It’s the December Booklab, and while our booklabs are normally only for subscribers, we’ve made this one free as a little present to you—something to listen to while all the other pods are having a well deserved break.How this works: we’ve chosen two among the brave souls who have submitted their first pages (i.e. first 350 words) to us. As always, we read the page aloud, with no other information other than genre and (sometimes) title. We talk about what we read, how it was received, what we think we do and don’t know about the book and what we should know. We offer constructive comments to these writers, and to all writers, on how to make that first page work as hard for you as it can.

And then we answer the question: would we turn the page?

Kids, those first pages have to WORK. People download a book, or grab an audio sample, often without the benefit of your flap copy or the beautiful cover, and you need to sell them on sticking around from that first minute.

The two entries for this episode:

* The Burning Truth is a commercial thriller centered on a woman whose sister’s death is reopened when a teenage true-crime podcaster starts investigating a case that hits dangerously close to home.

* Camil and Bloom is contemporary literary fiction about a middle-aged woman at a bar grappling with being ghosted, using sharp observational detail to explore loneliness, aging, and stalled lives.

Our takeaway is that a first page must work with extreme efficiency: it needs to establish character, stakes, and story direction all at once. Vivid details and strong writing aren’t enough on their own; those details have to be focused and clearly tied to the protagonist’s emotional core so readers understand whose story this is and why it matters. A compelling hook helps, but clarity of perspective and purpose is what ultimately makes a reader turn the page.

#AmWriting is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Most writers start revision by re-reading their manuscript from page one — but that’s the least effective way to improve a book. In this episode, Jenny explains a clearer, more strategic way to revise using the Blueprint and the 3D Revision Process. You’ll learn how to step back, see your book with fresh eyes, and create a plan that actually moves your manuscript from good to great.

We also invite you to join the upcoming Blueprint Sprint.

In this episode you’ll learn:

* Why a full-manuscript read is often the wrong first step in revision

* The mindset shift every writer needs before diving into revisions

* How to use the Blueprint to create a clear, confident revision plan before touching your pages

Join the Blueprint Sprint

Starting January 12 and rolling though February, KJ Dell’Antonia and Jennie Nash will lead you through the 14 foundational questions that every writer should ask of themselves and their book, whether you’re just getting started, are mid-draft or starting on on the whatever-number revision with weekly assignments, live events, workbooks and updated access to all the Blueprint resources. All you need to do is be a paid subscriber and stay tuned—we’ll let you know how to get signed up.

I NEED a January Blueprint!

What if you want even MORE? Then you could be one of a very few #AmWriting subscribers who join our first ever Blueprint Sprint cohort. 6 weeks of working together and write-alongs, 5 group-only live sessions, which will be recorded for anyone who can’t attend and a members-only community dedicated to helping you create a Blueprint that leads you to the book you want to write, ending with direct feedback from me and from Jennie on your flap copy and 3 page Inside-Outline.

We’re keeping this small on purpose—we max out at 10 and we might drop that down—so applications to join this group open today and will be evaluated on a first-come, first serve basis. Once we have 10 people, we will close down the application, so get yours in early! Early-bird pricing is $1000 until December 22, after that the price goes up to $1200 (if there are spaces left by then).

What are we looking for? 10 writers who are prepared to commit to the process and to the cohort, who do what they set out to do when they set out to do it, who welcome constructive feedback and are willing to do what it takes to build a blueprint for the book they want to create. Writers who know that sometimes you must look a hard truth in the face and cut your losses, that what goes in the scrap heap is rarely resurrected but that the scrap heap is a necessary part of the work. Writers who won’t take no for an answer, but can hear “not this” and feel both disappointment and a burning determination that the next effort will be the one that gets there.

Also: no a******s.

What will you need to apply? We want to hear about your professional and publishing backgrounds, but no publishing experience is necessary. We want to know where you are with this current project, but “still noodling” is a fine answer. The primary requirements are first, a readiness to do the work and second and more ephemerally, our sense of what makes a cohesive cohort.

If that sounds like you, here you go—the time to apply is now.

Links & Resources

* Learn more about the Blueprint tools

* Substack about how each genre has a different primary goal in the Blueprint

* #amwriting Episode about the Blueprint origin story and why it’s such a powerful tool:

Transcript Below!

#AmWriting is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“Revision means stepping back, thinking big picture, and being brave enough to rebuild.”

SPONSORSHIP MESSAGE

Hi writers, the Winter Blueprint Challenge 2026 is on, and I can’t wait to do it, and I can’t wait to tell you about it. Okay, so this time around, we’re going to have two ways to play. First, we’ll run the Blueprint for supporters, 10 weeks of Blueprint assignments, live events, and encouragement starting January 12, 2026—or, and this is the big news, apply to join our very first Blueprint cohort—10 of you will become a small group that receives direct feedback from me and from Jennie on flap copy and the three page Inside-Outline, and joins five group only live sessions and becomes a part of a members-only community dedicated to helping you create a blueprint that leads you to the book you want to start and finish. Applications to join this group open December 15, 2025 and will be evaluated on a first come, first-serve basis. Once we have 10 people, we’re going to close down the application. So get yours in early. Early-bird pricing for the small cohort is $1,000 until December 22 after that, the price goes up to $1200 (if there are even spaces left by then). I am so excited about this. So get your application in early. The regular Blueprint will run for supporters at the usual supporter pricing, but this other cohort is going to be really special details on how and where to apply are in the show notes, or they’re going to be pretty prominently displayed at AmWriting podcast.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Multiple Speakers

Is it recording? Now it’s recording. Yay! Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. Try to remember what I’m supposed to be doing. All right, let’s start over. Awkward pause. I’m going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now, one, two, three.

Jennie Nash

Hey everyone, it’s Jennie Nash, and this is the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast the place where we help you play big in your writing life, love the process, and finish what matters. Today, I want to talk about why most writers approach revision the wrong way, and how to use the Blueprint to do it right. Most people think revision starts with reading the whole manuscript, but the truth is I think that’s the last thing you should do. Before we dive into why I think that, and what I think you should do instead, I want to talk a little bit about what I call the “revision mindset.”

When you finish a manuscript, it’s really tempting to think, okay, I’ve got it, I did it, I’ll just polish it up a little and be done. But real revision requires openness—being open to seeing the strengths and the weaknesses and the changes that you need to make in the manuscript to take it from good to great. This can feel really vulnerable. I know for me, at this point, I worry that changing one thing is going to break everything else. You feel so close to the finish line that you don’t want to touch anything. But holding that tightly—that kind of clenching—is exactly what stops the revision process from working. It’s important to remember that revising is big-picture work. It’s not line editing. Revising is stepping back, seeing what’s really on the page, and being willing to reshape it. So a “revision mindset” is that openness and that willingness to look at it, to be real about what’s there and what you want it to be, and to be willing to do what it takes to get it there. So a good revision is going to start with that mindset. And if we start there, you can begin to see why doing a full manuscript read-through from page one, marching straight through all the way to the end, is going to lead to trouble. There are two particular things that happen if you approach revision in that way.

The first problem is when you go to read the book from page one chronologically all the way through—maybe you wrote it that way, maybe you didn’t—but in any case, if that’s how you approach revision, what tends to happen is that you fall into line editing instead of big-picture thinking. You begin to think, oh, this line is really great, or maybe I should fix that line, or maybe the flow here is a little off from this line to the other. You stay in the weeds, and you lose sight of structure and purpose and the big arc of your story or argument. The second problem with starting revision with a full manuscript read is when you ask somebody else to do that reading for you. Basically, what you’re doing is handing over your power to somebody else. You’re saying you look at this, tell me what you think, tell me how to fix it, tell me what’s wrong. And the problem with that is the tendency to get feedback and then just do everything they ask without thinking strategically through what you want to do or what you want your revision to accomplish. And a corollary of that problem is that usually when people are doing that full manuscript read for you, they’re just dumping all this stuff on you. They’re giving you this long litany of things that they see in the manuscript, or things that they think you should fix, and that list might include small things and big things and important things and not important things. It’s so easy to just get overwhelmed with the process.

As a book coach, that’s what I see all the time. People get into revision, they get overwhelmed, they freeze up, they don’t know what to do first. It’s so easy to feel defeated. And that’s the moment when so many writers stall out and shelve the project. They put it in a folder on their desktop—the proverbial drawer—and it’s just away, and they’re done, and they can’t face it. And then the idea of going back to that huge amount of work and trying to figure it out becomes too daunting, and they just don’t. So I don’t recommend starting your revision with the full manuscript read.

I have a different approach that I teach book coaches at Author Accelerator, and it’s called the “3D revision process.” It has three parts. The first is a process of inquiry. We use the Blueprint to ask key questions about the project. The second step is mapping everything out using the outline at the end of the Blueprint in a specific way. And the third step is strategizing. We look at that outline and we prioritize what changes need to be made using the stoplight strategy. I’m going to explain all these things in a minute, but the point is that this process gives you clarity, confidence, and a specific, actionable plan for approaching your revision—which is the dream.

Okay, so let’s walk through it. Step one is this process of inquiry, and using the Blueprint to walk us through that. In an earlier episode, which I’ll link to in the show notes, I talked about why I created the Blueprint and why I refer to it as a process of inquiry, rather than a story structure method. The process of inquiry allows the writer to look at the foundational aspects of what they’re writing and to look at the work from this big-picture angle that usually they skip. There are 14 questions no matter which genre you’re working on, but they all start with these really basic questions, like, why are you writing this book? What’s your point? Who’s your reader, and what do they want? And are you giving it to them?

Using the Blueprint to start a project, and answering these questions before you begin, is a really powerful way to think about what you want to do in the book, and a powerful way to get your vision clear. But when you have a finished manuscript and you go back to these questions, it’s a whole different ball game. It’s almost like a test. Can you answer these questions clearly and confidently based on what you know is there? Have you, in other words, put on the page the vision that you had in your head? So you go through the 14 questions honestly, answering them based on what you actually have, and it becomes this kind of assessment or challenge or test, like, did I do what I wanted to accomplish? And it’s really easy in those 14 questions to see if you didn’t. If you can’t confidently answer one of the questions, you know that that’s pointing toward a potential weakness in the book.

If I give the 14 Blueprint questions to somebody who has written a manuscript that they love and that is close to the vision that they had for it, they’re able to knock those questions out and answer them with such authority and power, and it’s just an amazing thing to see. And when they can’t, and they’re coming to the questions with that openness I talked about before, then it’s like, okay, look, we still don’t have this piece nailed down. We still have to figure out this part of the story or the argument that you’re making, so it becomes a first pass at what is really there and what strengths and weaknesses are on the page.

The second step in the “3D revision process” is to map out what you have, and we do this with the outline that is at the end of each of the Blueprints. If you’ve gone through the previous questions in the Blueprint, you’re looking at those foundational aspects, the structural elements of the story, all the things that hold up what you’ve written, and then the outline is, okay, here’s what I’ve actually written. If you’re at the start of a project, you want that outline to be no more than three pages. I’m very strict about this, and there’s a reason for that. It’s because we need to contain or constrain the creative process so that we can see what it is you’re wanting to make or to build. If someone goes on and on at that stage of the writing process, they’re not making good decisions and they’re not thinking about the big picture. But when you keep it to three pages, you’re forced to do that, and it’s a really awesome process.

With revision, I loosen those rules, and the reason is that for revision, I want this outline to be what I call an “as-is outline.” So this is not what you intend to write, or what you hope to write, or what you plan to write, which is what it is at the beginning of a project. Now it’s what is actually there. So the as-is outline is capturing what you actually wrote, not what you intended to write. So you use the manuscript, obviously, to get this information and to pin down an outline of what is actually there. And there’s still a constraint. I suggest that you keep this as-is outline to about 10 pages, and you absolutely need to follow the rules of the genre that I outline in the Blueprint. Each of the genres has a specific outline and a specific thing that we’re looking for in that outline, and I designed that to solve for the things that people most often get wrong in that genre.

I wrote a Substack post, which I’ll link to in the show notes, which explains what each of those things are, and I’ll link to that in the show notes. But you want to follow the rules of the outline, so that you make sure you’re not making the foundational problems of that genre. But then you have these 10 pages to capture what you’ve actually done on the page, and this as-is outline is where the big insights happen. When you step back and you look at this as-is outline, you can see where the momentum drops, where scenes or chapters repeat themselves, where your structure might be broken, where a subplot might take over, or, in nonfiction, where you veer off in some other direction. You can see where two memoir scenes are doing the same emotional work, or where a nonfiction chapter doesn’t drive towards the outcome that you’re leading your reader to. You can see so much in this outline, and that’s why this process is so powerful. The outline becomes a kind of X-ray of what you’ve actually written on the page.

And that leads us to step three of the “3D revision process” which is you’re going to analyze that outline. You’re going to bring some strategic thinking to what you have there. Each of the Blueprints has a checklist for their particular outline, and you want to go through those checklists and really ask yourself, have I done this? Have I done that? Have I done the other? The kinds of questions that checklist asks are things like, am I giving the reader what they want and expect? Does my outline include the essential elements of my genre or category? What’s missing, what’s out of order, what’s unclear, what’s unnecessary? So it’s strategic thinking about the material that you have created.

One of my favorite books about the creative process is Creativity, Inc., by Ed Catmull. It’s the story of the creation of Pixar, the company, and in that book, he talks about the Brain Trust, which is a very small group of writers who help each other to create the best possible stories. And they have this process in the Brain Trust that’s called giving good notes. And good notes are clear, they’re factual, they’re strategic, and that’s what you’re doing here for yourself. You’re giving yourself good notes. And if at this point you want to bring in a trusted partner to help you brainstorm and to help you look at your material and look at your notes and help you brainstorm solutions, this is a great time to bring in somebody to help you brainstorm and to look at your as-is outline and look at the notes that you’ve made for yourself, because instead of just handing the job over to somebody else, you’re saying, I have done this work of looking at my work in a strategic way. I know what I’ve done well, I know what my weaknesses are, and now I’m ready to solve those problems.

So a great critique partner or a trusted beta reader or a book coach…obviously, are great people to bring in at this stage of the process. And what’s awesome is you’re not asking them to sit down and spend 15 or 20 hours reading a whole manuscript and trying to figure out what you want or what you were trying to do, or how it all lands for them, and giving you this info dump of information. You’re asking them to look at your Blueprint, to look at your answers to the 14 questions, and your as-is outline, and your analysis of that outline. And what you’ll be doing, either on your own or in partnership, is prioritizing what needs to happen in the revision.

The tool that I teach coaches to do this is called the “stoplight strategy.” And what we’re doing is we’re trying to categorize the problems that we see in a manuscript by their severity. So red light problems are major structural issues, yellow light problems are medium-level issues, and green light problems are line-level edits. I designed the stoplight strategy because so many writers think that revision is about green light issues. So many of them start with line-level edits. And as I spoke about before, the tendency if you’re doing a full manuscript read is to fall into that rhythm of just seeing the green light things, or maybe a few yellow light things. But it’s very hard to see the red light things, which are the things that are going to bring your book down. They’re the fatal flaws, and most writers never find the time to actually look at those things.

So they might be things like, I’ve got to start this novel in a totally different place, or I have to chop off five chapters of my memoir, or I have to restructure my entire nonfiction argument in a different way to make it land. But if you’ve approached the process that I’m explaining with that openness, that revision mindset, and that curiosity about how can I make this better, and if you’ve gone through it in this systematic way, and you found some red light issues, they tend not to sting quite so much. They tend to feel manageable. Okay, I can fix this one big thing. And if I fix this one big thing, the next thing that I need to fix is probably going to be obvious, and then the next one is going to be obvious. So you’re leading yourself to a prioritization of what needs to happen in the revision, rather than looking at everything in the same way, meaning every little green light issue has the same weight as the yellow light issues and the same weight as the red light issues.

When we step out of doing the work chronologically, and we approach it in this more strategic way, we tend to focus on the red light issues. And again, they just tend not to feel quite so awful.

