most successful essays. It was on a compilation CD. And I was so miffed, and it was a running joke with us, because all the jokes in it were mine and he had just happened to pitch it.
So other than that one, we had not written together. We would take walks and bounce ideas off of each other, but we always wrote separately. And so when it came the time and we pitched this book, I wanted to write my own book, but the feedback we got was that there were a lot of parenting books written by women, not so many written by men, but that men tended not to buy the parenting books. So what if you did a book with a man and a woman, with in this case, a mom and a dad, but certainly could have been two parents, going back and forth about what it was like. So one chapter was mine and one chapter was his.
And it's funny, I was hesitant at first, but it ended up being one of the most romantic things we've ever done together. To tuck the kids in, and we would write for 15 minutes or an hour after they went to sleep. You know, stayed up late, instead of watching television, we wrote to each other. It was romantic, and it was also quick, because if you and I were writing together and I just get stuck, I'd be like, Matty, take a look at this. And then you'll write some, you'll be like, I'm stuck. You'll hand it back to me. I couldn't believe how quickly the chapters became finished because you know, you need that distance often to come back to something. Well, in this case, somebody else had the distance and we just would swap chapters.
And so it was both romantic and weirdly easy. Doesn't mean we didn't fight about it, but the writing itself, we were just unstuck a lot. I'm glad we did it.
[00:23:25] Matty: That is great. I have never had a guest who described the writing process as romantic, so this is definitely a first for me and the listeners.
Arguments About the Content and Book Category
So, when you had arguments about it, were the arguments about the content in the sense of, you wanted to provide differing pieces of advice to parents, or did you agree on the parenting background, but you differed on how you wanted to present the same piece of advice?
[00:23:52] Annmarie: Yeah, all of the above. Yeah, I tended to be about the stories, and he tended to be about the, how are we going to sell this? Because as anybody knows, if you're going to sell a book, Barnes and Noble wants to know what shelf it's going on. And so I was initially marketing it as a humorous parenting book that also was a little bit of a memoir because they were stories. But there is no shelf at Barnes and Noble for a humorous parenting memoir, right?
So it wasn't a memoir. But to be a parenting book, it has to have instructions to parents. And I didn't want to tell other people how to parent their kids. I just wanted to say how we were parenting ours. So then it's going to be on the humor shelf, but my husband would point out that he's not that funny. And so it wasn't funny enough to be on the humor shelf and it wasn't parental enough to be, we had to pick one. And so I remember arguments where I was arguing for humor or memoir, and he's like, this is a parenting book. It's parents talking about their kids. We got to shape it, that's got to have some instructions for other parents.
And so I definitely remember arguments about that, where like up until the last minute we had to do these little pullouts for like, how you could raise your kids with this technique or that. And I was just bellyaching the whole time, because I just wanted to tell stories and he saw the value of, yeah but you've also got to connect with readers who need to find your book amid all the other books. So, we made a good team, but yeah, we definitely battled about things along the way.
Vulnerability and Fear Amidst the Writing Arguments
[00:25:21] Matty: So when you were having those disagreements, did that feed your vulnerability and fear in any way? And if it did, was it different than the vulnerability and fear you felt as a solo writer?
[00:25:33] Annmarie: Oh, interesting. Well, I will say we discovered that a lot of the things we did as parents were just because our own parents did them. So one of my big rules in winter was, put on a coat before you go outside. And I remember one day, my daughter, our oldest daughter said, I don't want to. And so my answer was, well then, you're not going outside.
And my husband's like, but we're leaving, we're on our way out now. How this going to help us get out the door? And I'm holding on to the principle of parenting that I grew up with, which was coats are worn outside and he floats the notion, well, could she just carry her coat if she doesn't want to wear it? And that was mindboggling to me. The notion a child can carry their coat? This was never a choice, in all my years of parenting, I was shocked to discover.
And you know, I remember the same thing with boots. You got to wear your boots if you're going out in the snow. And one of our kids didn't want to, he's like, all right, go out without them. And his thought was, you'll learn pretty quick, it's cold. And I was going to stay and like do battles. So I was all about obedience, right? This is the rule, and you follow it. And he and I had conversations about, is that really the number one attribute, especially like we have two daughters and a son, but do you really, is that what you really want for your daughters to grow up obedient, to that, when people say something they're like, okay. That's not what I want my daughters to find their voices and use them and look for room at the table and make it, if there isn't any. They're sure not going to get that if all they do is follow every rule all the time. So definitely, we had conversations about where we were parenting in fear, where you're afraid to let the kids be raised different than you were, because what if you do it wrong?
