Dear Creativity...Let's Write

This episode is the second tarot chat in a series with author, tarot reader, and book coach Margaret McNellis. Last week, Margaret shared ways to use tarot cards to help you plot your novel and develop your characters. This week, we discuss ways to use the tarot to break through writing blocks and deepen your own writing practice.

Tarot cards can be a super fun resource to use as you plot your novels and develop your characters. They have layered meanings, images, and symbolism that can open you up to ideas to help you write your best story. In this episode, I chatted with book coach, tarot reader, and author, Margaret McNellis about how to use them to enhance your stories, even if you’ve never picked up a tarot deck before.

My guest this week, novelist Sandy Barker, is hilarious, loves to travel, and has a soft spot for a good romance novel. She’s been able to tie all that together into a successful career writing romantic comedies most of which are set in exotic locations. In this episode, Sandy shares how she went from self-publishing to landing multi-book deals with a major publishing house as well as an agent, writing tips, how she’s come up with some of her ideas and more. We touched on so much when it comes to writing there are honestly too many little nuggets of wisdom to list here.

Editing is a huge piece of the writing process, and it can also feel like one of the most daunting. What kind of editor do you need to hire? What kind of editors and editing are there? How do you work with an editor? How can you find one to work with? We tackle all of these questions nad more in this interview with editor and now author, Kris Emery. Her book Destination Author was released in Feb. 2021, so if you get as much out of this interview as I did, be sure to check out her book on Amazon.

Amy S. Peele, started writing in mid-life after working through The Artist’s Way and discovering that she loves to write. It took a few more years to become an author as she had a thirty-five-year career as a nurse in the organ transplant field. She’s now taken that expertise to the page and has published two, award-winning, medical murder mysteries with a third on the way.

In this episode, I share my own looking back process as well as a key lesson around expectations and my writing that I’ve learned and how it’s shifted my writing practice this fall and moving forward into 2022.

After the past few weeks of looking back at 2021, confirming my own personal findings with a little research, adjusting my own writing practice accordingly, and enjoying my writing while I make significant progress, I’ve discovered the value in having lower expectations for myself.

Bringing mindfulness to your writing practice helps develop consistency in your practice, and it can also make you a more descriptive writer as you slow down and notice more. We dive into all of this more with today's guest, author Lissa M. Cown who writes in a variety of genres and teaches fiction and structural editing at the university level. She also has a super popular writing mediation course on the daily Ohm with thousands of students.

We often think of creativity in terms of the thing that we’re creating, but in this episode with poet and creativity activator David Chislett, you might have your understanding of creativity deepened and even turned inside out and upside down. As David says, what the thing becomes is irrelevant. The idea is to just start, see where it goes because creativity is a quantum phenomena.”

We live in an Amazon Prime, Netflix, fast food, “I want it NOW” kinda world. Life moves fast, and when we decide we want something, we generally can get it fairly quickly. No more waiting for a movie to come out or the VHS to get or checking to see if it’s been returned to Blockbuster. We just stream it. We get items we’ve ordered in a day or two.

Sadly (in my mind at least), writing and producing books quickly has not escaped the “right now” push in modern society. And that’s what this episode is about today – how can we cultivate patience as writers?

Loss, heartache, major life changes, pain are all part of the human condition. Nobody escapes dealing with the hard and painful stuff. My guest this week, novelist Piper Punches, works through her heartache on the page and through her characters that somehow end up navigating similar challenges to what she's navigating. She's done this both intentionally and unintentionally as she discovered looking back at her body of work. This episode is not about journaling or working through your grief on the page in that way. Instead, it's about how writing fiction and stories can help us with grief.