So the next step in the process is you take that as-is outline, and you turn it into a “what’s-next outline,” a map of what the book is going to become in revision. On that outline, you mark what gets cut, what gets moved, what needs to be added, what shifts are you going to make because of the big changes, and you actually make them in the outline, so that the outline reflects where you’re going with your revision.

And that’s how we close the gap between what you’ve written and what you want to write. That’s where you get closer to your vision of what you want this book to be. And that’s why this process is so powerful, because now you have a clear map of what you need to do in revision. You have a clear plan for how you’re going to go execute those things, so you’re not guessing and you’re not lost in overwhelm. You have this what’s-next outline that you’re going to go in and follow. And if you want to start at the beginning and make all the revisions in chronological order, you can. Or if you want to go in and fix the big red light issues first, you can. And you can use this what’s-next outline as a kind of external hard drive to hold all the changes that you want to make in your revision, so that you’re not holding them all in your head.

Doing the revision in this way might actually mean going in and working on, let’s say, chapter 10, 11, and 12, and not touching anything else. It might mean going in and working on chapters 13 and 27 and not touching anything else. It’s not necessarily a chronological process. You’re going to follow the what’s-next outline and do what needs to be done in the manuscript.

And once you do that, now is the time when a full manuscript read can make a lot of sense. Now you can go through from beginning to end knowing that you don’t have any big structural issues. There are no red light issues in this manuscript anymore. There are no yellow light issues. You don’t have to think about those or worry about those. You can go through and do the thing that most people do at the beginning of their revision process, which is polishing the prose and making everything sing and working on the line-by-line writing. You’ve already done the heavy lifting.

If you’re excited about using the Blueprint in your revision and you want to work through it with a community of other writers who are doing it too, we’d love to have you join our upcoming Blueprint Challenge. You’re going to go through the Blueprint step by step along with people who are revising their books or people who are starting from scratch. It’s the same 14 questions, and people will be working on fiction, they’ll be working on memoir, and they’ll be working on nonfiction. KJ is going to be leading the charge of this Blueprint, and she’s going to be doing some write-alongs and AMAs and different things to support people while you work through those Blueprint questions. And I’m going to be in there a few times as well.

This is the fourth time we’ve done the Blueprint Challenge at the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast, and it gets better and better every time as more and more people do it. And you can find critique partners in there to help you with your Blueprint questions, maybe to look at your as-is outline, because they understand the process. They understand what’s going on. They understand what this is all about. And it’s just a really fun and powerful way to approach either a new book or the revision of a book that you want to work on.

You can check the show notes for details on how to sign up for the Blueprint Challenge. This challenge works if you have a new idea that you want to work through, or a new-ish idea. You can be a little bit into it, and the Blueprint process is still really effective. And it also, of course, works really well if you’re revising something, or maybe you’re stuck revising something, or overwhelmed by the revision process that you’re in.

You can start at the beginning of the Blueprint process and go through what I’ve just described here, and at the end of the challenge, be in a really great place to move forward with your project. We’d love to have you join us. So again, check the show notes for details.

We give everyone who joins the Blueprint Challenge a downloadable copy of the Blueprint book and a workbook to work through. But if you’re not able to do the challenge at this time and you want to go through this process yourself, you can just grab a copy of my Blueprint book at any bookstore and work through those 14 questions and your outline at the end. However you do it, we’re excited to support you on your way.

So until next time, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

Narrator

The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

It’s on again!

The Blueprint is one of our most popular offerings—Our 10 step plan to help you define the book you want to write before you write 100k words in search of it—but this time we’re going in fast and we’re knocking this puppy out in just 6 weeks. Starting January 12 and rolling though February, Jennie Nash and I (this is KJ) will lead you through the 14 foundational questions that every writer should ask of themselves and their book, whether you’re just getting started, are mid-draft or starting on on the whatever-number revision.

We’ll have weekly assignments and live events (recorded so no one missed anything). We’ll have workbooks and updated access to all the Blueprint resources. There will be chat and solidarity and all the energy that comes from being a part of a community all working together to reach the same goal. Plus, every time we’ve done a Blueprint, somebody ends up with a book deal (listen here: An #AmWriting Success Story! ). That could be you.

I LOVE Blueprint season.

As Jennie says in the episode, the Blueprint comes from her realization that over and over again in her book coaching career (which is long and storied) she was seeing people come to her with the same mistakes—300-350 page manuscripts that lacked an inner structure, or an internal point, that meandered, were all plot and no heart or tried to offer instruction without ever conveying why it was so badly needed and what it would change for the reader.

Her secret is that she developed the Blueprint for revision (and she recorded a whole episode about that, coming later this week) and then realized that using it from the get-go works, too.

Look, I’m the first to tell you that the Blueprint doesn’t solve everything. But it helps… a lot. So get ready to Blueprint, whether you’re starting a new project or revising the current one (that’s where I’ll be)—and if you’re not already a supporter of the podcast (the only way to access the Blueprint) you should be. Right now it’s $100 a year, going up January 1.

Oh I am so IN, counting the days.

What if you want even MORE? Then you could be one of a very few #AmWriting subscribers who join our first ever Blueprint Sprint cohort. 6 weeks of working together and write-alongs, 5 group-only live sessions, which will be recorded for anyone who can’t attend and a members-only community dedicated to helping you create a Blueprint that leads you to the book you want to write, ending with direct feedback from me and from Jennie on your flap copy and 3 page Inside-Outline.

We’re keeping this small on purpose—we max out at 10 and we might drop that down—so applications to join this group open today and will be evaluated on a first-come, first serve basis. Once we have 10 people, we will close down the application, so get yours in early! Early-bird pricing is $1000 until December 22, after that the price goes up to $1200 (if there are spaces left by then).

What are we looking for? 10 writers who are prepared to commit to the process and to the cohort, who do what they set out to do when they set out to do it, who welcome constructive feedback and are willing to do what it takes to build a blueprint for the book they want to create. Writers who know that sometimes you must look a hard truth in the face and cut your losses, that what goes in the scrap heap is rarely resurrected but that the scrap heap is a necessary part of the work. Writers who won’t take no for an answer, but can hear “not this” and feel both disappointment and a burning determination that the next effort will be the one that gets there.

Also: no a******s.

What will you need to apply? We want to hear about your professional and publishing backgrounds, but no publishing experience is necessary. We want to know where you are with this current project, but “still noodling” is a fine answer. The primary requirements are first, a readiness to do the work and second and more ephemerally, our sense of what makes a cohesive cohort.

If that sounds like you, here you go—the time to apply is now.

Rachael Herron’s latest: The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland, is, truly and in so many ways, the book only she can write. It pulls from every part of her life: identity, spirituality, a love of what’s magical in the world, her joy in crafting and her understanding of community and family. I, of course, wanted to know: how did you find the guts to put it all on the table?

We talked about vulnerability, the challenges of writing the book of your heart, and learning to play with what you fear. Rachael says, “I’m spoiled for any smaller kind of writing. I’m not sure I can go back.”

You’re gonna love it.

Links from the Pod:

The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland

Ink in Your Veins podcast

Rachel’s website: https://rachaelherron.com

The Jennifer Lynn Barnes “take my money” list.

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield#AmReading:

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams

This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, Tabitha Carvan

Transcript below:

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Multiple Speakers

Is it recording? Now it’s recording—yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don’t remember what I’m supposed to be doing. All right, let’s start over. Awkward pause. I’m going to rustle some papers. Okay, now—one, two, three.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Hey, listeners, this is the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast, the place where we help you play big in your writing life, love the process, and finish what matters. I am KJ Dell’Antonia, and today I am bringing to you an interview with Rachael Herron. I just finished talking to Rachael, and I really enjoyed this. We talked about vulnerability. We talked about the challenges of writing the book of your heart. We talked about what should show you where that book is, the idea that the fear is where you should play. It’s, it’s a really great interview, and I know that you are going to enjoy it.

Let me tell you a little bit about Rachael. She is the author of so many, so many books, thrillers and romances, and most recently, in the book that we are talking about, The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland. And I have to read you—Rachael’s going to describe this to you, but I got to read you the very short thing that basically made me say, take my money. And it went like this. A psychic tells Beatrix Holland that she’ll experience seven miracles and then she’ll die. No problem, though, Beatrix isn’t worried. She is above all things pragmatic. She vastly prefers a spreadsheet to a tall tale. Then the miracles start to happen.

It’s a really great book, and more importantly, it’s a big book. It is a book where Rachael is writing what comes from deep inside, and it is a book that only Rachael could write. And that is why I asked Rachael to join me today. I hope that you enjoy this interview, and before I release you to it, I just want to remind you that the place to go to talk more about writing big and playing big in your writing life is anywhere that we are: the AmWriting Podcast, Hashtag AmWriting, AmWritingPodcast.com. Find us on Substack. Find us by Googling. Grab those show notes—you should be getting them—and join us for all the different ways that we need to come together in a community to give each other the strength to do our very best and biggest work.

So I’m going to ask you to describe The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland to me. But also before I even do, I want to say how much I enjoyed it. And also so we have been spending most of our time on the AmWriting Podcast lately talking about writing—writing big and striving big and trying to do something different and bigger and better than what you have done before. We, I think as writers, we’re always trying to up our game, but there’s upping your game, and there’s reaching for the stars. And I felt like this book reached for the stars in a way that you maybe didn’t even set out to because to me, as someone who has read much of your work and followed your career and listened to a lot of the Ink in Your Veins Podcast and sort of just knows what’s going on with Rachael, this is the book that only you could write. So when I say this is your big book, I don’t mean, you know, that this is, is going to be a—I’m sorry—I don’t actually mean that 200 years from now, people will be passing this around.

Rachael Herron

Exactly.

KJ Dell’Antonia

What I mean is that this is you. This is and it’s you. All of your books are you, but this was really you in a way that felt downright magical to me. And it’s a magical book. So can you tell us a little bit about Beatrix Holland? And I will also say that even before I read it that you had me at the premise. So give us that.

Rachael Herron

Well, I don’t know how to talk about it now that you’ve talked me up so well. But thank you. Thank you for, you know, being honestly an ideal reader for this book. The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland is about a woman who is pragmatic and sensible and doesn’t believe in, you know, mumbo jumbo, not really worried about that kind of thing. But she is told by a psychic that she will experience seven miracles and then she will die and whatever, that’s not a big deal. It doesn’t bother her, because none of it is true. She doesn’t believe it. And then, me… miracles start to occur; things that even she cannot say are not miracles. And so therefore, maybe, what about that death thing that’s going to be preying on her mind?

KJ Dell’Antonia

So on top of that…

Rachael Herron

Who likes what the book is about…

KJ Dell’Antonia

We’re on an island, and there’s family secrets being revealed. And there are amazing family secrets that I think many of us would, I mean, they’re kind of awful, and I’ve talked to some people, and some people would be thrilled by them, and some wouldn’t, but yeah, just it just kind of keeps giving and giving and giving. And it’s funny because you say I’m the ideal reader, and actually, I don’t know that I necessarily would be…

Rachael Herron

Oh, that’s even better…

KJ Dell’Antonia

Except, if somebody else had written this, I would not be the ideal reader. And I don’t think that’s because I know you. I think it’s because of the way that you wrote that. And when what I when I say, I wouldn’t be the ideal reader, I am getting a little tired of books that are giving me certain specific elements that are very trendy right now and that people feel obliged to give me. And you know you have, certainly, you’ve got LGBTQ characters in this, but also you have LGBTQ characters in your life. You are yourself such a character.

Rachael Herron

As my wife is one of them over in the other room.

KJ Dell’Antonia

And this isn’t me saying I will only read books about queer people by queer authors. No, no, no. It’s that these are the thing, the elements of this book that sort of fall into that, that are just there, because that’s your life and what you see…

Rachael Herron

Right. Right.

KJ Dell’Antonia

And it just is perfectly natural. And of course, you have a lot of—and it’s in the sort of the same way that, of course, there’s a lot of witchiness and spirituality, because it’s part, it’s part of you and part of who you are. So it’s, it’s, it reads as authentic.

Rachael Herron

Oh, that’s such a, that’s such a—that’s such a huge compliment. I wrote this book to please myself.

KJ Dell’Antonia

That’s what… that’s my next question. Don’t make me. Don’t make me interrupt you. What? That was my question. What was your intention? What did you set out to do with this book?

Rachael Herron

I—so this is my sixth genre, and I’ve been writing for—I’ve been published for 15 years, and this is my 26 or 27th book. I’ve lost, I can’t remember, maybe more. I have a list somewhere. And I have always thought about, you know, the market and what people want to read and what people want to hear, as you know, as you know this, you’ve been, you’ve been doing the same thing a long time.

KJ Dell’Antonia

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Rachael Herron

There’s nothing wrong with writing tree, market around market, exactly. But, but in this case, I wanted to write a book, and I wanted to have fun, and, and, and to be honest, I talk about this regularly is that I was going to self-publish it. I didn’t even want to deal with my agent coming back and saying, oh, you should edit it this way. Or, you know that this or that editor doesn’t want it, or they wanted to change in some way. I wanted to write a—I wanted to write a series of about found family, and I did, I did the Jennifer Lynn Barnes thing, the adored Taylor, where I just, I just made the list of everything I love the most. You know, I love witch stuff. I love practical magic. I love sisters. I love twins separated at birth. Why wouldn’t I? I love grumpy, grumpy, older women and fireflies and all of the things that I love the most. And I and I wrote that book, and it was one of the fastest books I’ve ever written, and not because I was rushing, just because it came easily. I was following my heart and following my gut, and I was also following my tarot cards. When I would get stuck, I would just pull a tarot card and see what it did with my subconscious and moved me forward, and I it was just play. And then I revised it quickly. I hired my favorite editor, edited it, got it copy edited, and then I decided, oh gosh, I don’t think I want to do a whole series, and I’m not sure if I want to self-publish, because that’s a lot of work, so I’ll just let my agent have it and to see if she could sell it. And she said, okay, I’ll take a look at it and see if I could sell it. And then it sold at auction because it was, I don’t… there’s no because there it was just no surprise. There’s no because there’s no because there’s never a because in publishing. You can also write the book of your heart.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, and then this—the rest of the story wouldn’t fall that way and it would never sell that way…

Rachael Herron

Exactly. So it happened to go this way. And of course, a lot of it is a lot of it is luck. Cozy, cozy, queer fantasy is, you know, on an upswing right now, but that wasn’t, you know, a couple years ago. It took a couple years for it to come out.

KJ Dell’Antonia

What do you love most? Yeah, what do you love most about this book and the experience?

Rachael Herron

The thing I love most about the whole experience is that it has spoiled me for any other kind of writing; I think now, which may be a good or a bad thing. Ask me in a few years. But I kind of refuse now to write a book that I don’t desperately want to write, that I can’t stop thinking of. Because I’ve written a lot of books that I love, but they were, you know, what they were, they were my job. They were the book I sold. And now I will write the book that I sold. Now I will do, do what the contract says. And I don’t want to do that anymore. I just want to write the books that grab me and fascinate me and keep me in their thrall and what that means is that I have to, you know, focus on other ways to bring in money and to support. And really, I’m now, I’m supporting this writing passion with things like teaching and with, you know, you know, old backlist books. But I’m not, I’m not sure if I can go back. I don’t want to, I don’t want to be a work a day writer, writing to a contract that I don’t maybe love as much as other contracts I’ve had, right?

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah.

Rachael Herron

So, yeah, it’s spoiled me a little bit that way.