And it turns out you were also, this is another rule in parenting I didn't know, did you know that you're allowed to apologize to your children if you goof it up? I didn't know that. I just thought you made a mistake and gosh darn it. And it turns out that if you yelled at your child or if you do something wrong, you're allowed to go and say, you know what, when I yelled at you just then, I was kind of jerky. I'm sorry. I lost my temper, and I shouldn't have done that. I was shocked to discover that's allowed. Who knew?
So being in touch with my own vulnerability, the ways I wasn't sure that I was parenting well, bringing that to the page, because it turns out no one really knows how to do this. You're making it up or doing what your own parents told you and doing the best that you can.
Matty: So you've written a fiction work and you're shopping it around now. Do I remember that correctly?
Annmarie: Yes.
Matty: So how did all of this feed into your fiction writing?
Tapping into a Growth Mindset
[00:28:21] Annmarie: So what's interesting is that after we wrote the parenting book, our kids who were young when we started it, were getting a little older then, and I realized I didn't want to just be writing about my own children. It's one thing to tell a funny story about a three-year-old asking where babies come from, right? Because that's kind of funny when they're three and you have to think, what do I tell them? That's cute, but I don't want to write about my 16-year-old asking about where babies come from. That's a different conversation, and that's not a conversation for everybody else, that's not my story to tell.
And I had always wanted to write fiction, but again, how did doubt show up for me? I told myself I wasn't good at it. And I had a real fixed mindset. There's that research that Carol Dweck does, she's a psychologist at Stanford, I believe, and that notion that you're either fixed or in a growth mindset, that especially as girls, as women, we're told we're pretty, we're smart. And that's all well and good until you, I don't know, you look at a picture and you're not pretty, or you try to solve a puzzle and you don't get it. And then you think, I guess I'm not pretty, I guess I'm not smart. And that gets you nowhere, so that's the fixed mindset.
On the other hand, a growth mindset is, I'm someone who uses my brain to solve problems. And if I don't get it this time, I will use my brain to try to solve it again. So I had a real fixed mindset that I was a non-fiction writer, that I wasn't someone who could tell stories. And when I thought about not continuing to tell my own kids' stories and telling other made up stories, I wasn't very good at it at first, but that's okay because in a growth mindset, you practice, right? You get better. You try harder to bring your own vulnerability to the page.
I'd been a high school teacher for many years before my kids were born and have gone back to do it since. And so now my first two books that I've written are about teenagers. They're made-up teenagers based loosely on versions of kids I've known, but they're sassy and they're sarcastic and they get me in touch with a time in my own life that was fun. And my kids are teenagers now, so I'm also still writing for my children, but I'm not writing their stories. So it's been fun to bring that playfulness back into the page as a fiction writer.
How do You Tell Yourself Yes?
[00:30:42] Matty: And have you been able to maintain a sense of playfulness through the process of pitching your book, because that's an area you really need a thick skin for. Has that experience created any fear of vulnerability for you?
[00:30:55] Annmarie: Just a little bit. So for a nonfiction book, people probably know this, but I didn't, for a nonfiction book, you sell the idea. We pitched the agent an idea, a proposal, if you will. And our proposal was that we're going to write this parenting book. But we didn't have a finished manuscript. If anything, I think we only submitted two chapters and then just some sketches for the other 9 or 10.
So when you pitch a nonfiction book, you're just selling the idea. And so if the idea doesn't sell, you haven't invested so much, you can always go back and retool it.
For fiction, man, you're writing all 120,000 words before you pitch it. That is terrifying, because what do most people do? Exactly what I did. I wrote my first 120,000 words, I pitched it, I had some great interest and, in the end, didn't find a match. And then you either go back and try to fix that manuscript or I put it in a drawer and start it again. I did another 120,000 words. I can absolutely say, this book is better, this book is stronger, I feel more confident and capable.
Will it find a match? I don't know, but this is where the growth mindset and the fixed mindset come in. A fixed mindset, the story I would tell myself is, I'm someone who can't write fiction books. Nonsense. I'm getting better every time I write. Growth mindset says, I go back to that daily writing habit that I love so well, that I tell myself stories and I feed my heart and soul, and I love the work that eventually, absolutely, I will find a match.
But absolutely, querying. Keep your rejections, a good friend told me this. When she goes to high schools, she writes young adult books, she brings her rejections with her and she has a stack. Most of us have hundreds of rejections. Bring them with you, pass them out, ask people to read them out loud. Those are all folks who rejected your book. And then you'll be standing there with your book and talking about what it's like to have people tell you no. How do you tell yourself yes?
