#AmWriting

As a former member of the “write drunk, edit sober” club, I thought it might be interesting to look at the research on alcohol, weed, stimulants and their effect on creativity so we can figure out what’s working for us, what’s not, and weigh the pros and cons of intoxication for inspiration. I cite a few studies in this episode and, for the #AmReading segment, share a few of my favorite books on t...

Actually, there is no action without anxiety. We all feel it, and we’re all driven by it—and almost no one is completely at peace with it. Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever and Hiding in the Bathroom: How to Get Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home), has been working for years to normalize those feelings and the spectrum on which they appear to bring mental health struggles out i...

We’ll admit it. We like our writerly gear. We get a little rush from visiting our favorite Vermont stationery store together. (In fact, we just did this last week.) But in all seriousness, we spend a lot of time on this job, so it’s good to figure out what works for us. Today Sarina takes us through her novel-writing tech stack. She covers hardware, software and the “why” behind the tools she choo...

Becoming an expert takes years of work and many of you have asked how you can take that expertise out for a spin in the media. I don’t blame you. From the moment the my first Atlantic article, “Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail” went viral in 2013, I was eager to get on television and radio so I could talk about my work, stir up interest in my topics, and hopefully maximize my chances of...

Jess here, because I hate outlining. Hate it. It sounds boring and feels like an assignment, writing stripped of all flow and joy. I asked KJ and Sarina to help me with this problematic mindset, because my novel in progress clearly needs a solid outline and yet every time I go back to work on it, I feel irritated, frustrated and blocked.  Thank goodness for my accountability buddies, because they...

Recently, someone on Twitter asked if sensitivity readers are still a resource writers utilize and where to find them. Yes indeed, sensitivity readers are still a great resource, and since we interviewed Jordan Shapiro and a sensitivity reader he worked with on his book, Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist Dad . I hope you enjoy this re-airing of episode 266 the #AmWriting podcast.  Hey all, Jess...

This week, Jess and KJ talk to journalist, author, and lifelong knitter Peggy Orenstein about research, nonfiction writing, expertise, and examining the unexamined in ordinary life. Peggy’s newest book is , Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater. Peggy’s TED Talk: What Young Women Believe About Their Own Sexual Pleasure Why F...

Hey all! Today Sarina brings you a fun but tricky topic: how to write a novel in three months.  Should you do it? Maybe. It depends on the book. Not every book can or should be written in 90 days.  But if you’re game to try, Sarina gives you:  4 things you need to know about the book before you start 5 tips for writing scenes more quickly 3 things to try when you’re stuck Links from the Pod The As...

True confession time: Sarina and I have always wanted to make something like this. I’m talking about The Storyteller’s Workbook , which is a gorgeous combination of structural writing guide and writing bullet journal created by Isabel Ibañez , the author of Woven in Moonlight and Written in Starlight , a fantasy YA series that’s a hit with TikTok and Time Magazine both as well as a designer whose...

As Leslie Hooton told me, “Some writers have a stroke of luck, I had a stroke at birth,” which left her paralyzed on one side of her body. Thanks to Dragon dictation (not sponsored, we’re just fans!), she’s learned to train her Dragon and “penned” three novels including her most recent release, After Everyone Else . As Jess hosts this episode, we delve into plenty of tangents on dictation, deleted...

STOP. Do not think to yourself, well, I don’t want to write Erotica—why is this podcast/book for me? This conversation, and the book, How to Write Erotica , that inspires it, goes far beyond any pre-imagined specifics you have about writing scenes, stories and books focused on which bit of bodily anatomy goes where—because to write good erotica, you have to come back to the heart of writing any st...

Your query letter—or your jacket copy—KNOWS. It knows if you’ve got a whole story in there, if there’s an arc of change, if there are stakes, if there’s a why now and a why this and a why her/him. You just have to be willing to listen. Julie Artz, query coach extraordinaire, and KJ talk about mistakes writers make in our queries—and more importantly, the problems queries can reveal about our stori...

Okay, some us (hand up here) start ALL THE THINGS. But some of us don’t like to start what we don’t think we will finish (and even those of us who start a lot sometimes beat ourselves up for that).  But if you don’t start stuff you cannot finish stuff. So: here’s Becky Blades, author of Start More than You Can Finish (which—and this is a big deal—was recommended by the Next Big Idea Book Club — an...