KJ Dell’Antonia

So are there other ways that this book feels bigger than things that you have written before? And this is again; we’re not denigrating our old work. We’re not…

Rachael Herron

No, of course not. Of course not. I think that every—for me, it’s always been a goal that for every book that I write, it needs to be me playing bigger. It needs to be me playing truer, more, more free. And in this book, it’s only recently come up in my in my consciousness that I think that I needed to leave the United States and move around the world to New Zealand. And one of the reasons we left the states was because we were scared of the way LGBTQ rights are, are trending. There’s 867 pieces of legislation that are anti LGBTQ on the dockets right now in the United States, and that’s, that’s up by like 700% in the last four years, and it’s and it’s terrifying. But it I didn’t strike me until recently that this is my first novel that has a queer love story. It’s not a romance, but there’s a queer, queer love story inside it. And I finally, perhaps, felt safe enough to do that, you know, because it and when I came into the industry, I came in writing straight romances, because that’s what would sell. And when I would ask to write other things that was turned down by traditional publishing because they thought it wouldn’t sell. And then, you know, obviously self-publishers came along and said, oh, there is a market. Wow, look who wants to read these books. But, and so it was me kind of exposing myself in that way, and also me exposing myself in in the way that Beatrix does is that I always, I also just want to believe in magic. I want to believe I want to believe in things out there that I can’t explain, that are bigger than me, that I don’t actually need a name for or to understand. Because if I could understand something that is that big, something that is powering the universes, I can’t be expected to understand that. But can I, can I engage with it? Can I play with it in the in the exact same way that that Beatrix does? I think the answer is yes. And I did. When I would pull the tarot cards to help me write the next chapter if I got stuck, it was an actual process of engaging with a larger thing, saying, I don’t know how to write this book. Help me write this book. Asking for help in writing this book from, from whatever is out there. I don’t have, I don’t have big ideas about it, but yeah. So that was, that was, it was scary, and maybe that’s why I originally wanted to self-publish it, because then it, it felt like I could keep total control.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Sure.

Rachael Herron

If I did that,

KJ Dell’Antonia

Of course, you could keep anyone who wouldn’t like it from reading it then.

Multiple Speakers

[Both laughing]

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, okay, so maybe not so much. But no, I get it. It must have felt…

Rachael Herron

Yeah.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Less vulnerable. So I was going to ask you next, what was hard about it. And I guess that’s, is that what was hard? But maybe something else was.

Rachael Herron

Let’s see, what was that? So that was hard, being that honest and vulnerable. And you know how when we write our novels, the thing that we want to do is be as truthful as possible, even though we’re just making up a pack of lies. It’s it feels more true often than even memoir can when we’re when we’re doing this. What else felt hard? Not much felt hard about this book. And I have had books that I have struggled with like I am wrestling muddy alligators for decades at a time. It feels like those that’s what those that’s what those books feel like. And there’s nothing wrong with those books. They were just; you know where I was at the moment. But this book, I it’s one of those gift books. It just, I must have struggled, and I do not remember. I honestly do not remember struggling.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Well… I wish for…

Rachael Herron

I just remember it being joy.

KJ Dell’Antonia

…all of us. I wish that. I wish that journey for all of us. Oh. Yeah, yeah…

Rachael Herron

As usual, I struggle whenever I get copy edits back. When I get copy edits back, I realize I don’t know how to write a sentence.

KJ Dell’Antonia

So if any of our listeners are sort of trying to find within themselves the freedom to write what they really want to write, and maybe can’t even figure out what the heck that would be, what would you say to them…asking for a friend?

Rachael Herron

I would encourage them to do one of those “ID lists”, to sit down and write a list of the thing that if you saw that something about it was on the box of the of the video cassette at the video rental store, because that’s how old I am, if you saw that listed on there, would you pick it up and rent the movie? Write down all of the things that you love the most and then actually use it as an exercise in creativity within constraints. How many of those things can you actually shove in there? Can you get them? Can you get them all in there? The other thing I like to ask myself when this question comes up is, if I am alone—well, it doesn’t actually matter if I’m alone or not—but if I, if I walk into the bookstore, any bookstore, and and I reject any “shoulds,” you know, should I look for that cookbook I was thinking about, or should I look for that new nonfiction I heard about on the podcast, if I’m if I’m released of all shoulds, where will I want to—and say somebody tells me you can only look at one section of the store today. What is the section of the store that I will go stand in front of and pull books off the shelf and look at? And perhaps that is a clue as to where you should be writing.

KJ Dell’Antonia

And how about freeing yourself up to actually do it. We can’t all move to New Zealand, Rachael.

Rachael Herron

[Laughing] Freeing yourself up do you mean to write the book, to write that book?

KJ Dell’Antonia

To write that book. I don’t. Yeah, most of my listeners—well, most of our listeners aren’t you know, we tend to be a podcast for professionals or people that are playing professional so, you know, these aren’t people who can’t put their butt in the chair, but to be vulnerable and admit that you want to go bigger and then do it. That’s a different question. Got any advice for that?

Rachael Herron

I do like to think of Steven Pressfield’s advice from his book The War of Art, where he talks about resistance with the capital R. And the place where you feel the most resistance, that’s your that’s your compass that is pointing north to what you what, what you are meant to do. And a lot of times when we think about these bigger stories that we may want to write someday, the someday, right when I get there, I’ll write it someday, that you’ve already got this compass pointing you there, and it is terrifying. And the fear of how can I do that now is maybe the thing that says that you do not need to put aside the fourth book in the series that you’re writing that you need to finish before you write this next series. You can do that. But maybe listening to that resistance, listening to that fear, and dedicating 15 minutes, three times a week, to playing with the idea of this book. If you were to start to write it anytime in the future, you can, you can at least be courting it and flirting with it, making it know that you are going to be available to write that, that book of your heart, because everybody, every we all need that. We all need that. We also need to pay the bills and do the professional writing and do all that too.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, yeah.

Rachael Herron

But…

KJ Dell’Antonia

We got to; we got to try to do the biggest things we can. All right. Well, that’s a great place to lead into my next question, which is, what have you read recently where you really thought the writer was playing big?

Rachael Herron

Can I give you two?

KJ Dell’Antonia

Of course!

Rachael Herron

Okay, the first one, and strangely, these are both nonfiction. So make of that what you will, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who is a QE. Have you heard of this one?

KJ Dell’Antonia

Oh yeah. This is the…

Rachael Herron

Oh yeah, the Facebook book.

KJ Dell’Antonia

The Facebook book. We moved fast, and we did indeed break things.

Rachael Herron

We did move fast. We broke things. And Sarah has a uniquely Kiwi sense when she’s looking at them, because she goes in and she’s really watching it all happen. And I don’t care about Facebook. I don’t actually engage with all of the stuff that said about it. And this book is written basically it felt like a thriller. It was—I couldn’t put it down. And she was fearless, the things that she said. No wonder Zuckerberg wanted to silence it. He looks like a moron. And she was absolutely fearless. And it was one of those schadenfreudy, why am I reading this? Why can’t I put this down? But I can’t put it down. And I think it was because of her bravery.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah.

Rachael Herron

So I really enjoyed it for that. And then the other one I want to tell you about is kind of on the flip side. And you may not have heard about this one. It’s called This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch

KJ Dell’Antonia

Not only have I heard about this one, it’s entirely possible that I sent it to you.

Rachael Herron

Really?!

KJ Dell’Antonia

I love this book! All right, go on. Go on.

Rachael Herron

…The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It, by Tabitha Carvan. Oh, my god, isn’t it brilliant? She writes about how, yes, she does love Benedict Cumberbatch, who I’d really never considered very much in my life

KJ Dell’Antonia

No, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup of youthful-ish…

Rachael Herron

Yeah.

KJ Dell’Antonia

British-ish…

Rachael Herron

Yeah.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Actor-ish,

Rachael Herron

And she loves him, loves him, loves him, no, no joke, loves him. And the whole book is about recovering from any shame around loving the thing that you were put on this earth to freaking love with your whole heart, no matter what anybody says. And I really think the Benedict Cumberbatch is a really great thing to tie this whole book in.

KJ Dell’Antonia

It had to be something like that, because if it was like knitting, I mean,

Rachael Herron

Right, exactly.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Okay, that’s fine, honey, you can love your knitting. And you know it also is…

Rachael Herron

Exactly,

KJ Dell’Antonia

You know, it also is…

Rachael Herron

This is not a book about yogurt. Who cares, you know. But Benedict Cumberbatch is funny to say. He’s actually kind of funny to look at when you do look at him, when you do look him up. And it’s so evocative, and it is, and it is something that people would snicker at.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah.

Rachael Herron

Right? People would snicker.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Still even… yeah, it’s like, she snickers it herself. But also she’s like, okay, why? Why is that, you know? Why would it be? What if I were super obsessed with the stats of some obscure ball—baseball player, no one would mock that. If I wanted to watch every football game played by, you know…

Rachael Herron

That blew my mind when she said that, of course, of course. So, and she goes deep. She’s again, she’s so brave. She plays big. She goes into what it means. How does it like? How does it affect her husband? What does she think about how it affects her husband? Like she goes all of the places. I’m so, I bet you did tell me about it, and I’m so glad that you did.

KJ Dell’Antonia

I love, I love. I keep extra copies to force people to read it. I tie people up in like, you know parts of my house and force them… no. I don’t really do that.

Rachael Herron

[Laughing] I love that. But, and what are those all have in common? I think that what are, the both those books have in common? Is these women who, who, at any point, anybody in the whole world could have told them that’s not really a good idea to write.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, no, that’s exactly right.

Rachael Herron

And it would’ve been true.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah. It would have been true. It would have been excellent advice.

Rachael Herron

Excellent advice not to write that book.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Really, you should not admit that you love Benedict. Or really, I mean, you’re never going to work in this town again, man.

Rachael Herron

You’re never going to work in this town again. And the whole, during the whole book of Careless People, she’s talking about being inside, she is inside the beast that is doing the damage. And that’s and that’s brave too. And I don’t think Seven Miracles is as brave as those books, but there was, but there was bravery and resistance around moving, moving toward, really putting yourself on display.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Run towards the fear.

Rachael Herron

And that’s what we writers do.

KJ Dell’Antonia

That’s our theme.

Rachael Herron

Yeah, run towards the fear. Even if you can only give it 15 minutes a day or so, three times a week, that’s enough. That’s good enough to tell your bravery. It should come back more.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yes.

Rachael Herron

Scooch, door bravery, little scooches.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Edge towards the fear. Tip toe.

Rachael Herron

Oh, that’s beautiful. I love that you’re doing this series.

KJ Dell’Antonia

We love it too. So, yeah, it’s going great. Well again, thank you. I was really excited to talk to you about this book. I was really excited to read this book. I enjoyed the heck out of it, and I think, listeners, that you would too. You should absolutely check it out as well as all the rest of Rachael’s work. Links of course, as always, in the show notes, and follow Rachael in all the places. Although, to me, the best thing to do is to go and listen to the Ink in Your Veins Podcast. Because obviously, people, you’re a podcast listener, you wouldn’t be here. Where do you most like to be followed, Rachael?

Rachael Herron

At Ink in Your Veins or on Rachaelherron.com/write, if you are a writer and want to get on the on the writing encouragement list. But I just want to thank you for doing this amazing show and for having me. I feel very, very honored to be here.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Well, thank—thank you. All right. And as we say in every episode, until next week, kids, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

Narrator

The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

In this Write Big session of the #amwriting podcast, host Jennie Nash welcomes Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jennifer Senior for a powerful conversation about finding, knowing, and claiming your voice.

Jennifer shares how a medication once stripped away her ability to think in metaphor—the very heart of her writing—and what it was like to get that voice back. She and Jennie talk about how voice strengthens over time, why confidence and ruthless editing matter, and what it feels like when you’re truly writing in flow.

It’s an inspiring reminder that your voice is your greatest strength—and worth honoring every time you sit down to write.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW!

THINGS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

* Jennifer’s Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross: Can’t Sleep? You’re Not Alone

* Atlantic feature story: What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind

* Atlantic feature story: The Ones We Sent Away

* Atlantic feature story: It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart

* The New York Times article: Happiness Won’t Save You

* Heavyweight the podcast

SPONSORSHIP MESSAGE

Hey, it’s Jennie Nash. And at Author Accelerator, we believe that the skills required to become a great book coach and build a successful book coaching business can be taught to people who come from all kinds of backgrounds and who bring all kinds of experiences to the work. But we also know that there are certain core characteristics that our most successful book coaches share. If you’ve been curious about becoming a book coach, and 2026 might be the year for you, come take our quiz to see how many of those core characteristics you have. You can find it at bookcoaches.com/characteristics-quiz.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Jennie Nash

Hi, I’m Jennie Nash, and you’re listening to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. This is a Write Big Session, where I’m bringing you short episodes about the mindset shifts that help you stop playing small and write like it matters. This one might not actually be that short, because today I’m talking to journalist Jennifer Senior about the idea of finding and knowing and claiming your voice—a rather big part of writing big. Jennifer Senior is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2022 and was a finalist again in 2024. Before that, she spent five years at The New York Times as both a daily book critic and a columnist for the opinion page, and nearly two decades at New York Magazine. She’s also the author of a bestselling parenting book, and frequently appears on NPR and other news shows. Welcome, Jennifer. Thanks for joining us.

Jennifer Senior

Thank you for having me. Hey, I got to clarify just one thing.

Jennie Nash

Oh, no.

Jennifer Senior

All Joy and No Fun is by no means a parenting book. I can’t tell you the first thing about how to raise your kids. It is all about how kids change their parents. It’s all like a sociological look at who we become and why we are—so our lives become so vexed. I like, I would do these book talks, and at the end, everybody would raise their hand and be like, “How do I get my kid into Harvard?” You know, like, the equivalent obviously—they wouldn’t say it that way. I’d be like; I don’t really have any idea, or how to get your kid to eat vegetables, or how to get your kid to, like, stop talking back. But anyway, I just have to clarify that, because every time...

Jennie Nash

Please, please—

Jennifer Senior

Someone says that, I’m like, “Noooo.” Anyway, it’s a sociology book. Ah, it’s an ethnography, you know. But anyway, it doesn’t matter.

Jennie Nash

All right, like she said, you guys—not what I said.

Jennifer Senior

I’m not correcting you. It came out 11 years ago. There were no iPads then, or social media. I mean, forget it. It’s so dated anyway. But like, I just...

Jennie Nash

That’s so funny. So the reason that we’re speaking is that I heard you recently on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where you were talking about an Atlantic feature story that you wrote called “Why Can’t Americans Sleep?” And this was obviously a reported piece, but also a really personal piece and you’re talking about your futile attempts to fall asleep and the latest research into insomnia and medication and therapy that you used to treat it, and we’ll link to that article and interview in the show notes. But the reason that we’re talking, and that in the middle of this conversation, which—which I’m listening to and I’m riveted by—you made this comment, and it was a little bit of a throwaway comment in the conversation, and, you know, then the conversation moved on. But you talked about how you were taking a particular antidepressant you’d been prescribed, and this was the quote you said: “It blew out all the circuitry that was responsible for generating metaphors, which is what I do as a writer. So it made my writing really flat.” And I was just like, hold up. What was that like? What happened? What—everything? So that’s why we’re talking. So… can we go back to the very beginning? If you can remember—Jess Lahey actually told me that when she was teaching fifth and sixth grade, that’s around the time that kids begin to grasp this idea of figurative language and metaphor and such. Do you remember learning how to write like that, like write in metaphor and simile and all such things?

Jennifer Senior

Oh, that’s funny. Do I remember it? I remember them starting to sort of come unbidden in my—like they would come unbidden in my head starting maybe in my—the minute I entered college, or maybe in my teens. Actually, I had that thing where some people have this—people who become writers have, like, a narrator’s voice in their head where they’re actually looking at things and describing them in the third person. They’re writing them as they witness the world. That went away, that narrator’s voice, which I also find sort of fascinating. But, like, I would say that it sort of emerged concurrently. I guess I was scribbling a little bit of, like, short story stuff, or I tried at least one when I was a senior in high school. So that was the first time maybe that, like, I started realizing that I had a flair for it. I also—once I noticed that, I know in college I would make, you know, when I started writing for the alternative weekly and I was reviewing things, particularly theater, I would make a conscientious effort to come up with good metaphors, and, like, 50% of them worked and 50% of them didn’t, because if you ever labor over a metaphor, there’s a much lower chance of it working. I mean, if you come—if you revisit it and go, oh, that’s not—you know, that you can tell if it’s too precious. But now if I labor over a metaphor, I don’t bother. I stop. You know, it has to come instantaneously or...