But those rejections are the decorations that house the garage, where your origin story is, right? No one wants to hear about the person who did a thing and was successful right away. That's a boring story. You want to hear about the folks who were up against it? Who tried, who shifted, who pivoted and that's what we're doing. Those are good stories.
[00:33:29] Matty: Well, Annmarie, what a lovely note to wrap up our conversation on. I think that is just such a lovely perspective on using vulnerability to feed your creativity.
So thank you for joining me and please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
I have a podcast called Wild Precious Life. And so you can look for me there and all my Facebook and social and Twitter tags and things like that are there, but it's so great to meet you, Matty. I've listened to your show before and now I've talked to you. It's great. Thank you for having me.
[00:33:59] Matty: Oh, it has been my pleasure. Thank you.
[00:00:07] Annmarie: Hi Matty.
To give our listeners and viewers just a little bit of background on you, Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh is the author of "Here Be Dragons," a memoir about the sweet and wonderful misery of raising children with someone you love. She also hosts "Wild Precious Life," a literary podcast about making the most of the time we have, and Annmarie lives in Cleveland, Ohio with a marshmallow dog named Higgins. I have to ask about the marshmallow part.
[00:00:30] Annmarie: He's sort of like a toasted marshmallow. He's got a kind of a creamy underbelly, but also toasty outside. He's like half German Shepherd, half Golden Retriever. Oh, but he's got the lesser attributes of both dogs. So German Shepherds are known to be very smart, he didn't necessarily get that part. And Golden Retrievers are very loyal, but also shed a lot, so we call him our Golden Shepherd.
[00:00:55] Matty: Oh, that sounds lovely. I'm going to have to rustle up a picture of Higgins at some point.
So I invited Annmarie on the podcast to talk about using vulnerability to feed your creativity. And I just got back from the Writer's Digest conference in New York and all three of the keynote speakers, this was very much a theme of their talks, encouraging writers who are perhaps a little less further along in their careers about tips and the prevalence of fear and vulnerability and tips to avoid it. And so I thought it would be interesting to start out talking Annmarie about your author career. So just provide a little bit of background about your author career, how you got there.
How Annmarie Came to Writing
[00:01:36] Annmarie: Sure, thank you. I've heard about that conference. I'm dying to ask you. We could spend the whole time talking about that, we might circle that to it. I was not one of those kids who scribbled. I talked to a lot of authors on my show and many of them talk about, they were the journal keepers they wrote and wrote and wrote. I was a diary keeper intermittently, but I didn't grow up thinking of myself as a writer. I didn't know any writers. I didn't really know that could be a job. I just didn't know any of them. I took a writing workshop in college as a requirement for my major. And when the professor said, you're going to write every day, I almost dropped the class. Write every day? Who could possibly write every day? What is that about? I'm shocked to discover that this writing teacher wants us to write.
And instead what I found, was the limbing up that habit of writing every day was like stretching every day. No one would say, I'm going to exercise every day, and we're like, oh, why would you do that? It's the health properties for your body. And for me, the health properties for my heart and my mind were myriad. And I never forgot that feeling and I chased it off and on. But I, again, I wasn't going to be a writer when I grew up. I just learned that I liked to write. I was a teacher, I was a mom.
And my second daughter was born with some health issues, and she's in pretty good shape now, but when she was born, the day she was born, we were told that she was going to need multiple surgeries before the age of four. And automatically I thought, I'm not going to go back to my teaching job and I'm going to be with this baby and take care of her. And I looked back to that daily writing practice, which was really just for me. I'm scared and I'm afraid, and I wonder what I did to cause this baby to be broken, and I feel like it's my fault. And so I went back to that daily writing practice, again, just for me just to survive those nights in the NICU, when my daughter was in the crib at the hospital.
And those stories found an audience. I initially thought they would just be for me, but it turns out there are other parents next to their babies in hospital rooms. And so in stepping away from my teaching career and in having a baby who spent a lot of time in the hospital, I stumbled into this great love of writing that I'd had in my pocket. And took it from there. My husband and I wrote a book together. I do this show. I just finished my first fiction book that I'm shopping around and have never looked back.
Transitioning to Professional Writing
The writing that you were doing when you were in the NICU, was that very much tied thematically to the situation you found yourself in? Or was it totally different because you were using it as sort of an escape from that situation?
[00:04:36] Annmarie: Yeah, in the beginning it was just, how are we going to get this baby to eat? How are we going to get this baby to grow? And those were just scribbles and notes to myself. And then I started doing it on a computer while she napped. And it was sometimes about parenting, but it also was about escaping from parenting. My middle daughter's name is Lizzy, as Lizzy grew and got better, then it was just about the nuttiness in general of raising children and seeking other people whose children were peeing in the bath water or whatever it was that I was contending with. The five hours that it was taking to get out the door only to realize you'd forgotten the diapers or the change of clothes or all those things. So I was seeking other people who were in the parenting trenches with me.