On this week’s episode, Jess and KJ talk to Kristen Mei Chase, an OG mommy blogger, journalist, former professor, podcaster, CEO of the Cool Mom Picks Network, and now, novelist. Her book, Thousand Miles to Graceland comes out on January 24, 2002, and we discuss the long road to publication for her (very personal) story.  #AmReading Kristen : Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You KJ : Charmaine...

Hello #AmWriters! Someone in the #AmWriting Facebook group asked about the best ways to connect and build relationships with bookstores, so we decided to revisit this older episode with bestselling author and Emmy-winning television host Mary Laura Philpott . Drawing on her many years working at Parnassus Books and launching her own books into the world, we talk about the benefits of working with...

A few assorted 2023 goals that I have no doubt I can achieve: Finish this box of Wheat Thins Take down holiday decorations before July. Read … some books. Let the dogs in. Hey, look at that. Already I can check off #1. Jess, Sarina and I just aren’t feeling the goals this year. Oh, we have them. But they’re mostly “do that again” or “yeah, stick with that” kinda things. . I’m gonna write another b...

We make a point of setting goals every year—and, even more importantly, actually looking back to see whether we achieved them, and why. We’ve talked a lot in past years about the importance of setting the right kind of goals (you can get a short PDF on goal-setting and a worksheet below)—by which we mean goals you can control. You can’t sell your book to a publisher—that’s not a goal within your c...

My motto for 2023 is “good writing comes last” but it might as well be “story first”, which is why we’re re-sharing this interview with Anna North , author of three novels, most recently Outlawed —the January 2021 Reese’s Book Club pick. Outlawed has a powerful theme and message and what we call, in the interview, a “poke-in-the-gut point”—but it also has, first and foremost, a can’t-put-it-down s...

Hooks, tropes, high concept. Comps. The publishing world tosses those phrases around like juggling balls, and I for one (as usual it’s KJ here) had a hard time understanding them for ages, especially the idea of a hook.  But now I get it. A hook, in short, is the thing that gets someone—agent, editor, reader, movie-goer, etc—to say, following a one or two sentence description of the book: SOLD. Fi...

Sometimes you have to start with a memoir (that you never publish) to figure out who you are and where you’re going. Today’s guest has a nice impressive bio—but 8 years ago, she was just a writer staring at a screen and working on, as many of us do when we first start, a memoir.  Emily Grosvenor is the editor of Oregon Home magazine , Willamette Week’s design publication Nester. She’s also written...

Hey #AmWriters! Jess here. I recorded a bunch of videos to answer all of your questions about creating video for book marketing but in the end, I figured an entire episode needed to happen in order to really get into the topic.  I started creating daily videos based on the content in The Addiction Inoculation because I wanted to the information out there, and if it sold some books or rustled up so...

Pain by Elsie Robinson Imagine discovering that one of the highest paid, most well known journalists in the world, whose voice dominated the Hearst media empire for more than 30 years, who wrote something like 9,000 published articles… has basically disappeared from living memory. That’s the story of Julia Scheer and Allison Gilbert’s biography: Listen World: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became...

Ever feel like some things are just outside your ken? I’m that way with literary magazines. And I’ve never found the right retreat or residency, or applied for a grant, and I know sometimes it’s just that I don’t think I belong in that world. But worlds don’t usually just reach out and drag you in. That’s a fave theme of ours around here—you can’t be published unless you write something, etc. If y...

Many of you have heard me (this is obviously KJ) whine about my revision in process. Well, I’m here to report that it’s done, and successfully. Below is a full description of the process, and in the episode you’ll hear me talking about it with Jennie Nash. I detail everything except the Peeps that fueled me, and I decided it was wrong to leave them out.  So, in addition to a lot of butt-in-chair t...

Sometimes your first book is a gateway. For me—KJ—it was Reading with Babies, Toddlers and Twos , a book I wrote in 2006 with Susan Straub. Susan was the expert and I was a rising writer with a lesser expertise riding on her coattails. We pitched the book before I had many bylines at all—but adding the words “is the author of the forthcoming book…” to my pitches opened a lot of doors. The book its...