Jennie Nash

Or that reminds me of people who write with the thesaurus open, like that’s going to be good, right? That’s not going to work. So I want to stick with this, you know, so that they come into your head, you recognize that, and just this idea of knowing, back in the day, that you could write like that—you… this was a thing you had, like you used the word “flair,” like had a flair for this. Were there other signs or things that led you to the work, like knowing you were good, or knowing when something was on the page that it was right, like, what—what is that?

Jennifer Senior

It’s that feeling of exhilaration, but it’s also that feeling of total bewilderment, like you’ve been struck by something—something just blew through you and you had nothing to do with it. I mean, it’s the cliché: here I am saying the metaphors are my superpower, which my editors were telling me, and I’m about to use a cliché, which is that you feel like you’re a conduit for something and you have absolutely nothing to do with it. So I would have that sense that it had almost come without conscious thought. That was sort of when I knew it was working. It’s also part of being in a flow state. It’s when you’re losing track of time and you’re just in it. And the metaphors are—yeah, they’re effortless. By the way, my brain is not entirely fogged in from long COVID, but I have noticed—and at first I didn’t really notice any decrements in cognition—but recently, I have. So I’m wondering now if I’m having problems with spontaneous metaphor generation. It’s a little bit disconcerting. And I do feel like all SSRIs—and I’m taking one now, just because, not just because long COVID is depressing, but because I have POTS, which is like a—it’s Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, and that’s a very common sequela from long COVID, and it wipes out your plasma serotonin. So we have to take one anyway, we POTS patients. So I found that nicotine often helped with my long COVID, which is a thing—like a nicotine patch—and that made up for it. It almost felt like I was doping [laughing]. It made my writing so much better. But it’s been...

Jennie Nash

Wait, wait, wait, this is so interesting.

Jennifer Senior

I know…it’s really weird. I would never have guessed that so much of my writing would be dampened by Big Pharma. I mean—but now with the nicotine patches, I was like, oh, now I get why writers are smoking until into the night, writing. Like, I mean, and I always wished that I did, just because it looked cool, you know? I could have just been one of those people with their Gitanes, or however you pronounce it, but, yeah.

Jennie Nash

Wow. So I want to come—I want to circle back to this in a minute, but let’s get to the first time—well, it sounds like the first time that happened where you were prescribed an antidepressant and—and you recognized that you lost the ability to write in metaphor. Can you talk about—well, first of all, can you tell us what the medication was?

Jennifer Senior

Yeah, it was Paxil, which is actually notorious for that. And at the top—which I only subsequently discovered—those were in the days where there were no such things as Reddit threads or anything like that. It was 1999… I guess, no, eight, but so really early. That was the bespoke antidepressant at the time, thought to be more nuanced. I think it’s now fallen out of favor, because it’s also a b***h to wean off of. But it was kind of awful, just—I would think, and nothing would come. It was the strangest thing. For—there’s all this static electricity usually when you write, right? And there’s a lot of free associating that goes on that, again, feels a little involuntary. You know, you start thinking—it’s like you’ve pulled back the spring in the pinball machine, and suddenly the thing is just bouncing around everywhere, and the ball wasn’t bouncing around. Nothing was lighting up. It was like a dis… it just was strange, to be able to summon nothing.

Jennie Nash

Wow. So you—you just used this killer metaphor to describe that.

Jennifer Senior

Yeah, that was spontaneous.

Jennie Nash

Right? So—so you said first, you said static, static energy, which—which is interesting.

Jennifer Senior

Yeah, it’s... [buzzing sound]

Jennie Nash

Yeah. Yeah. Because it’s noisy. You’re talking about...

Jennie Senior

Oh, but it’s not disruptive noise. Sorry, that might seem like it’s like unwanted crackling, like on your television. I didn’t really—yeah, maybe that’s the wrong metaphor, actually, maybe the pinball is sort of better, that all you need is to, you know, psych yourself up, sit down, have your caffeine, and then bam, you know? But I didn’t mean static in that way.

Jennie Nash

I understood what you meant. There’s like a buzzy energy.

Jennifer Senior

Yeah, right. It’s fizz.

Jennie Nash

Fizz... that’s so good. So you—you recognized that this was gone.

Jennifer Senior

So gone! Like the TV was off, you know?

Jennie Nash

And did you...?

Jennifer Senior

Or the machine, you know, was unplugged? I mean, it’s—

Jennie Nash

Yeah, and did you? I’m just so curious about the part of your brain that was watching another part of your brain.

Jennifer Senior

[Laughing] You know what? I think... oh, that’s really interesting. But are you watching, or are you just despairing because there’s nothing—I mean, I’m trying to think if that’s the right...

Jennie Nash

But there’s a part of your brain that’s like, this part of my brain isn’t working.

Jennifer Senior

Right. I’m just thinking how much metacognition is involved in— I mean, if you forget a word, are you really, like, staring at that very hard, or are you just like, s**t, what’s the word? If you’re staring at Jack Nicholson on TV, and you’re like, why can’t I remember that dude’s name?

Multiple speakers

[Both laughing]

Jennifer Senior

Which happens to me far more regularly now, [unintelligible]… than it used to, you know? I mean, I don’t know. There is a part of you that’s completely alarmed, but, like, I guess you’re right. There did come a point where I—you’re right, where I suddenly realized, oh, there’s just been a total breakdown here. It’s never happening. Like, what is going on? Also, you know what would happen? Every sentence was a grind, like...

Jennie Nash

Okay, so—okay, so...

Jennifer Senior

[Unintelligible]... Why is this so effortful? When you can’t hold the previous sentence in your head, suddenly there’s been this lapse in voice, right? Because, like, if every sentence is an effort and you’re starting from nothing again, there’s no continuity in how you sound. So, I mean, it was really dreadful. And by the way, if I can just say one thing, sorry now that—

Jennie Nash

No, I love it!

Jennifer Senior

Yeah. Sorry. I’m just—now you really got me going. I’m just like, yeah, I know. I’m sort of on a tear and a partial rant, which is Prozac—there came a point where, like, every single SSRI was too activating for me to sleep. But it was, of course, a problem, because being sleepless makes you depressed, so you need something to get at your depression. And SNRIs, like the Effexor’s and the Cymbalta’s, are out of the question, because those are known to be activating. So I kept vainly searching for SSRIs, and Prozac was the only one that didn’t—that wound up not being terribly activating, besides Paxil, but it, too, was somewhat deadening, and I wrote my whole book on it.

Jennie Nash

Wow!

Jennifer Senior

It’s not all metaphor.

Multiple Speakers

[both laughing]

Jennifer Senior

It’s not all me and no—nothing memorable, you know? I mean, it’s—it’s kind of a problem. It was—I can’t really bear to go back and look at it.

Jennie Nash

Wow.

Jennie Nash

So—so the feeling...

Jennifer Senior

I’m really giving my book the hard sell, like it’s really a B plus in terms of its pro…—I mean, you know, it wasn’t.

Jennie Nash

So you—you—you recognize its happening, and what you recognize is a lack of fizzy, buzzy energy and a lack of flow. So I just have to ask now, presumably—well, there’s long COVID now, but when you don’t have—when you’re writing in your full powers, do you—is it always in a state of flow? Like, if you’re not in a state of flow, do you get up and go do something else? Like, what—how does that function in the life of a writer on a deadline?

Jennifer Senior

OK. Well, am I always in a state of flow? No! I mean, flow is not—I don’t know anyone who’s good at something who just immediately can be in flow every time.

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Jennifer Senior

It’s still magic when it happens. You know, when I was in flow almost out of the gate every day—the McIlvaine stories—like, I knew when I hit send, this thing is damn good. I knew when I hit send on a piece that was not as well read, but is like my second or third favorite story. I wrote something for The New York Times called “Happiness Wont Save You,” about a pioneer in—he wrote one of the foundational studies in positive psychology about lottery winners and paraplegics, and how lottery winners are pretty much no happier than random controls found in a phone book, and paraplegics are much less unhappy than you might think, compared to controls. It was really poorly designed. It would never withstand the scrutiny of peer review today. But anyway, this guy was, like, a very innovative thinker. His name was Philip Brickman, and in 1982 at 38 years old, he climbed—he got—went—he found his way to the roof of the tallest building in Ann Arbor and jumped, and took his own life. And I was in flow pretty much throughout writing that one too.

Jennie Nash

Wow. So the piece you’re referring to, that you referred to previous to that, is What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind, which was a feature story in The Atlantic. It’s the one you won the—Pul…Pulitzer for? It’s now made into a book. It has, like...

Jennifer Senior

Although all it is like, you know, the story between...

Jennie Nash

Covers, right?

Jennifer Senior

Yeah. Yeah. Because—yeah, yeah.

Jennie Nash

But—

Jennifer Senior

Which is great, because then people can have it, rather than look at it online, which—and it goes on forever—so yeah.

Jennie Nash

So this is a piece—the subtitle is Grief, Conspiracy Theories, and One Family’s Search for Meaning in the Two Decades Since 9/11—and I actually pulled a couple of metaphors from that piece, because I re-read it knowing I was going to speak to you… and I mean, it was just so beautifully written. It’s—it’s so beautifully structured, everything, everything. But here’s a couple of examples for our listeners. You’re describing Bobby, who was a 26-year-old who died in 9/11, who was your brother’s college roommate.

Jennifer Senior

And at that young adult—they—you can’t afford New York. They were living together for eight years. It was four in college, and four—

Jennie Nash

Wow.

Jennifer Senior

In New York City. They had a two-bedroom... yeah, in a cheaper part... well, to the extent that there are cheaper parts in...

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Jennifer Senior

The way over near York Avenue, east side, yeah.

Jennie Nash

So you write, “When he smiled, it looked for all the world like he’d swallowed the moon.” And you wrote, “But for all Bobby’s hunger and swagger, what he mainly exuded, even during his college years, was warmth, decency, a corkscrew quirkiness.” So just that kind of language—a corkscrew quirkiness, like he’d swallowed the moon—that, it’s that the piece is full of that. So that’s interesting, that you felt in flow with this other piece you described and this one. So how would you describe—so you describe metaphors as things that just come—it just—it just happens. You’re not forcing it—you can’t force it. Do you think that’s true of whatever this ineffable thing of voice—voices—as well?

Jennifer Senior

Oh, that’s a good question. My voice got more distinct as I got older—it gets better. I think a lot of people’s—writers’—powers wax. Philip Roth is a great example of that. Colette? I mean, there are people whose powers really get better and better, and I’ve gotten better with more experience. But do you start with the voice? I think you do. I don’t know if you can teach someone a voice.

Jennie Nash

So when you say you’ve gotten better, what does that mean to you?

Jennifer Senior

Yeah. Um, I’m trying to think, like, do I write with more swing? Do I—just with more confidence because I’m older? Being a columnist…which is the least creative medium…

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Jennifer Senior

Seven hundred and fifty words to fit onto—I had a dedicated space in print. When David Leonhardt left, I took over the Monday spot, during COVID. So it’s really, really—but what it forces you to do is to be very—your writing becomes lean, and it becomes—and structure is everything. So this does not relate to voice, but my—I was always pretty good at structure anyway. I think if you—I think movies and radio, podcasts, are, like, great for structure. Storytelling podcasts are the best thing to—I think I unconsciously emulate them. The McIlvaine story has a three-act structure. There’s also—I think the podcast Heavyweight is sublime in that way.

Jennie Nash

Is that Roxane Gay?

Jennifer Senior

No, no, no, no.

Jennie Nash

Oh, it’s, um—

Jennifer Senior

It’s Jonathan Goldstein.

Jennie Nash

Yes, got it. I’m going to write that down and link to that in our show notes.

Jennifer Senior

It’s... I’m trying to think of—because, you know, his is, like, narratives, and it’s—it’s got a very unusual premise. But voice, voice, voice—well, I, you know, I worked on making my metaphors better in the beginning. I worked on noticing things, you know, and I worked on—I have the—I’m the least visual person alive. I mean, this is what’s so interesting. Like, I failed to notice once that I had sat for an hour and a half with a woman who was missing an arm. I mean, I came back to the office and was talking—this is Barbara Epstein, who was a storied editor of The New York Review of Books, the story editor, along with Bob Silver. And I was talking to Mike Tomasky, who was our, like, city politic editor at the time. And I said to him, I just had this one—I knew she knew her. And he said, was it awkward? Was—you know, with her having one arm and everything? And I just stared at him and went one arm? I—I am really oblivious to stuff. And yet visual metaphors are no problem with me. Riddle me that, Batman. I don’t know why that is. But I can, like, summon them in my head, and so I worked at it for a while, when my editors were responsive to it. Now they come more easily, so that seems to maybe just be a facility. I started noticing them in other people’s writing. So Michael Ondaatje —in, I think it was In the Skin of a Lion, but maybe it was The English Patient. I’ve read, like, every book of his, like I’ve, you know— Running… was it Running in the Family? Running with the Family? I think it was Running in the—his memoir. And, I mean, doesn’t—everything. Anil’s Ghost—he— you know, that was it The Ballad of Billy the Kid? [The Collected Works of Billy the Kid] Anyway, I can go on and on. He had one metaphor talking about the evening being as serene as ink. And it was then that I realized that metaphors without effort often—and—or is that a simile? That’s a simile.

Jennie NashLike—or if it’s “like” or “as,” it’s a simile.

Jennifer Senior

Yeah. So I’m pretty good with similes, maybe more than metaphors. But... serene as ink. I realized that what made that work is that ink is one syllable. There is something about landing on a word with one syllable that sounds like you did not work particularly hard at it. You just look at it and keep going. And I know that I made a real effort to make my metaphors do that for a while, and I still do sometimes. Anything more than that can seem labored.

Jennie Nash

Oh, but that’s so interesting. So you—you noticed in other people what worked and what you liked, and then tried to fold that into your own work.

Jennifer Senior

Yeah.

Jennie Nash

So does that mean you might noodle on—like, you have the structure of the metaphor or simile, but you might noodle on the word—

Jennifer Senior

The final word?

Jennie Nash

The final word.

Jennifer Senior

Yeah. Yeah, the actual simile, or whatever—yeah, I guess it’s a simile—yeah, sometimes. Sometimes they—like I said, they come unbidden. I think I have enough experience now—which may make my voice better—to know what’s crap. And I also, by the way, I’ll tell you what makes your voice better: just being very willing to hit Select Alt, Delete. You know, there’s more where that came from. I am a monster of self-editing. I just—I have no problem doing it. I like to do it. I like to be told when things are s**t. I think that improves your voice, because you can see it on the page.

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Jennifer SeniorAnd also, I think paying attention to other people’s writing, you know, I did more and more of that, you know, reverse engineering stuff, looking at how they did stuff as I got older, so...Jennie Nash

So I was going to ask a question, which now maybe you already answered, but the question was going to be… you said that you’re—you feel like you’re getting better as a writer as you got older. And you—you said that was due to experience. And I was going to ask, is it, or is it due to getting older? You know, is there something about literally living more years that makes you better, or, you know, like, is wisdom something that you just get, or is it something you work for? But I think what I’m hearing is you’re saying you have worked to become the kind of writer who knows, you know, what you just said—you delete stuff, it comes again. But tell me if—you know, you welcome the kind of tough feedback, because you know that makes you better. You know, this sort of real effort to become better, it sounds like that’s a practice you have. Is that—is that right?

Jennifer Senior

Oh yeah. I mean, well, let’s do two things on that, please. I so easily lose my juju these days that, like, you’ve got to—if you can put a, you know, oh God, I’m going to use a cliché again—if you can put a pin in or bookmark that, the observation about, you know, harsh feedback. I want to come back to that. But yes, one of the things that I was going to keep—when I said that I have the confidence now, I also was going to say that I have the wisdom, but I had too many kind of competing—

Jennie Nash

Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer Senior

You know, were running at once, and I, you know, many trains on many tracks—

Jennie Nash

Yeah, yeah.