[00:05:24] Matty: And were you doing that while you were writing to support your writing? Or were you doing that after the writing was done in order to find an audience for your writing?
[00:05:32] Annmarie: Yeah, I don't think I was very thoughtful about it. In the beginning, it was just survival. And then once I found people would pay for writing, that you could put your writing out there and this was in the era of blogging, but you could blog and then people would pay you for it, I did find a weekly column here and there on various online newspapers and then branched out with what I was willing to talk about. You know, if you're being paid to do a weekly column, you want to flex and see what you can take on. And once the kids were a little bigger, that was easier to do.
The subtitle of the topic that we wanted to talk about was, how vulnerability and fear makes us better writers and what to do when doubt shows up. So I want to get in a minute to the vulnerability and fear that all of us as writers experience at least sometimes, but you were in a very vulnerable and fear-creating position with your daughter. Is this fear both at like internally generated, like we think about with writers and externally generated?
Writing as a Source of Healing
[00:06:33] Annmarie: Yeah, I mean, on an external level, I was just trying to take care of this kid, right? But internally, I was struggling with, I made this baby, and this baby was born with health deficiencies. Was it my fault, and what had I done? And I got in these kinds of cycles of blame. There's absolutely nothing you can do once the baby is born to go back in time and try to figure out, was it that sandwich I ate? Was it? And, but you still try. And so I think I had both, but for me, bringing that doubt and vulnerability and fear to the page actually transformed my writing from just journals that nobody else needed to read but me, into a source of commonality that other people would come to and say, I feel that way too, sometimes. I'm so glad you said it out loud.
[00:07:28] Matty: And do you feel as if the writing has to answer the question? Like if you were writing for other parents with children with health issues, are you trying to convince them that it's not their fault, or are you sharing your experience with the understanding that in itself is going to be helpful to them?
[00:07:47] Annmarie: That's such a good question. I've once been told that good writing, like it, you tell them something and then you say something about what you told them. And you're doing two things at once, you're telling a story and then you're talking about the story you told. And so I do think that often my journals and my writing about my situation were very inward looking.
But then when I would reflect, for instance, I had a miscarriage not too long after my middle daughter was born. And I remember asking some of those same questions. Was it my fault? And asking that out loud and writing it down. And miscarriage is a great example of something that happens to one in four, one in three women, but we don't have a procedure for it. We don't have something that we do. There's not a set way to talk about it. And a lot of women haven't even announced that pregnancy, so they don't announce the miscarriage either.
So I remember when I published that piece, I was both looking inward and wondering if anybody else had undergone that. And I was overwhelmed at the number of people who reached out and said, I thought I was the only one.
I had never heard anyone say that before, thank you so much. So finding that, it turns out that our stories aren't as unique as we think, and that if you are silently suffering, chances are pretty good that there's thousands of other people silently suffering too. And that community fosters healing.
Acting on Reader Input
[00:09:19] Matty: Did you ever find that input you got from readers, maybe beta readers before something was out in the public, or readers after a work had been published. Did that take you in a direction that you hadn't expected when you first put that piece of work out there?
[00:09:35] Annmarie: So I would differentiate there between the book, which went through lots of beta reading and the articles that tended to just be between my editor and I, and that kind of reading was just for clarity, because when you're working for a newspaper, an online journal, you've got to get that content out very quickly. But for the book, absolutely, when we had our first readers, sometimes you'd have something that would really resonate and other times you'd have a story that just wasn't clear at all.
Like I remember in "Here Be Dragons," the book you referenced, I had a long story about fishing. I thought it was hilarious. This fishing story where my husband claimed that I never did anything fun for him. And so I took him on this fishing trip, it was night fishing and it was from six to eight. We were going to go fishing and we get on the boat, and it turns out it's not from six to eight now, it's from six to eight tomorrow.
So now we're overnight fishing and we're both horribly seasick and at eight o'clock the next morning, I said to the captain, isn't it time to go back? And they said, it's not eight o'clock this morning, it's eight o'clock tonight. It was 26-hour fishing. And I had just neglected to read, we were ill, just throwing up over the side of the boat. And it's an uproarious ridiculous story. And one of my beta readers said, what the heck does this have to do with parenting? And it was entirely true. It was a funny story, but it had nothing to do with parenting.