Jennifer Senior

…about to leave, so…, Like, I had to sort of hop on one. But, like, the—the confidence and wisdom, yes, and also, like, I’ll tell you something: in the McIlvaine piece, it may have been the first time I did, like, a narrative nonfiction. I told a story. There was a time when I would have hid behind research on that one.

Jennie Nash

Ooh, and did you tell a story. It was the—I remember reading that piece when it first came out, and there you’re introducing, you know, this—the situation. And then there’s a moment, and it comes very quickly at the top of the piece, where you explain your relationship to the protagonist of the story. And there’s a—there’s just a moment of like, oh, we’re—we’re really in something different here. There’s really—is that feel of, this is not a reported story, this is a lived story, and that there’s so many layers of power, I mean, to the story itself, but obviously the way that you—you present it, so I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Jennifer Senior

Yeah, and by the way, I think writing in the first person, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately, is not something I would have done until now. Probably because I am older and I feel like I’ve earned it. I have more to say. I’ve been through more stuff. It’s not, like, with the same kind of narcissism or adolescent—like, I want to get this out, you know. It’s more searching, I think, and because I’ve seen more, and also because I’ve had these pent up stories that I’ve wanted to tell for a long time. And also I just don’t think I would have had the balls, you know.

Jennie Nash

Right.

Jennifer Senior

So some of it is—and I think that that’s part of—you can write better in your own voice. If it’s you writing about you, you’re—there’s no better authority, you know? So your voice comes out.

Jennie Nash

Right.

Jennifer Senior

But I’m trying to think of also—I would have hid behind research and talked about theories of grief. And when I wrote, “It’s the damnedest thing, the dead abandon you, and then you abandon the dead,” I had blurted that out loud when I was talking to, actually, not Bobby’s brother, which is the context in which I wrote it, but to Bobby’s—I said that, it’s, like, right there on the tape—to his former almost fiancée. And I was thinking about that line, that I let it stand. I didn’t actually then rush off and see if there was a body of literature that talked about the guilt that the living feel about letting go of their memories. But I would have done that at one point. I would have turned it into this... because I was too afraid to just let my own observations stand. But you get older and you’re like, you know what? I’m smart enough to just let that be mine. Like, assume...

Jennie Nash

Right.

Jennifer Senior

It’s got to be right. But can we go back, also, before I forget?

Jennie Nash

Yeah, we’re going to go back to harsh, but—but I would just want to use your cliché, put a pin in what you said, because you’ve said so many important things— that there’s actual practice of getting better, and then there’s also wisdom of—of just owning, growing into, embracing, which are two different things, both so important. So I just wanted to highlight that you’ve gone through those two things. So yes, let’s go back to—I said harsh, and maybe I miss—can...misrepresenting what you meant.

Jennifer Senior

You may not have said that. I don’t know what you said.

Jennie Nash

No, I did, I did.

Jennifer Senior

You did, okay, yeah, because I just know that it was processed as a harsh—oh no, totally. Like, I was going to say to you that—so there was a part of my book, my book, eventually, I just gave one chapter to each person in my life whom I thought could, like, assess it best, and one of them, so this friend—I did it on paper. He circled three paragraphs, and he wrote, and I quote, “Is this just a shitty way of saying...?” And then I was like, thank God someone caught it, if it was shitty. Oh my God. And then—and I was totally old enough to handle it, you know, I was like 44, whatever, 43. And then, who was it? Someone else—oh, I think I gave my husband the intro, and he wrote—he circled a paragraph and just wrote, “Ugh.” Okay, Select Alt, Delete, redo. You know, like, what are you going to do with that? That’s so unambiguous. It’s like, you know—and also, I mean, when you’re younger, you argue. When you’re older, you never quarrel with Ugh. Or Is this...

Jennie Nash

Right, you’re just like, okay, yep.

Jennifer Senior

Yeah. And again, you—you’ve done it enough that, you know, there’s so much more where that came from.

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Jennifer Senior

Why cling to anything that someone just, I don’t know, had this totally allergic reaction to? Like, you know, if my husband broke out in a hive.

Jennie Nash

Yeah. So, circling back to the—the storyline of—you took this medication, you lost your ability to write in this way, you changed medications, presumably, you got it back. What did it feel like to get it back? Did you—do you remember that?

Jennifer Senior

Oh God, yes, it was glorious.

Jennie Nash

Really?!

Jennifer Senior

Oh, you don’t feel like yourself. I think that—I mean, I think there are many professions that are intertwined with identity. They may be the more professional—I’m sorry, the more creative professions. But not always, you know. And so if your writing voice is gone, and it’s—I mean, so much of writing is an expression of your interior, if not life, then, I don’t know some kind of thought process and something that you’re working out. To have that drained out of you, for someone to just decant all the life out of your—or something to decant all the life out of your writing, it’s—it’s, I wouldn’t say it’s traumatic, that’s totally overstating it, but it’s—it’s a huge bummer. It’s, you know, it’s depressing.

Jennie Nash

Well, the word glorious, that’s so cool. So to feel that you got back your—the you-ness of your voice was—was glorious. I mean, that’s—that’s amazing.

Jennifer Senior

What—if I can just say, I wrote a feature, right, that then, like, I remember coming off of it, and then I wrote a feature that won the News Women’s Club of New York story for best feature that year. Like, I didn’t realize that those are kind of hard to win, and not like I won... I think I’ve won one since. But, like, that was in, like, 99 or something. I mean, like, you know, I don’t write a whole lot of things that win stuff, until recently, you know. There was, like, a real kind of blackout period where, you know, I mean, but like—which I think, it probably didn’t have to do with the quality of my writing. I mean, there was—but, I mean, you know, I wasn’t writing any of the stuff that floated to the tippy top, and, like, I think that there was some kind of explosion thereof, like, all the, again, stuff that was just desperate to come out. I think there was just this volcanic outpouring.

Jennie Nash

So you’re saying now you are winning things, which is indeed true. I mean, Pulitzer Prizes among them. Do you think that that has to do with this getting better? The wisdom, the practice, the glorious having of your abilities? Or, I guess what I’m asking is, like, is luck a part of—a part of all that? Is it just, it just happens? Or do you think there’s some reason that it’s happening? You feel that your writing is that powerful now?

Jennifer Senior

Well, luck is definitely a part of it, because The Atlantic is the greatest place to showcase your feature writing. It gets so much attention, even though I think fewer people probably read that piece about Bobby McIlvaine than would have read any of my columns on any given day. The kind of attention was just so different. And it makes sense in a funny way, because it was 13,600 words or something. I mean, it was so long, and columns are 750 words. But, like, I think that I just lucked out in terms of the showcase. So that’s definitely a part of it. And The Atlantic has the machinery to, you know, and all these dedicated, wonderful publicity people who will make it possible for people to read it, blah, blah, blah. So there’s that. If you’re older, you know everyone in the business, so you have people amplifying your work, they’re suddenly reading it and saying, hey, everybody read it. It was before Twitter turned to garbage. Media was still a way to amplify it. It’s much harder now, so passing things along through social media has become a real problem. But at that moment, it was not—

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Jennifer Senior

So that was totally luck. Also, I wonder if it was because I was suddenly writing something from in the first person, and my voice was just better that way. And I wouldn’t have had, like, the courage, you know?

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Jennifer Senior

And also, you’re a book critic, which is what I was at The Times. And you certainly are not writing from the first person. And as a columnist, you’re not either.

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Jennifer Senior

So, you know, those are very kind of constricted forms, and they’re also not—there are certainly critics who win Pulitzers. I don’t think I was good enough at it. I was good, but it was not good enough. I could name off the top of my head, like, so many critics who were—who are—who haven’t even won anything yet. Like Dwight Garner really deserves one. Why has he not won a Pulitzer? He’s, I think, the best writer—him and Sophie Gilbert, who keeps coming close. I don’t get it, like, what the hell?

Jennie Nash

Do you—as a—as a reader of other people’s work, I know you—you mentioned Michael Ondaatje that you’d studied—study him. But do you just recognize when somebody else is on their game? Like, do you recognize the voice or the gloriousness of somebody else’s work? Can you just be like, yeah, that...?

Jennifer Senior

Well, Philip Roth, sentence for sentence. Martin Amis, even more so—I cannot get over the originality of each of his sentences and the wide vocabulary from which he recruits his words, and, like, maybe some of that is just being English. I think they just get better, kind of more comprehensive. They read more comprehensively. And I always tell people, if they want to improve their voice, they should read the Victorians, like that [unintelligible]. His also facility with metaphor, I don’t think, is without equal. The thing is, I can’t stand his fiction. I just find it repellent. But his criticism is bangers and his memoirs are great, so I love them.

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Jennifer Senior

So I really—I read him very attentively, trying to think of, like, other people whose kind of...

Jennie Nash

I guess I was—I was getting at more... like, genius recognizes genius, that con... that concept, like, when you know you can do this and write in this way from time to time anyway, you can pull it off.

Jennifer Senior

Yeah, genius as in—I wouldn’t—we can’t go there.

Jennie Nash

Well, that’s the—that’s the cliché, right? But, like...

Jennifer Senior

Oh no, I know, I know. Game—game, game recognizes game.

Jennie Nash

Game recognizes game is a better way of saying it. Like, do you see—that’s actually what the phrase is. I don’t know where I came up with genius, but...

Jennifer Senior

No, it’s fine. You can stick anything in that template, you know—evil recognizes evil, I mean, you know, it’s like a...

Jennie Nash

Yeah. Do you see it? Do you see it? Like, you can see it in other people?

Jennifer Senior

Sure. Oh yeah, I see it.

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Jennifer Senior

I mean, you’re just talking about among my contemporaries, or just as it...

Jennie Nash

Just like anything, like when you pick up a book or you read an article or even listen to a storytelling pack podcast, that sense of being in the hands of somebody who’s on it.

Jennifer Senior

Yeah, I think that Jonathan Goldstein—I mean, I think that the—the Heavyweight Podcast, for sure, is something—and more than that, it’s—it’s storytelling structure, it’s just that—I think that anybody who’s a master at structure would just look at that show and be like, yeah, that show nails it each and every time.

Jennie Nash

I’ve not listened, but I feel like I should end our time together. I would talk to you forever about this, but I always like to leave our listeners with something specific to reflect or practice or do. And is there anything related to metaphor or practicing, finding your voice, owning your voice, that you would suggest for—for folks? You’ve already suggested a lot.

Jennifer Senior

Read the Victorians.

Jennie Nash

Awesome. Any particular one that you would say start with?

Jennifer Senior

Yeah, you know what? I find Dickens rough sledding. I like his, you know, dear friend Wilkie Collins. I think No Name is one of the greatest books ever. I would read No Name.

Jennie Nash

Amazing. And I will add, go read Jennifer’s work. We’ll link to a bunch of it in the show notes. Study her and—and watch what she does and learn what she does—that there it is, a master at work, and that’s what I would suggest. So thank you for joining us and having this amazing discussion.

Jennifer Senior

This has been super fun.

Jennie Nash

And for our listeners, until next time, stop playing small and write like it matters.

Narrator

The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

In this Write Big session, Jenny Nash shares a story from her business mastermind about what it looks like to “play big.” From asking for help to boldly joining the conversation, Jenny shows how these small but brave moves apply directly to the writing life—and why writers need to see themselves as entrepreneurs. A quick dose of inspiration to stop playing small and write like it matters!

SPONSORSHIP MESSAGE

Are you staring down a holiday shopping list with a haunted look in your eyes? My great big guide to holiday under-the-radar book-giving perfection can help. Maybe you think not everyone in your life wants a book, but honestly, they are just wrong. I’ve got a book on my list for the therapy-speak-loving teen who’s glued to TikTok, a book for your mom whose book club just forced her to read Emily Henry and just wants a protagonist with a little seasoning. One for your dad, who thinks TV hasn’t been the same since The X-Files. And a few for your book-loving bestie, who’s read everything already, and all you have to do to get the list to drop right into your phone for your shopping pleasure is join my newsletter, Hashtag AmReading, at kjda.substack.com—link in the show notes and pretty much anywhere where you can find me, which is easy.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Jennie Nash

Hi, I’m Jennie Nash, and you’re listening to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. This is a Write Big Session where I’m bringing you short episodes about the mindset shifts that help you stop playing small and write like it matters. Today I want to share with you a specific example of what writing big could look like for you. Something happened to me in my business mastermind that was so cool. This is a mastermind that meets every week, and its business people who are running businesses just like mine. You submit questions about challenges you’re facing in your business, or decisions you have, or mindset shifts you need to make, and we get coached. And there’s also a lot of activity in the chat. Oftentimes, people are chiming in with things that they’ve tried or opinions or cheering people on or lifting people up. It’s a very engaged and active chat.

This is actually my second year in the mastermind, and I happen to be one of the people that a lot of other people look up to. This morning, in the middle of a conversation, somebody admitted that they had been studying my funnel and stalking my offers to see how I was doing what I was doing and to try to emulate it. She then said something along the lines of how she was obsessed with what I was doing and wanted to know how I made it happen. So this, to me, is a moment of playing big, because she’s new to the mastermind, and she’s looking up to me, and yet she was willing to make that comment and engage with me in that way, and she didn’t ask for anything specifically. She just commented that she admired what I was doing and was studying what I was doing. And so it gave me the perfect opportunity to say, would you like to get together offline — meaning, in a separate call from the mastermind some other day — and I’ll show you inside my funnel, and I’ll show you what I’m doing. I’m happy to help show you the architecture of the whole thing. And she, of course, was thrilled and accepted. And in my mind, even as she was doing it, I thought, this is exactly the way that you ask for help.

She didn’t come after me and say, will you teach me all your tricks? She didn’t even assume that I would answer any question in particular at all. She just made a comment and engaged with me in a very kind and thoughtful way and allowed me to make that offer. So I thought that was really cool. But then a second thing happened that amplified that moment, and I thought that was really cool too, which is that a third person saw this chat going on between us and jumped into our thread there and said, I would really like to join that call if it’s okay with the two of you. And again, this was such a bold move. So many of us would think, oh, I don’t want to horn in on their thing, or oh, maybe that’s piling on too much, or oh, I shouldn’t take up that much space, or be that forward, or whatever we might tell ourselves. And this person just very kindly— think she actually used the phrase; can I crash your party?—so she did it with a sense of humor and self-awareness.

And again, it allowed me and this other woman to say, of course, that would be amazing, no problem, let’s do it. And so the three of us made a plan to get together and do this work separately. Now it’s not just totally altruistic on my part. I love business models, and I love learning from other business people, so getting to see what they’re doing and inside their structures and thought processes is really useful for me as well. So you may be sitting here thinking, what on earth does this have to do with writing? And it has everything to do with writing, because every single one of us who are writing things are also entrepreneurs. And this term gets thrown around a lot — the author entrepreneur — or, you know, you’re starting a business, or whatever the words that people use are, but I don’t think writers take it seriously enough.

This idea that writing a book is launching a business—you are making a product, and you want people to buy that product. And I think more writers need to think of it like that, because nobody would launch a business with a product and not expect to invest in it and not expect to spend a lot of time, effort, energy, and money to bring that product to market. So often, writers think all we have to do is write the book, and our work here is done. We think that marketing is not our job, sales is not our job, thinking about the business is not our job, but it absolutely is our job. You absolutely have to learn how to think like an entrepreneur.

And so the lesson here for writers is, make sure that you’re part of communities where people are doing the work that you want to be doing around your book. That could be people who are doing things on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram or have really cool newsletters on Substack that you follow, but you want to get into communities where people are taking action and making moves, so that you can study what they’re doing, follow what they’re doing, maybe engage with them if there’s a particular situation in which that engagement is welcome, and then you need to put yourself out there and ask for help and ask for coaching and ask for guidance.

The thing about the business mastermind that I’m in is that it’s very expensive. People have committed a lot of money to it, and I think when people commit money, the energy follows. So people in this group are very engaged. They show up for the calls all the time. It is not a random group of strangers. And so there’s a sense inside the container that we’re all trying to do the same thing—we’re all trying to reach the same levels of success, we are all kind of in it together—and that’s a huge part of the reason why I was able to make this offer to these other people, because they’re not just random strangers coming at me from social media. I get those kinds of requests all day long. People who want to pick my brain—they literally say that—people who want answers to questions that really they shouldn’t ask, who make audacious asks about things. This is different because we’re all in a container together.

So if you’re thinking, I want that kind of mentorship, I want that kind of camaraderie, I want that kind of engagement so that when my book comes out, I will have a plan and a strategy and support in place to get it out into readers’ hands. And it may be that you have to find a community to invest in, or it may be that you have to invest your time in a way that you haven’t yet been investing—but playing big means putting yourself in the right spaces where you can ask these kinds of questions, make these kinds of connections with people, and ask for help. There were so many playing big moves in what went on this morning, and I just loved seeing it, and I loved being part of it, and I wanted to share that all with you in hopes that it might be inspiring. Until next time, stop playing small and write like it matters.

Narrator

The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

Hi all! In honor of Thanksgiving, we decided to share what we’re doing to get MORE of what we’re grateful for in our writing lives—as in, try not just to give a nod to gratitude but actually increase the things we do to feel it. Enjoy!

Are you staring down a holiday shopping list with a haunted look in your eyes? My great big guide to holiday under-the-radar book-giving perfection can help. Maybe you think not everyone in your life wants a book, but honestly, they are just wrong. I’ve got a book on my list for the therapy-speak-loving teen who’s glued to TikTok, a book for your mom whose book club just forced her to read Emily Henry and just wants a protagonist with a little seasoning. One for your dad, who thinks TV hasn’t been the same since The X-Files. And a few for your book-loving bestie, who’s read everything already, and all you have to do to get the list to drop right into your phone for your shopping pleasure is join my newsletter, Hashtag AmReading, at kjda.substack.com—link in the show notes and pretty much anywhere where you can find me, which is easy.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Multiple Speakers

Is it recording? Now it’s recording, yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don’t remember what I’m supposed to be doing. All right, let’s start over. Awkward pause. I’m going to rustle some papers. Okay, now—one, two, three.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Hey kids, it’s KJ, and this is the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast, the place where we help you play big in your writing life, love the process, and finish what matters.

Jess Lahey

I’m Jess Lahey. I am the author of The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation, and you can find my work at The New York Times and The Washington Post and The Atlantic.

Sarina Bowen

And I’m Sarina Bowen. My newest novel is called Thrown for a Loop, and you can find it at bookstores everywhere.

Jennie Nash

And I’m Jennie Nash. I’m the founder and CEO of Author Accelerator, a company on a mission to lead the emerging book coaching industry. And I’m the author of the Blueprint books that help you get your book out of your head and onto your page. And today, the four of us have gathered to talk about gratitude. It’s the week of Thanksgiving, and we’ve been thinking about the things that we’re grateful for in our writing life, and how we want to celebrate that and amplify that. So we thought we’d share that all with you today. KJ, do you want to start by talking about what you’re grateful for?

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah, I actually managed to give this some thoughts. Since we did, we did talk about it. And I should say we kind of got the idea from Laura Vanderkam’s newsletter, which is really great, and you should subscribe. She was just talking about how, you know, it’s one thing to be grateful for things like, “Whoo, I’m grateful that I live in such a beautiful place,” but it’s another thing to say, “And because I’m grateful that I live in such a beautiful place, this week I will make a point of going for a walk, you know, tonight with my dog, in a place that I love,” or something along that. Her point was: come up with something and then actually do something to amplify that for yourself. So you’re not just sitting around, you know, writing a gratitude journal. You’re actually trying to do something about it. So having announced that I am totally prepared for this—I’m not really, but I kind of am. Okay. So one of the things that I am grateful for this year, a little weirdly, is AI, and it is not for the reasons anyone might think. I’m primarily grateful—I’m grateful that the spurt of AI in everything that I read, from Goodreads book reviews to things in my inbox to, I’m sorry, actual articles in actual newspapers… it’s become so recognizable. The stuff that is written, the pattern, the three examples, the particular words that are invariably used. Oh, somebody threw one out the other night—oh, in the real estate world, if it says something is “nestled between two things,” that’s AI. Anyway, that made me realize that the last thing I want is something else to do any of this for me. I just don’t. I just, you know, sometimes you sit around going, “Oh, somebody just write this book for me—” you know what? No. No. Because I don’t want my book to be nestled between a rock and a hard place or whatever. So, so no. So what I’m doing to sort of bring that home for myself is I’m actually trying to be more present, in particular within the AmWriting—the AmWriting universe. So I’ve been doing something that I’m calling Hashtag AmWriting ‘Almost’ Every Day. It’s really nowhere close to every day. Don’t worry about getting your inbox full. But I am—you know, that’s actually me. If I have time and something to say, or something to whine, or some write-alongs to share, or an idea, then I’m going to put that out there for y’all. And hopefully you’re going to comment back, and you probably won’t bother to use AI to do that, because that would be really silly. So that’s a thing I’m doing, and a thing that I’m grateful that I’ve suddenly come to the realization of.

Jess Lahey

What’s funny, KJ, is that I can absolutely tell when you’re really enjoying writing, because it—it just comes through, as it does with most people. But it’s been… your newsletters have been really fun, and you’re really in it. And I love reading them. I absolutely love reading them.

Jennie Nash

It gets a little sassy.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Thanks!

Jess Lahey

She does. She does get a little sassy.

Jennie Nash

I love it.

Jess Lahey

Yep, the Shirley Jackson comes out in her, and it’s really fun. I like that a lot.

Jennie Nash

Jess, do you want to go next?

Jess Lahey

Yeah. Sure. So newsletters have come to mean a lot to me. I have a lot of drafts sitting there, some of which I don’t think—I may never publish. But I’m really, really grateful that writing has, for my entire life, been the way that I process what I’m thinking about. I do it a lot by talking, but when I’m alone in the woods, like I am right now in Vermont, writing is how I figure things out, and I’m so grateful for that, because, you know, as I wrote about in my newsletter, I’m dealing with breast cancer, and I’m about to have surgery, and some of that stuff is really, really scary. And how I think about it, and how I manage it, is through writing about it. And I’m just—I’ve never been so grateful to have, even if it never goes out into the world, a place to write about that stuff. And, and, yeah, I’m so grateful for the words. Absolutely.

Jennie Nash

That’s so beautiful, that in the scariest, most difficult time, it’s the most natural thing that you turn to.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, I think there are some people who pour themselves out in watercolors, or some people—whatever. The words, man, they’re the best.

Jennie Nash

Very cool. Sarina, what about you?

Sarina Bowen

Yeah, well, as always, my gratitude runs toward the granular and the practical. I guess I can’t ever get away from that. So I am grateful to deadlines. Last month, I had a really difficult deadline. I had to scramble and set everything else aside and keep myself from panicking. And I did it. I actually—I turned it in, and then I immediately went on a book tour for a different book. So that was a difficult experience and a difficult month, and I’m not used to quite so much deadline pressure. But the wonderful thing is, is that I have these deadlines because of the work that I have placed with publishers, and I wouldn’t want to change a single thing about that. So even if I need to get a little better about my timing, I recognize that—even in the darkest day—that it’s a gift to have this problem. And then I’m also grateful for coffee shops, because that has been a place for me to work this year. And I never did this before. I was one of those people who had to be at home, in a room all by myself, in the quiet, writing. And suddenly that became really difficult for me. The quiet was too much quiet. There was too much doom scroll, there was too much self-reflection. And it really started the day after the election, actually. Like, I sort of ordered KJ to meet me out at a coffee shop because I needed to be where other people were. And it was really grounding—like, there we were, and the barista is a familiar face, and everything was fine inside that shop, you know, which was, in itself, a little bubble of privilege. But, but just being out in the world, seeing the rest of the world keep chugging, has really focused me. And I’ve spent a lot of time in a lot of different coffee shop and library settings in the intervening couple of months—and, well, almost a year now—and it’s felt fantastic. So I am excited that there are places where I’m allowed to go pay way too much for a cup of coffee and then sit there for two hours, and I will continue to do it.

Jess Lahey

Can I add a layer to the Sarina—to the Sarina stuff? Because I got to go to, as some of the other people talking today did, got to go to one of Sarina’s events. And, you know, we love Sarina, and we just rave about Sarina, and I think she’s a genius, and I think her writing is wonderful. But I was in a room of people who knew her work. Like, at one point, someone asked about whether or not she was going to be writing more in, like, The Company Series, which is one of the series she started to write. And there are a couple books—in that one. And then when she’s like, “Oh, I don’t—I think the time for that is over,” and people were like, “Awww,” and they were sad, and they knew characters really well. There was a die-hard fan of one of her books—I think it was Stay. And I just—I’m so grateful to be able to go to those events and see that other people love Sarina as much and respect Sarina’s work as much as I do. And my whole family was there. So my kid, who’s been hearing about, you know, my friend who wrote—writes “kiss me” books, he was like, “Man, people are into her books.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I told you. I’ve been trying to tell you.” And it was great. It was really fun to see people that into it.

Sarina Bowen

Well, the thing is that romance readers really are special. I’m not saying there aren’t—there aren’t fandoms in other genres as well. But it’s something about a romance novel involves characters that aren’t afraid to say how they feel, and that is how romance readers are about the books. They are not afraid to say what they feel, and they are there for all the feelings in the first place. And it is really a great spot to be. So for every writer who ever looked down at the romance section of the bookstore, I got news for you. It’s really nice over there.

Jess Lahey

It’s great. The people were so great.

Jennie Nash

And we have gratitude for the romance—the romance readers too.

Jess Lahey

Yeah.

Jennie Nash

I love all of your—your gratitude’s. Mine is—I guess I would say that I am grateful for having the identity of a writer as a thing that I take with me wherever I go. And what I mean by that is I have been traveling to see family, and there were airplane troubles, lots of different airplane troubles, actually, on this particular trip, and lots of delays, overnight delays, sitting in airports for long periods of time, all of that, and I am never sad about those things. I’m almost never at a total loss. Like, you tell me that I have to spend six hours at the San Francisco airport, and I’m fine, because I can fill the time—not just, not just fill it like, “Oh, I can get through this,” but I can actually have really productive, useful, awesome time for six hours in the San Francisco airport. And if I have to spend a night at a terrible airport hotel, and, you know, just all the things—and I was so grateful when I thought about it in that way, that here’s a thing that I can take with me wherever I go, that all I need is something to write on. Could be my phone. It could be a piece of airport hotel notepad and paper. It could even be a torn-out page of a magazine that I bought at the airport. And I—I can be somebody. I can be somebody doing something that I find interesting and good and useful. And I just am so grateful for that. What an amazing thing to be. And obviously holiday travel is a special kind of thing, but just the thought that—that that comes with me, no matter where I go or what I do or what happens in my life—I have that, and I’m very grateful for that. So I don’t know, KJ, in terms of how am I going to bring that forward or exercise it or do it? I guess—I guess I’ve got to hope for smoother travels.

KJ Dell’Antonia

You should just get stuck in more airports, but you don’t want to get stuck in more airports? I feel like that should be your goal now.

Jennie Nash

I guess if you take it to a very granular, practical level, like Sarina does—always have a notebook with you, man. That’s what I got to say, and a working writing implement. It saves the day.

Jess Lahey

And then you text the word “sticker” to the rest of us, and we know, “Oh, man, those travel stickers—those are worth double stickers.” We always say that travel stickers are double stickers.

Jennie Nash

It’s so true. It’s so true. Well, we just wanted to pop in here today to share this gratitude episode with you all and to give you some things to think about, about your writing life and your writing practice. And we hope that everyone is having a day filled with gratitude. KJ, do you want to say other things?

KJ Dell’Antonia

I wanted to say that I think we’re all grateful for the way this community is slowly but steadily growing. I’ve been doing Write-Alongs with a bunch of people lately. We’ve been seeing people in the actual Substack chat, which, if you…

Jess Lahey

The chat is fun.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Use Substack chat, that’s great. And you know—you know what it is, and if you don’t, that’s fine. You can totally hit the same results by talking to us in the comments, which is the same as comments on anything. I just—I just really like sort of seeing the same people and faces pop up over and over again, and feeling the same kind of “less alone” about this that I used to feel back in the early days of blogging. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have pretty much, you know—I’ll put a thing on Instagram, and then I’m out of there because, again, it’s—there’s, there’s so much slop now. I’m not really doing a lot of other things. But I am here, and there are other people here, and I think that’s so fun.

Jennie Nash

It’s really fun. And we will continue to be here with—with lots of offerings, from Nerd Corner episodes to Write Big episodes to KJ Writing Along episodes, and we’re in the chat to help and answer questions, and we have other things up our sleeves too. So keep tuning in.

KJ Dell’Antonia

Yeah. All right.

Jess Lahey

All right, everyone until next time around, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

Narrator

The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

Jenny Nash builds on her conversation with Mary Laura Philpott to highlight a crucial truth: writing for yourself and writing for readers are two very different things—and they need to happen at the same time. Start from passion, but bring market intention in early, because it shapes everything from structure to genre to how your book will sell. Define your goals up front, so you’re not left frustrated later.

Transcript Below!

SPONSORSHIP MESSAGE

Hey, it’s Jennie Nash, and I wanted to remind you that while you’re shopping all the sales this week, think about investing in your writing. Author Accelerator book coaches are offering a Black Friday special for writers who are ready to move forward on their books. It’s called the Mini Blueprint Strategy Session, and you get a focused one-on-one experience that helps you see what’s working in your manuscript and what to do next. Eighty-six of our certified book coaches are offering this special for a limited time. You can go to authoraccelerator.com/black-friday to check it out.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m Jennie Nash and you’re listening to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. This is a Write Big Session—a short episode about the mindset shifts that help you stop playing small and write like it matters.

Today I wanted to do a second episode about some of the things that Mary Laura Philpott shared in our last episode. I thought that conversation was just rich with incredible meaning, and something she said has really stuck with me—that I want to amplify here today.

And it’s this idea about the difference between what you want to write for your own self—and writing for readers in the marketplace. Mary Laura articulated so well that these are two really separate parts of the process. You have to write what you want to write from your heart. You have to bring your heart and your soul to your work—because first of all, writing a book is a really long undertaking. You’re going to spend a lot of time with this story or this content and material, and you want to make sure that you’re doing it from love.

You want to make sure that you’re doing it from some deep creative well within yourself—and tapping into that place that is rich and full and makes you feel alive. That’s the only book that’s worth writing, and many people do that kind of writing and do that kind of work—and don’t ever want to cross over to that other place where now they’re doing the work of making that ready and accessible for a reader.

And Mary Laura talked about how that second shift in the book-writing process is so weighty for her—and it is for everyone. The difference between writing something for your own self and writing something that bubbles up and springs up from inside you, and writing something with the intention that it’s going to be bought and sold by strangers—and read by people that you don’t know—that’s what strangers are, I guess—the difference between those two things is really huge. And I think too many writers make the mistake of doing the first part and thinking that’s enough--that they don’t have to think about, well, what does my reader want? Where does this book fit on the shelf in a bookstore? How is this going to be bought and sold?

What is this book’s relationship to the marketplace? They don’t make that leap into that second way of thinking—and then they get frustrated when the marketplace rejects their work. It’s the work of their heart. It’s the work of their soul. They brought their whole being to the page—but they didn’t do that second part.

But here’s the key about that second part—It doesn’t usually come after. It’s not chronological. You don’t write the thing and then think about the marketplace. Sometimes that happens—but it’s actually really rare.

You have to do those two parts of the work at the same time—they have to overlap. You start a project out of the love and the passion and the yearning and the desire, but the intention that it’s going to be for the marketplace needs to come pretty soon thereafter, because it’s going to impact your structure.

It’s going to impact your genre. If you’re writing fiction, it’s going to impact the length of what you write. It’s going to impact all kinds of decisions that you make about that book, and if you leave those decisions until after you’ve written a draft, you’re likely going to be very disappointed.