And I had just put it in there because it was right before I got pregnant. And I thought the echoes of being seasick was like the echoes of morning sickness, but the readers didn't think that. They thought it was a fun story that did not belong in the book. And you know, you don't write the books for yourself, even you're proud of yourself and you do, but you hope that they find an audience and that they get read. So it does help to listen to the people who read your book because they’re smart.
Reading Reviews
[00:11:24] Matty: Do you read the reviews of your book?
[00:11:26] Annmarie: I know you're not supposed to, but I don't know how not to. I just, they're right there. And I do think you can learn a lot. You have to have a thick skin. So I remember years ago writing a piece about Mother's Day, and how I didn't love Mother's Day, I didn't love breakfast in bed and the kids knocking over orange juice and insisting that I eat green scrambled eggs and smoothies that have jellybeans floating in them. So I wrote what I thought was sort of a comedic sketch about Mother's Day and just how all I want is to be left alone.
And I had so much feedback. Mostly from people who had lost their mothers, who said you have no idea what it is like every year to see families in church and know that I'll never hold my mother's hand again. I will never smell her flower that I get her on Mother's Day. That I'll never hug her. And I had to sit with that and think, is there room for both narratives in the world? And I think there is, but making sure that you cue somebody in, because the last thing you want is for someone who's mourning their mother to end up stuck in your humor piece about mothering.
So I do read the reviews when I feel like I can have a thick skin and do better as a writer. But you can also spiral, right? Because doubt shows up for all of us. We all have that voice on our shoulder that takes the form of, oh, who knows, could be your own mother, could be the pastor at your church, it could be that frenemy who says you're not good enough at this, that you shouldn't write, that you have no story to tell. And if you're in a doubt spiral, that's not really the time to read any of your reviews or comments.
Dealing with the Doubt Spiral
[00:13:15] Matty: So the whole doubt spiral, I think is very much tied to this theme about being vulnerable and feeling fearful. What are circumstances that trigger that for you? And then we want to talk about circumstances that might trigger that for other people.
[00:13:30] Annmarie: Oh my goodness, what doesn't trigger it? You read something amazing, and you think, I'll never be able to write like that. Or you read something terrible, and you think, how come they have seven books, and I don't? So good writing and bad writing can both trigger doubt. You show up to the page on one of those days when you've carved out time and you stretch, and you've got a good beverage and you go to the keys, and nothing comes out.
And all of the good things about your writing can also turn into doubt. I tell myself, you joke too much. Why do you think you're so funny? Or why don't you write more? Other people write every day for hours, how come you only write for 15 minutes? Or your book's not in the right, it's not been reviewed by the right places, it hasn't been blurbed by the right authors. It's not in the right shelf on Barnes and Noble, if it's even there at all. Oh my gosh, doubt shows up for everyone all the time.
[00:14:25] Annmarie: And Annie Lamott has that great story in "Bird by Bird" when she's just like, turn all those voices up, and then turn 'em down. And I've had yoga teachers say, be present in your yoga class, just take it and put it on the shelf, it'll be there when you're done.
I do the same thing for writing. Yeah, it's there, but every day I'm going to go to the keyboard or go to my paper and my notebook paper and my pencil. And just kind of do the best I can. I never quite know where I'm going to wander with my words. I never quite know what I think until I write what I wonder. So trusting the process does help. And also knowing that everybody has doubt. We all have doubt. It's part of how we try to do the job better.
[00:15:13] Matty: And so when we talk about how vulnerability and fear make us better writers and what to do when doubt shows up, is there a part of it that is knowing when to set it aside and a part that is knowing when to sit with it and work with it, make it work for you?
Tapping into Vulnerability and Fear
I'm of the opinion, however, unpopular that it might be, and I don't actually think it's that unpopular, I'm of the opinion that vulnerability and fear often transform a story into what it was meant to be anyway. I started off telling a story once about third grade recess, and how we like to play four square, and there was sensory imagery about the bouncy ball and the kids I played with and how it felt to whack the ball and get the top square. And it was a fine story about four square. And then I went back to it, and I added the vulnerability, and I talked about one particular day when the third-grade teacher didn't pick my poster to win the poster contest, and how, when I went outside with my friends, we decided we were going to play three square that day, because the girl who won the poster contest was our fourth.
[00:16:28] Annmarie: And then that's a different story I'm telling. It's no longer a story about four square, and I don't think it was a story about four square to begin with. It was a story about the competitive nature that I brought to things. It was a story about how girls wound one another. It became a very different story. So often, when the vulnerability shows up or when the fear shows up, we try to write around it to make sure we don't say that one thing, the unsayable thing. But often that's where the story is.