So what this is really about is understanding your intention for the work as soon as you can. So again, you might start with the love and the desire and the yearning and the passion, but once you start thinking… I would like for this to be read, I would like for this to be in the marketplace. My intention and ambition is for it to be read. Then you need to stop and start asking yourself some of these core questions about: how is it going to be read, how is it going to be in the marketplace? My Blueprint books were designed for this exact thing. They offer a 14-step method of inquiry that helps you think about these core questions at the beginning of a project before you write too far.

This isn’t an advertisement for my Blueprint books. I think they’re great, but there’s a lot of other ways to get this work done as well. There’s some other methods—there’s other systems and processes. You might have a framework for doing it as well, but it’s something that we really need to think about—is these two different pieces of the process. So my reflection for today is to go back and listen to that episode with Mary Laura Philpott and listen for the words that she says around this, because they’re so good—and I think she just pinned it down so well—and I just want you to spend some time reflecting on these two phases of the process and these two parts of making a book that readers are going to love.

Until next time, stop playing small and write like it matters.

The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

In this #amwriting podcast Write Big session, Jennie Nash talks with author Mary Laura Philpott about the surprising choice she made after her acclaimed book Bomb Shelter—to stop writing on purpose. Mary Laura shares how, after pouring everything into that project, her gut told her she didn’t need to rush into another, despite the pressure of “what’s next?” from the industry and readers. This conversation reframes writing big not as chasing ambition, but as honoring your gut and giving your whole heart to whatever season you’re in—even if that means not writing at all.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW!

THINGS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

* Mary Laura Philpott’s website

* Bomb Shelter

* The New York Times Review

SPONSORSHIP MESSAGE

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Jennie Nash

Hi, I’m Jennie Nash, and you’re listening to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. This is a Write Big Session, where I’m bringing you short episodes about the mindset shifts that help you stop playing small and write like it matters. Today, I’m talking to Mary Laura Philpott about the idea of trusting your gut. This is a critical component to writing big, and I asked Mary Laura to come speak to us because a very interesting thing happened to her after the publication of her second book, Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives. This book is so good. It’s a book about being a parent and a daughter and a spouse and a person in the world. And what happened was that she stopped writing—on purpose. Her gut told her, “I’m done now.” And it struck me that if we could understand what makes a successful writer choose not to write; maybe we could understand better what makes us each choose to write big. So welcome, Mary Laura.

Mary Laura Philpott

Hello, friend. Thanks for having me.

Jennie Nash

Ah, I’m so excited to have this conversation. I’ve been wanting to have it for a very long time.

Mary Laura Philpott

Oh, good.

Jennie Nash

So thanks for joining us. This is maybe your second, third, fourth time on the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast—you’re a fan favorite. So welcome back. To set this conversation up, I’m going to read a little snippet from The New York Times review of Bomb Shelter, which was written by Judith Warner, and in which she called your book a “master work.” I’m going to read the end of her review, because it really sets up this question that we’re going to be talking about.

So she writes: “I want to say something negative about this book. To be this positive is, I fear, to sound like a nitwit. So to nitpick—there’s some unevenness to the quality of the sentences in the final chapter—but there’s no fun in pointing that out. Philpott already knows. I’m telling this story now in present tense. She writes, ‘I’m still in it, not yet able to shape it from the future’s perspective. The story is still being written, and that’s all right. The only problem is having to wait to read what comes next.’”

So—you wrote this book, which was your second book…

Mary Laura Philpott

Second book of this type—yes, kind of second, second memoir.

Jennie Nash

Second book of this type. And you get this beyond rave review in The New York Times by this luminary reviewer, in which she says, “I can’t wait to see what you write next.” And here we sit some years later, in which the answer is—there is nothing next. So can you talk about that? Can you talk about how you—first of all, what that feels like?

Mary Laura Philpott

Yeah, it’s—I mean, you know this feeling of before a book is even on shelves, people are already asking, “So what’s next? Like, what are you working on?” You know? And then you go on tour, and every question everywhere is, “So what are you working on now?” There’s this relentless, kind of—this churning wheel of productivity behind it all. And so I’m used to that, and I was used to that feeling of, okay, the book is out, people are talking about it, but I need to be working on something next, because that’s always been how it is. But I was tired. That was a really—I love that review so much, and I love the way this book was received—but it was a really emotional book to write, and it was a really emotional book to tour with and go out and talk about for several weeks on end. And so when I came back home, I was like, you know, I get to decide how this little hamster wheel of productivity goes—and I have decided I need a break, and I’m going to focus on, you know—I had, like, one or two years left with my kids at home before they left the nest. I was like, I’m just going to be at home. I’m going to focus inward. I’m just going to be kind of living life on my own terms. And I did that for about a year—and then another year—and now it’s been... let’s see... here we are in 2025... It’s been three years since that book came out. I have not written another book, and I have never been so calm about not being in the middle of writing another book. It just feels like I don’t have something I urgently need to say.

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Mary Laura Philpott

And I also feel—there’s something rebellious in the beginning about saying, “I’m not going to do it.” But once the rebellion kind of burns off and you realize, actually, I don’t owe anyone anything—like, I’m not under contract for another book. I had the sort of miraculous timing of my editor for Bomb Shelter and for I Miss You When I Blink retiring right after Bomb Shelter came out, so I don’t even have an editor breathing down my neck going, “Come on, what’s your next thing?” So I’ve been experimenting with saying I’m retired. When people ask me, like, “What are you working on?” I say, “I might be retired. I don’t know if I am. It might be temporary. It might be—this might be like Ross and Rachel: are we on a break, or are we broken up? I don’t know.” But I am so calm and happy with the decision not to be getting up every day and sitting at my desk. It’s like a cord has been cut in me—and I don’t feel any guilt about it.

Jennie Nash

So you said you feel that you don’t have anything to say. When you started these books and your other books and projects, did you feel that?

Mary Laura Philpott

Always! Yes. Like, I—for myself and for other people—like, I need to get this on paper. There’s that therapeutic part of writing: I need to get this on paper and organize it so that I can understand what it is I think. That’s not enough of a reason to go through the misery of publishing a book, but it’s something. And then there’s the other part—where you, or for me, where once I figure out what it is that I’m thinking as I’m putting it on paper, I realize there are other people who may feel this way, and translating it into words is a gift. And it’s something that I want to be able to do for readers, and I want to enter into that two-way conversation with my words and my readers. And it’s not that I don’t have anything interesting to talk about right now—it’s just that I don’t have anything keeping me up at night, begging to be translated and, therefore, you know, urging me to the page. I’ve started and stopped little—not books, but like other little projects here and there—where I’m like, oh, maybe I want to play around with this idea. And then I put them down, and I just feel... it’s honestly the first time in my life I have felt no guilt about not working on the thing that everyone thinks I should be working on. And it’s so weird because other people seem to have really strong feelings about it.

Jennie Nash

I was going to say, what are people’s reactions when you say, “I might be retired”?

Mary Laura Philpott

The other day—okay, so I’m going to tell you about this event I went to the other day. It was a book event for a woman who we all know, who’s pretty well known, and this is her—I don’t know—fourth or fifth or sixth book and it’s very much anticipated by its readers. And she’s exactly my age—she’s 51—and when I went to this event, I ran into a lot of other book people who I know, and of course, the first question everyone asks: “What are you working on?” So I decided to test out my line, and I would say, “I think I might be retired.” The vehemence with which people go, “No, you’re not! Like, shut up!”—I got told “Shut up” so many times. Like, what? Why? Why do people have this strong reaction? But then—and then, you know, I’m such a people pleaser that if enough people say, “Shut up. No, you’re not,” I start to question myself. I’m like, maybe I should try? I don’t know. I don’t want to disappoint everybody. But then we sat down for the discussion part of this event, and someone in the audience asked this fellow writer, “Where do you want to be in ten years? Look ahead ten years and tell us what you see.” And she said, “In ten years, I will be in my early sixties, and I think by then I’d like to hang it up and live life just for me.” And I felt so viscerally and instantly—oh, no, I do not want to wait ten years. I wanted to yell out, “You don’t have to wait till then!” But, you know, to each her own—and she may have ten years more of wanting to be out and about and hustling and doing this.

Jennie Nash

Yeah, yeah. So it sounds like you wouldn’t characterize what you’re feeling as burnout. It’s not—it’s not like, “Oh, I burned out, and I’ll get back to it someday.” It feels really as if you arrived at a different place.

Mary Laura Philpott

It feels like—yes, it feels more like closure than like burnout. And that has changed. That feeling has changed over the last two to three years. In the beginning, it did feel like burnout—like, when I came home from that book tour, I was wrung out. I mean, I was thrilled, it was—it was amazing—but I was tired. And I thought—I remember you and I talking about this and saying, “You know what? I’ve just—I left it all on the field. I’m exhausted, and I need to take a year-long nap.” And then, over time, it became more of an “Okay, I’m not burned out. I actually feel fine. I’m just taking a break.” And I’ve talked to—you and I have a good friend in common, Laura Vanderkam, who writes a lot about productivity, and she and I had a conversation once where I was like, “I think what this is, is a break. Just—I’m going to take a pause, and I’ll decide when I’m done pausing. When I’m done pausing.” And that may be what it is. I do tend to live life kind of cyclically, so I might cycle back into “Now I want to do this,” or “Now I’ve written that.” But right now it feels like this really peaceful closure. And even if I do write something again—which, come on, I mean, I probably will at some point—the part that feels closed is the hustle part. The part that—a lot of us don’t actually really enjoy that much—which is not the writing of the book or the, you know, nice conversations with the readers, but the part where it’s like, okay, you’ve got to put together this tour schedule, and you’ve got to answer all these questions for these promotional essays, and—and now you’ve got to—you know, this promotional machine that—“Go get your photo taken again.” I’m so sick of my face...

Multiple Speakers

[Both laughing]

Jennie Nash

Right?! It’s the performing aspect of being a writer.

Mary Laura Philpott

Yeah.

Jennie Nash

Did—does any of this have to do with the fact that Bomb Shelter...? I know we talked about it at one point—that you felt, while you were writing it, that this—that it was good. Like, you knew that your vision was matching the execution. And then the world reflected back to you that yes, it is good—you did do that, and at a really high level. Particularly that one. There were a lot of reviews like that, but that sort of was the shining—you know, shining star. Was there a—do you think that the fact that you wrote the book—you know, we’re always trying to write the book that we envision, and we don’t always get there—and it feels like you got there. Does that have to do with this feeling, do you think?

Mary Laura Philpott

Maybe—because there—I mean, you’re right, there is almost always a gap between—before we write the thing—this wonderful, amorphous idea in our head where it’s like, “This is just a shining galaxy of thoughts,” and then you get it on paper, and its like, “Oops, I killed it. I flattened it.” And there’s always this gap between the two. And with Bomb Shelter, I really did—it has the smallest possible gap of anything I’ve ever written. And so maybe, you know, maybe that is part of it—that I feel like, what else am I waiting for? Like, what else could I want to do? If you get down to the pure reason of why we do this and what draws you to the page—and also the part of my personality that is, for better or for worse, kind of Type A and achievement-driven—this is... maybe I got to that point where I was like, well, I got the A-plus-plus-plus. What else could I try to get? I don’t think that’s entirely it, because it’s not the whole reason that I write. I don’t think it’s like, “I got the A-plus-plus-plus, now there’s nothing left to say.” When there’s something to say, I’ll say it. But I do—I think you’re right that that’s part of it.

Jennie Nash

And the idea of writing for other people—that there’s the writing, and then there’s the connecting with other people, knowing that you’re doing it for other people, then being out there in the world with those people— Is there a world in which you would write something that doesn’t go into the world? Or is that not... I feel like that’s something I would not be able to do at this point in my— But I’m so wired and attuned to writing for consumption.

Mary Laura Philpott

Yeah.

Jennie Nash

I mean, I write for myself. Of course I write the things I want to write—you know, all those things are true—and, yes, for other people.

Mary Laura Philpott

Yes. Well—and I tend to be similar to you in that regard. And there’s so much—you know, we talked a couple minutes ago about the difference between the therapeutic reasons why you start writing and then the actual hard, somewhat miserable work of getting it from the therapeutic version to something that is publishable. And that takes such discipline and real care for the art of it—of turning this thing that was helpful for your own brain into a piece of art that is worth someone investing in and putting out there in the world. I think—I do—I mean, in a way, I kind of write all the time, and you are similar to me in this. Like, we email, we—you know, we’re very communicative people, so the writing part of my brain is doing something all the time. And I have started a few little weird projects here and there where I’m like, “Oh, I’ve had an idea for this,” and I’ll, you know, write a few pages and then just kind of set it aside—without feeling like I’ve got to go attack it with that discipline that turns it into something.

Jennie Nash

Yeah.

Mary Laura Philpott

And maybe that’s the part of my brain that’s just tired—that’s like, I’m still tired. And when I am untired, I will go back and pull those things out and play with them some more. I don’t know.

Jennie Nash

Yeah, yeah. Well, I love your characterization of that, because I have been talking about this—this newish idea—or I have newish words around this idea of calling it “Write Big”. And people often, I think rightly so, mistake that for big ambition, big goals, big wins, big success, big money—you know, all those things. And it’s not that at all, actually. It’s the doing the thing with your whole heart.

Mary Laura Philpott

Yes!

Jennie Nash

No matter what the thing is.

Mary Laura Philpott

And not holding back.

Jennie Nash

And what you’re saying is that the cost of that for you—you’re not going to do something. It’s not that. And the cost of that for you is too high.

Mary Laura Philpott

At the moment it is. At the moment, when I think about—when I look around at the life I’m in—and this is professionally and personally—there’s this interesting confluence, which is, I’m in my... I’ve just finished my first year of empty nesting. So this has been the first year of my life since I, you know, first had a baby, where my days do not in any way revolve around a school schedule, a nap schedule, a feeding schedule, etc. And then I did maybe the dumbest thing ever—and I adopted a puppy, who does have feeding and nap and all this other stuff. And so all my displaced maternal energy has now been funneled into this puppy, whom I absolutely love—but he is a wild and crazy ‘Looney Tune’. And when I look at the way my days look right now—which is the get up, make my coffee, walk the puppy, feed the puppy, you know, teach the puppy how to sit—and I think, do I feel like trading that right now for getting a dog sitter and going into my office and writing for multiple hours? I don’t. I don’t want to trade that right now. I may change—I fully reserve the right to change my mind and be like those, you know, sports players who are like, “I’m retired,” and then the next season, they’re like, “I’m out of retirement.” Maybe I’ll come out of retirement. But right now, what I want to do is feed my puppy, teach my puppy, be available on a moment’s notice. If a kid says, “Hey, I was the understudy for this play, but I got called up to be in a performance this weekend,” I want to be able to jump on a plane and go and not have other commitments. I’m enjoying that. And I do fully recognize—I should give this disclaimer—that this is a very privileged situation I am in. My income from books is not what paid our mortgage. I’m married. I have a spouse with a job that has health insurance, you know, so I’m able to make decisions. And I do feel the financial consequences of these decisions. Like, it’s not a small deal for me to be like, “I’m not going to write another book,” because that would have been important income—but it’s not the only income in our house. So I’m not—if I had still young children coming up, lots of tuitions to pay, mouths to feed—this might not be so easy for me to just be like, “I want to play with my puppy.”

Jennie Nash

Right, right. Well—the idea we started with, of writing big, is trusting your gut. Not writing is trusting your gut. All of this starts and ends with: what do we think, what do we feel, what do we want to say?

Mary Laura Philpott

Yeah.

Jennie Nash

Those are such hard things to know, and it feels like you’re just really tuned into that right now. And you talked at the very beginning—you said that it feels peaceful. Can you just maybe, to end our conversation, describe that feeling? Because that, I think, is what we all are looking for with our work—whether we’re doing it or not doing it—is peace around it.

Mary Laura Philpott

Yeah. I think a big part of the peace—and I wish I had found this earlier, when I did still have things to say and I was writing—because I think it could have removed a lot of distraction for me in writing big, the way you say—is tuning out other people’s voices. And if you are the type of person, as I am, who—like, when the Olympics are on TV and I see the person doing the high jump, I’m like, “I bet I could do that if I went and—” like, which obviously I cannot. But I have that part of my brain that’s like, “Should I try to do everything I’m capable of doing? Like, I can’t. I can’t leave anything undone. I should. I should go try to be the best at everything I could ever be the best at.” Because, you know, other people expect me to work hard and produce things. And to be able to tune out that inner voice and other people’s voices—those voices that equate productivity with worth—and, you know, “If people aren’t talking about the new thing you’ve done, then how do you even prove you’re worth the air you breathe?” Disconnecting from those voices is what led to the peace. And I think I was beginning to disconnect from that while I was writing Bomb Shelter. I think that’s why that book worked, in some ways—because I really—I mean, remember, I wrote it during the pandemic. I wrote it when I was stuck at home. I had less contact with the outside world than ever before. We did not know what book publishing was going to look like. We did not know if there would ever be another book tour. So I really did write that book in a bubble of having as little outside input as possible. So I think that’s the—maybe, if there’s any key to peace—it’s tuning out voices that you just don’t need.

Jennie Nash

I love that. I love that so much. And I think we will end our conversation there, because it’s so profound and it’s so good.

Mary Laura Philpott

Thank you for having me.

Jennie Nash

Well, for our listeners—until next time, stop playing small and write like it matters.

Narrator

The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output—because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

Jess here. Sarina and I discuss audiobook narration this week and explain how narrators get hired, paid, and dish some inside baseball on audiobook production.

Transcript Below!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Is it recording? Now it’s recording—yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don’t remember what I’m supposed to be doing. All right, let’s start over. Awkward pause. I’m going to rustle some papers. Okay, now—one, two, three.

Jess Lahey

Hey, welcome to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. I’m your host, Jess Lahey, and this is the podcast about getting all the words done, writing all the things, writing, short things, long things, proposals, queries, poetry, all the things. But today, Jess and Sarina are bringing you the book nerdery stuff, the best stuff. This is The Publishing Nerd Corner. I love this new segment. I’m super excited about it, but first, my name is Jess Lahey. I am the author of The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation. You can find my journalism out there various places, including The New York Times. And you can find my newsletter at jesslahey.substack.com.

Sarina Bowen

And I’m Sarina Bowen, the author of many contemporary novels. My new one is called Thrown for a Loop, and it drops on November 4, and it also will be published that same day as an audio book.

Jess Lahey

Whoo so...

Sarina Bowen

And that is what...

Jess Lahey

Yeah, we’re going to talk about audiobooks today, because Sarina knows so much about this—because she has to, like, hire her own narrator sometimes and stuff like that. All I know is, I narrated my own audiobook, and it was super fun, and I loved it. But we want to talk about all the aspects of how audiobooks work—all of it. There’s lots of fun stuff to talk about. Where would you like to start, Sarina?

Sarina Bowen

That is a good question. So, most of the time, if you are selling your book to a big publisher, audio rights will be included in your contract, and your publisher is therefore responsible for making the audiobook. You might be consulted about the choice of narrators, and that audio will magically appear finished on your publication date. But if you are a self-published author, then the existence or not of your audiobook is completely under your control. Audio has been the shining star of publishing for the last decade in that it is the growth story. I’m not sure how that has worked the last couple of years, but audio was one of the only areas of traditional publishing that demonstrated double-digit growth for much of the last decade. A lot of that has to do with the popularity and availability of streaming as a way that people listen to these books. Obviously, the technology shift made a huge difference, but so did things like cellular networks that work well and buffer easily. So...

Jess Lahey

Can I add one little, tiny thing? There’s been another reason that I think that audio has done so well, and that’s the acceptance within the education world—thanks to researchers like, for example, Dan Willingham and other people who study the brain and how we process and learn—that audiobooks are reading. From a processing perspective, from a learning perspective, listening to audiobooks is reading, and anyone who is telling you otherwise is not looking at the science. And so, this has been an incredible way—when you look at kids, for example, neurodivergent kids, dyslexic kids, kids who need another way to take in the information. It used to be that audio was like, “Oh no, that’s cheating,” and it is absolutely not cheating. So, I think that acceptance within the education world has been so great. And, you know, yes, it is a small part of the growth, but I do want to put that plug in there.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah. So, the way that, traditionally, audiobooks have been made is that a narrator goes into a booth and reads the book after having prepped it a bit in terms of maybe reading the whole book, maybe reading parts of the book, understanding what they’re going to bring to the table. If it’s fiction, then they’ll be looking to see what are the major voices, because audio narrators change their delivery to indicate voices. And one thing that’s interesting about the trend where we are in audio right now is that it’s very trendy for a nonfiction author to read their own work if they’re comfortable with it. That is widely done in nonfiction.

Jess Lahey

And it was one of my favorite parts of my process. And I have to say, nothing affected me more on an emotional level. I cried at the end of narrating both books. I had to pause at the very end—at the last couple, the last paragraph. It was such a moving experience for me to narrate my own book. And I have to say, it wasn’t a slam dunk that they were going to let me do that. I, you know, I worked really hard to be able to do that, because for some people, that’s just not their bag—it’s not something that comes naturally to them. But it was, for me anyway, my favorite part of the process.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah, so if you had written a novel, though, we wouldn’t be—

Jess Lahey

No.Sarina Bowen—having that same conversation.Jess Lahey

I’m not an actor. I don’t have the chops for that.Sarina Bowen

Well, a lot of authors of novels don’t understand this. It’s not that they don’t understand how their own book should sound and be delivered—it’s that what they don’t understand is that the way that novel audio sounds in 2025 is a specific trend in the way that readers want their books delivered. The books are very much acted. It wasn’t always this way. There were times when audio really sounded more like somebody just reading—and that’s okay. Like, there’s lots of room for style in terms of the way that audio fiction works. But right now, the trend in audio fiction is very much a performance. And one way that you can see this—and it continues to expand as a trend—is the trend toward something called duet audio, which means, for example, in romance, if there’s a male hero and a female heroine—and the way that most of my books work is that if the chapter is in the POV of a man, then the male narrator reads it. But of course, when he comes to a line of dialogue delivered in the heroine’s voice, he softens his tone a bit to indicate that she’s speaking, but he reads the whole chapter.Jess Lahey

They’re always amazing—that’s amazing to me when readers can do that. I mean, Davina Porter is the one that comes to mind—like, in the Outlander books, when she switches whose voice she’s reading. She switches whose voice—it’s down to the accent—and you don’t for a second think, “Oh, that’s the same person reading all of this.” And some of the narrators you use, Sarina, in your books—the same thing. My brain absolutely believes that I’m hearing a female voice versus a male voice. It’s a really incredible talent.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah. In fact, if this is of interest to you, there is a book called Thank You for Listening by Julia Whelan.

Jess LaheyIt’s so good!

Sarina BowenWho is one of the few who’s been very successful as both an author and a narrator, and her book is a little bit of inside baseball about narrators. And it’s a delight.

Jess LaheyIt’s fun. It’s really fun.

Sarina BowenOkay, so what I was just describing, though—where he reads a chapter and then she reads a chapter—we refer to that as dual narration (D-U-A-L). But there’s a new trend called duet, whereby in the same book, he would read the chapter, but if there was a line of dialogue from a woman, the female narrator would read that line.

Jess LaheyWhich is more similar to me in terms of how it feels with, like, ensemble narration. Like, for example, Lincoln in the Bardo had a full cast of many characters, and every part was someone different, and those actors would chime in with their parts. So, same—similar idea.

Sarina BowenWell, sometimes, sometimes a “full cast” audiobook just means that there are lots of very short chapters or segments. But to have every single line of dialogue cut in is really different than just saying a book has a full cast.

Jess LaheyThat’s true. Actually, that’s true.

Sarina BowenSo the thing about duet specifically is that the engineering part of it—the post-production—is really expensive because the engineer has to cut together this script, and actually preparing the script is also a lot of work. So it’s a pretty big deal to make a duet book. It’s more expensive. The cost of making a one-POV narrator book or a dual book is between, let’s say, $300 and $600 per finished hour.

Jess LaheyWhat do you mean by that, Sarina?

Sarina BowenSo, if you look at Audible right now, you can see the lengths of all of my audiobooks down to the minute. So it might say eight hours and thirty minutes. That means the finished length of that book is eight hours and thirty minutes. And the cost of making that book will be 8.5 times some number between $300 and $600. But if I did that book as duet, then it might be $1,000.

Jess LaheyOkay, all right.

Sarina BowenSo, every audiobook I’ve ever made cost between, like, three grand and seven grand. And if I were doing duet, then I would be hitting numbers more like $10,000.

Jess LaheyAnd make no mistake—there are stars in the audiobook world who, like celebrities in films, can earn more per finished hour for their books. And that demand is really important because they have a vibe. There are fans of particular narrators who will listen to anything that narrator reads.

Sarina BowenYeah, like my kids and I used to listen to audio narrated by Meryl Streep, and I’m sure she broke the curve for how much that cost per finished hour. But you should also know that the finished hour is not the same as how long it takes the narrator to do the job. So, if I’m paying a narrator $350 a finished hour, he is spending more time on that book, and his actual pay per hour is lower—like 150 bucks or whatever. It depends on his ratio of how fast he can narrate a book. And also, narrators’ voices get tired. They can’t narrate forty hours a week—although, actually, some of them probably do—but, you know, it’s a hard job. So, if you’re thinking, “I’m not going to pay someone $350 an hour to narrate my book,” you should know that it doesn’t really work that way, and that really is the price for a reason.

Jess LaheyAnd they’re fun—just for some fun inside baseball things. Like, for both of my books, narration hours when we worked—our starting time in the morning was pushed up a little bit because no one wants to get an audiobook narrator right after they woke up. Your voice is not primed. Your voice has gunk in it. So, we would start later. You really could only go—you know, with my first book, I think we went until, like, three in the afternoon or something. You have to take a break for lunch, and then after you eat lunch, you get all these weird secretions, and it takes time to get back into it. There’s just some weird stuff that I didn’t count on—like it was better for me to be hungry (except then my stomach would make noises, which the microphones would pick up) than to stop and eat and have to get back in the groove. Because when you’re in the groove, you kind of don’t want to stop. There was just so much more to it than I ever anticipated. It was a blast, but it took me almost a whole week. We had scheduled five days for The Gift of Failure—it’s like 78,000, 80,000 words, or something like that. We scheduled five full days; we ended up taking four. And I didn’t have pickups for that book, but I did have pickups for The Addiction Inoculation. There was a lot more scientific language in that book that we had to do some pickups for. So, yeah, it’s—

Sarina BowenPickups means edit.Jess Lahey

Yeah. So, there were a couple days where I came in—and so I actually did The Addiction Inoculation during COVID. I was at a studio here locally in Vermont with my director, the producer of the audio in one ear of my headphones, and my producer from Harper in my other ear, in New York or wherever she was. We were working in a sound booth in Vermont. And, you know, in the evening, that producer would go over the audio and make sure that all of the words were pronounced correctly and everything was good. And then the next day, we would do pickups along with the new work as well.

Sarina BowenRight. So, the editing that happens is really down to the word. Like, the engineer will sit there and, you know, go right into that space between the two words that you said and put the new thing in. And when a professional narrator is in the booth, they operate in a way that’s called punch and roll, which means that they will stop when they make an error, go back—looking at that visual sine wave of the audio on their screen—find the pause between the words, go right to that spot, and then roll forward by hitting record again and then speaking the word that they meant to say.

Jess LaheySome audiobook narrators use a clicker too. It’s a way of being able to see on the wave where you, you know, might need to go back and figure something out.

Sarina BowenYeah. So, um, there’s a lot that goes into this. Humans make a lot of noises that we’re trying not to hear. Like, some engineers will go in and dampen the breath sounds.

Jess LaheyYeah. Yep.

Sarina BowenYou know, they’ll go in and take out the “heeeeh.”

Jess LaheyActually, I had to change my clothes. My sweater was making too much noise. It turns out when I narrate, I use my arms a lot—so I actually had to learn how to narrate with my arms resting on the armrests but only using my lower arms. So, I look like the robot in Lost in Space with my little—my little—and also, my hair had to be up because my hair made noise too. And you can’t wear jewelry, you know, like bracelets and things like that also make noise.

Sarina BowenYep. And narrators all have stories like, “I can’t eat Indian food before I narrate,” or “When I go in the booth after lunch, I strap pillows around my midsection.” Like all this stuff to make sure that the sound quality works. So, that brings us to a difficult topic in how audiobooks are made, which is that a lot of books are flooding the market with AI voices. And everybody’s heard AI voices before—for example, if you’ve ever been on TikTok and you hear that weird, artificial female voice reading the—I don’t even know how to explain it—but that’s primarily why I never go on TikTok, because I cannot stand that artificial voice.

Jess LaheyI listened to—I listened to an article yesterday with The New York Times that was AI-generated that was better than those awful TikTok voices, but still, you know—still AI.

Sarina BowenYeah. So, I am not going to spend our time discussing whether those voices are good or not, but it has really gotten messy. At the beginning of AI narration, some platforms said, “No way, no how. We will never have one.” And then a lot of platforms suddenly allowed for it. So, there’s lots of AI narration in the world, and it’s causing real havoc, especially among people whose livelihoods are being affected by a drop in audio work. I really believe that the readers of my books care very much about the delivery, and it’s hard for me to think that an AI voice could carry the kind of emotion that romance readers are looking for in an audiobook. So, I hope—I hope that audio listeners continue to demand quality, because it’s a big deal.

Jess LaheyAt least right now, your listeners—you know, they love Teddy Hamilton. Or, you know, there are audiobook narrators who are very specifically—people get excited when they see a particular narrator’s voice attached to your work. And I think—and again, in Thank You for Listening, there’s that good—she goes into great detail on that whole inside baseball of narrator fans. And like, Teddy Hamilton has fans—has a fan base. And I hope that persists, because I think there’s real value in that. I hope there’s real value in that, and I hope people continue to value it.

Sarina BowenYeah, and I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon. People really aren’t clamoring to see AI Meryl Streep on the screen at the movies—and, you know, paying a movie ticket price for that. And I believe that in narration land, yeah, it’s the people coming up that will suffer the most—the newer narrators who don’t have a fan base yet and are struggling to get work. So, yeah—anyway, that is one thing. And we could talk about how to get your book done in AI production now, but I think we won’t, because...

Jess LaheyYeah.

Sarina BowenBecause that’s, you know, not—you can figure that out yourself if that’s interesting to you. But, um, I believe that humans are still the way to go here.

Jess LaheyThere was an interesting note. So, when I said that I worked really hard to get the chops to narrate my own audiobook—I mean, I went to go work for Vermont Public Radio. I recorded these commentaries. And these commentaries that my producer taught me how to record—there was a really interesting note she gave me, which is that these commentaries are really short, like just a couple of minutes—less than three minutes. And one of the things she taught me is that when I’m reading these commentaries, if at the end I look up at my producer and smile and make eye contact with my producer that it makes the narrator be even more connected to the listener. And she’s absolutely right. You could hear a difference in the commentary when I was making eye contact with my producer, and I find that fascinating and intangible and magic. There is a magic in that that I hope we do not lose with AI.

Sarina BowenYes, absolutely—and that is a fantastic place to close this episode.

Jess LaheyAbsolutely.

Sarina BowenLet’s not lose that magic.

Jess LaheyIf there are things you would like us to talk about when it comes to the nerdery of publishing—in the Publishing Nerd Corner—if you’re a huge fan of publishing nerdery, I also would love to recommend that you go over and follow Jane Friedman immediately, because she is such a great writer about the nerdery stuff in publishing. But we will continue to talk about it. If there are things you would like to know about, please let us know.

But until next week, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

NarratorThe Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output—because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.