[00:16:58] Matty: Is there a flag that you could advise writers look for as they're rereading something they've written and it's feeling fine, but maybe flat, as I imagine your original four-square story was. Should writers be looking for opportunities to tap into the fear, even if they're not feeling it on the surface?
[00:17:23] Annmarie: That's a good question. I've heard of so many different ways that people revise. I've heard people will read a paragraph and they'll be like, it's great, it's terrible. And you have to choose, this is good or bad. And that you could be a ruthless reviser with your own work. And sometimes, if you go through eight or nine paragraphs in a row and they're all no good, then I suppose I would look to see where's the feeling? Where's the vulnerability, where's the risk that you're taking?
You don't want to make the mistake of writing about something sad and your reader doesn't feel anything, that they're not along for that ride. And sometimes it's because you haven't let them in. We can be performers as writers. We want to write an exciting story or a fun story or a story that makes us look smart. But I think that the authenticity that you bring, somehow it shows if it isn't there. And so I don't know what the test would be. I just know that sometimes readers aren't along for the ride because you're riding around the very thing that you need to say, the itch that you need to scratch.
[00:18:30] Matty: Yeah, I periodically think that it would be fun to have some tool that you could give to beta readers and give them a piece of work and say, I want you to insert an emoji when you have a certain feeling, like a smiley face or laughing or crying or whatever, and think about what you expect them to get out of it. And if somebody's reading the four-square story and it's just smiley face, and you read it and you think, first of all, that's, maybe that's not what I expected, or smiley face isn't what I'm going for here. And then you insert the part about it became three square and suddenly you're getting a sad face or a surprised face.
I always just wish there's was a better way to just get the emotional reaction of the reader without asking them to say, at this point, I was feeling as if, then you're taking them out of the train of thought or train of experience, if you're asking them to do that. At some point, I'm going to develop that tool and market it, and that will be my retirement fund.
Tossing It and Starting Again
[00:19:30] Annmarie: Oh, that reminds me. I went to a talk by the writer John Keane, brilliant poet, brilliant everything, and he talked about the flow state that musicians often get to when they're just flowing, and how as writers, every once in a while, we'll get to a place, and just the time just went away, and he was just flowing, and we wish we could tap into that flow more often. And he had us do an exercise for getting unstuck and for feeling your way into a piece, rather than with your brain, just feeling your way in. And it was to write, in this case it was just a paragraph, but write the paragraph, then flip the page and without looking, try to write it again.
And then you find right away that you can't remember what you said. So you tell the story a different way. And then we flipped the page and he said, try to write it again. And by then, you're getting bored with trying to write the same thing. And the language got really free. And I wrote some wacky sentences that, because I was tired of trying to write the same thing, I played with language and even got into kind of a flowing state. I mean, I've heard writers do this, right? That you write it, and you toss it, and you start again. I wonder if that gets more at the feelings, once you've gotten the wave.
[00:20:47] Matty: Yeah, that's really interesting. I've never heard that specific exercise, but that is a great idea.
A Collaboration that was Romantic and Weirdly Easy
[00:20:54] Matty: I wanted to find out about the process of writing your book, which you wrote with your husband, and how that differed from the writing of the articles. Were all the articles written by you? Did you coauthor any of your articles with anyone?
All the articles were written by me, when I wrote for newspapers and NPR and things like that. With the exception of one. My husband and I co-wrote something about a Christmas tree. We were talking about how badly children decorate Christmas trees. It looked like the Christmas tree got drunk and started decorating and then passed out halfway and it was just a lot of fun. And then when we submitted it, they would only let one of us read it.
[00:21:36] Annmarie: And we had a conversation, and we just went with, well, he was the one who sent the email. So, yeah, he can read it. And it ended up being one of our most successful essays. It was on a compilation CD. And I was so miffed, and it was a running joke with us, because all the jokes in it were mine and he had just happened to pitch it.
So other than that one, we had not written together. We would take walks and bounce ideas off of each other, but we always wrote separately. And so when it came the time and we pitched this book, I wanted to write my own book, but the feedback we got was that there were a lot of parenting books written by women, not so many written by men, but that men tended not to buy the parenting books. So what if you did a book with a man and a woman, with in this case, a mom and a dad, but certainly could have been two parents, going back and forth about what it was like. So one chapter was mine and one chapter was his.
And it's funny, I was hesitant at first, but it ended up being one of the most romantic things we've ever done together. To tuck the kids in, and we would write for 15 minutes or an hour after they went to sleep. You know, stayed up late, instead of watching television, we wrote to each other. It was romantic, and it was also quick, because if you and I were writing together and I just get stuck, I'd be like, Matty, take a look at this. And then you'll write some, you'll be like, I'm stuck. You'll hand it back to me. I couldn't believe how quickly the chapters became finished because you know, you need that distance often to come back to something. Well, in this case, somebody else had the distance and we just would swap chapters.
And so it was both romantic and weirdly easy. Doesn't mean we didn't fight about it, but the writing itself, we were just unstuck a lot. I'm glad we did it.
[00:23:25] Matty: That is great. I have never had a guest who described the writing process as romantic, so this is definitely a first for me and the listeners.
Arguments About the Content and Book Category
So, when you had arguments about it, were the arguments about the content in the sense of, you wanted to provide differing pieces of advice to parents, or did you agree on the parenting background, but you differed on how you wanted to present the same piece of advice?
[00:23:52] Annmarie: Yeah, all of the above. Yeah, I tended to be about the stories, and he tended to be about the, how are we going to sell this? Because as anybody knows, if you're going to sell a book, Barnes and Noble wants to know what shelf it's going on. And so I was initially marketing it as a humorous parenting book that also was a little bit of a memoir because they were stories. But there is no shelf at Barnes and Noble for a humorous parenting memoir, right?
So it wasn't a memoir. But to be a parenting book, it has to have instructions to parents. And I didn't want to tell other people how to parent their kids. I just wanted to say how we were parenting ours. So then it's going to be on the humor shelf, but my husband would point out that he's not that funny. And so it wasn't funny enough to be on the humor shelf and it wasn't parental enough to be, we had to pick one. And so I remember arguments where I was arguing for humor or memoir, and he's like, this is a parenting book. It's parents talking about their kids. We got to shape it, that's got to have some instructions for other parents.
And so I definitely remember arguments about that, where like up until the last minute we had to do these little pullouts for like, how you could raise your kids with this technique or that. And I was just bellyaching the whole time, because I just wanted to tell stories and he saw the value of, yeah but you've also got to connect with readers who need to find your book amid all the other books. So, we made a good team, but yeah, we definitely battled about things along the way.
Vulnerability and Fear Amidst the Writing Arguments
[00:25:21] Matty: So when you were having those disagreements, did that feed your vulnerability and fear in any way? And if it did, was it different than the vulnerability and fear you felt as a solo writer?
[00:25:33] Annmarie: Oh, interesting. Well, I will say we discovered that a lot of the things we did as parents were just because our own parents did them. So one of my big rules in winter was, put on a coat before you go outside. And I remember one day, my daughter, our oldest daughter said, I don't want to. And so my answer was, well then, you're not going outside.
And my husband's like, but we're leaving, we're on our way out now. How this going to help us get out the door? And I'm holding on to the principle of parenting that I grew up with, which was coats are worn outside and he floats the notion, well, could she just carry her coat if she doesn't want to wear it? And that was mindboggling to me. The notion a child can carry their coat? This was never a choice, in all my years of parenting, I was shocked to discover.
And you know, I remember the same thing with boots. You got to wear your boots if you're going out in the snow. And one of our kids didn't want to, he's like, all right, go out without them. And his thought was, you'll learn pretty quick, it's cold. And I was going to stay and like do battles. So I was all about obedience, right? This is the rule, and you follow it. And he and I had conversations about, is that really the number one attribute, especially like we have two daughters and a son, but do you really, is that what you really want for your daughters to grow up obedient, to that, when people say something they're like, okay. That's not what I want my daughters to find their voices and use them and look for room at the table and make it, if there isn't any. They're sure not going to get that if all they do is follow every rule all the time. So definitely, we had conversations about where we were parenting in fear, where you're afraid to let the kids be raised different than you were, because what if you do it wrong?
And it turns out you were also, this is another rule in parenting I didn't know, did you know that you're allowed to apologize to your children if you goof it up? I didn't know that. I just thought you made a mistake and gosh darn it. And it turns out that if you yelled at your child or if you do something wrong, you're allowed to go and say, you know what, when I yelled at you just then, I was kind of jerky. I'm sorry. I lost my temper, and I shouldn't have done that. I was shocked to discover that's allowed. Who knew?
So being in touch with my own vulnerability, the ways I wasn't sure that I was parenting well, bringing that to the page, because it turns out no one really knows how to do this. You're making it up or doing what your own parents told you and doing the best that you can.
Matty: So you've written a fiction work and you're shopping it around now. Do I remember that correctly?
Annmarie: Yes.
Matty: So how did all of this feed into your fiction writing?
Tapping into a Growth Mindset
[00:28:21] Annmarie: So what's interesting is that after we wrote the parenting book, our kids who were young when we started it, were getting a little older then, and I realized I didn't want to just be writing about my own children. It's one thing to tell a funny story about a three-year-old asking where babies come from, right? Because that's kind of funny when they're three and you have to think, what do I tell them? That's cute, but I don't want to write about my 16-year-old asking about where babies come from. That's a different conversation, and that's not a conversation for everybody else, that's not my story to tell.
And I had always wanted to write fiction, but again, how did doubt show up for me? I told myself I wasn't good at it. And I had a real fixed mindset. There's that research that Carol Dweck does, she's a psychologist at Stanford, I believe, and that notion that you're either fixed or in a growth mindset, that especially as girls, as women, we're told we're pretty, we're smart. And that's all well and good until you, I don't know, you look at a picture and you're not pretty, or you try to solve a puzzle and you don't get it. And then you think, I guess I'm not pretty, I guess I'm not smart. And that gets you nowhere, so that's the fixed mindset.
On the other hand, a growth mindset is, I'm someone who uses my brain to solve problems. And if I don't get it this time, I will use my brain to try to solve it again. So I had a real fixed mindset that I was a non-fiction writer, that I wasn't someone who could tell stories. And when I thought about not continuing to tell my own kids' stories and telling other made up stories, I wasn't very good at it at first, but that's okay because in a growth mindset, you practice, right? You get better. You try harder to bring your own vulnerability to the page.
I'd been a high school teacher for many years before my kids were born and have gone back to do it since. And so now my first two books that I've written are about teenagers. They're made-up teenagers based loosely on versions of kids I've known, but they're sassy and they're sarcastic and they get me in touch with a time in my own life that was fun. And my kids are teenagers now, so I'm also still writing for my children, but I'm not writing their stories. So it's been fun to bring that playfulness back into the page as a fiction writer.
How do You Tell Yourself Yes?
[00:30:42] Matty: And have you been able to maintain a sense of playfulness through the process of pitching your book, because that's an area you really need a thick skin for. Has that experience created any fear of vulnerability for you?
[00:30:55] Annmarie: Just a little bit. So for a nonfiction book, people probably know this, but I didn't, for a nonfiction book, you sell the idea. We pitched the agent an idea, a proposal, if you will. And our proposal was that we're going to write this parenting book. But we didn't have a finished manuscript. If anything, I think we only submitted two chapters and then just some sketches for the other 9 or 10.
So when you pitch a nonfiction book, you're just selling the idea. And so if the idea doesn't sell, you haven't invested so much, you can always go back and retool it.
For fiction, man, you're writing all 120,000 words before you pitch it. That is terrifying, because what do most people do? Exactly what I did. I wrote my first 120,000 words, I pitched it, I had some great interest and, in the end, didn't find a match. And then you either go back and try to fix that manuscript or I put it in a drawer and start it again. I did another 120,000 words. I can absolutely say, this book is better, this book is stronger, I feel more confident and capable.
Will it find a match? I don't know, but this is where the growth mindset and the fixed mindset come in. A fixed mindset, the story I would tell myself is, I'm someone who can't write fiction books. Nonsense. I'm getting better every time I write. Growth mindset says, I go back to that daily writing habit that I love so well, that I tell myself stories and I feed my heart and soul, and I love the work that eventually, absolutely, I will find a match.
But absolutely, querying. Keep your rejections, a good friend told me this. When she goes to high schools, she writes young adult books, she brings her rejections with her and she has a stack. Most of us have hundreds of rejections. Bring them with you, pass them out, ask people to read them out loud. Those are all folks who rejected your book. And then you'll be standing there with your book and talking about what it's like to have people tell you no. How do you tell yourself yes?
But those rejections are the decorations that house the garage, where your origin story is, right? No one wants to hear about the person who did a thing and was successful right away. That's a boring story. You want to hear about the folks who were up against it? Who tried, who shifted, who pivoted and that's what we're doing. Those are good stories.
[00:33:29] Matty: Well, Annmarie, what a lovely note to wrap up our conversation on. I think that is just such a lovely perspective on using vulnerability to feed your creativity.
So thank you for joining me and please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
I have a podcast called Wild Precious Life. And so you can look for me there and all my Facebook and social and Twitter tags and things like that are there, but it's so great to meet you, Matty. I've listened to your show before and now I've talked to you. It's great. Thank you for having me.
[00:33:59] Matty: Oh, it has been my pleasure. Thank you.
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Annmarie!
What do you think about her advice for tapping into your vulnerability and fears to feed your creativity? Is it something you have done in your own writing, or see an opportunity to do? I'd love to hear your thoughts--please leave a comment and let me know!