Mom Writes Podcast

Mom Writes Podcast

By Abby MathewsEducationArtsBooksKids & Family
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Mom Writes Podcast episodes

  • Episode 59: Just Blow Something Up...
    In this episode:
    [NSFK—the end of this episode is Not Suitable for Kids. I swear and we don’t edit it out, plus we mention dildos about 16 times, so put on your headphones as we enter chit chat territory at the end!]
    Both Mel and Abby are sick. But Mel wins. She has the flu and shows up anyway because she is convinced that part of her self-care is talking about her edits. She tried extra hard this week to make up for her “bad edits” last time.
    Jennie’s comments last time were along the lines of “but nothing is happening in the story.” So Mel’s solution was to go back and blow something up.
    Jennie points out how dangerous it is to “blow stuff up” in a story. You can very easily make it about plot and not story. Mel’s story is about life and death and the choices we make around life and death. Mel’s writing played into that, so it works. But Jennie cautions writers not to just randomly include epic events in their stories if they don’t serve a purpose in the overarching WHY. If your motivation is “I just gotta make something happen” then that’s bad.
    There needs to be a logic to every single action a character makes.  It has to be logical in the universe of the story, and it has to be logical to who that character is. (Would that character actually do that? Why would they do that? And is it clear to the audience why they would do that?)
    Mel beat herself up over her previous edits, but we talk about writers’ high standards for themselves. Why do writers think it has to be perfect the first time they write something? Mel points out that first-time writers hold themselves to that standard of perfection because they have been raised on a million wonderful books in their final form and have yet to develop an appreciation for the iterative process of writing.
    Jennie says no one is immune from this, and that the people who are willing to put themselves in the vulnerable place of sharing their work are the people who end up doing good work. There are so many skills you have to master when writing a novel—SO MANY!  So go easy on yourself when you make mistakes. 
    Besides having the flu, Mel also lost her work when Word crashes and she lost four pages. It could have been worse, but she had really liked those pages! Jennie shares a secret, and she calls it “device agnostic.” She talks about how everything she does lives in Dropbox.  
    We end by talking about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. We all have funny stories that revolve around hoarding childhood treasures.
    52 min
  • Episode 58: Luke Reynolds, MG Writer & (God Bless Him) Former Middle School Teacher
    This morning we interview Luke Reynolds, author of The Looney Experiment (Blink),  Surviving Middle School: Navigating the Halls, Riding the Social Roller Coaster, and Unmasking the Real You, and most recently Fantastic Failures: True Stories of People Who Changed the World by Falling Down First, which comes out Sept 11!
    We talk about how Luke was inspired to write Fantastic Failures through personal experience via his career in teaching middle grades and junior high students. So many young people struggle with overcoming failure and rejection, and Luke wanted to write a book for kids that shows how the most successful people in history have a long (LONG!) history of personal and professional failures.
    Luke himself always wanted to be a writer, but his B+'s on writing assignments in school never made him feel that he could be successful - he only learned later that persistence was the key, and having an honest perspective on what it takes to complete a book - drafts upon drafts upon drafts! Luke also credits his oldest brother for noticing he was on the wrong path and making him run with him every day, forming a connection and keeping him out of trouble. We need people to care about us, be authentic with us, and lead us - and then hard work and grit come into play. Various biographies in Fantastic Failures had people who wouldn't have made it without help along the way - friends, families, mentors - that encouraged them to keep going. 
    One of the takeaways from this book is to change the idea of failure - don't see it so much as failure, but as one of the steps in succeeding. How do we change this perfection for ourselves and our kids?
    "I think it's become somewhat popular to talk about failure and making mistakes in general, but the next level is really hard to get to - to actually start talking about our OWN failures and rejections...to start talking really openly about how I failed as a dad, as a teacher, a writer, a friend, a brother...to start normalizing it. We all experience deep rejection and failure, and we'll talk about the "safe" failures - things that happened 30 years ago, but not yesterday." - Luke Reynolds
    One of the main reasons Mel and Abby started this podcast was to start recognizing and normalizing the iterative process of writing, and how bad writing and bad first drafts are a normal thing. It can be a beautiful process, but only if we see failure as one of the steps to success. And is there any real joy without a struggle, anyway? If something comes easy to you, you don't feel as great about it as opposed to the things you really had to work for. 
    "The people who sustain their love of something are people that fail often, early on - and you can't get the love of it out of them. People who succeed very quickly tend to quit quickly as well." - Luke Reynolds
    44 min
  • Episode 57: Writing & Super Zoloft
    Mel got some feedback that was not very positive, but she wasn’t surprised by it. She had a rough stretch in her personal life (hard, not-exactly-podcast-material-kinda-stuff), but she forced herself to finish her pages. When she got her edits back, she admits that it hurt. It felt like she had really screwed up in her writing.
    Mel says, “It just brought to light how distracted I had been. I was distracted from my story. I wasn’t really connected to it. I was trying to put the things in it that, for some reason, I thought needed to be there, but there wasn’t that thing that we always talk about. There wasn’t a connection to the characters. There a bunch of stuff in here, but it doesn’t really mean anything.”
    Jennie and Mel talk a little about the interplay between being a person and being a writer. Mel hates the trope that you have to be a sad, depressive creative in order to write well. Mel talks about her struggles with mental health, and how they have the exact opposite on her writing. Things for her grind to a halt until she can take care of herself. She tried to tape her life together so that no one could see that things were falling apart. She didn’t want to admit to anyone that she was struggling. Mel thinks that creatives can be more prone to dealing with this sort of thing.
    “I don’t really think it’s addressed as often as it should be. Or admitted to as often as it should be. Or maybe it’s used in a way that says, ‘Oh, well. That person’s really troubled, but they’re also really brilliant.’ You don’t have to be both. And when I’m troubled, I’m not brilliant.” -Melanie Parish.
    You connect to people through your art, and you can pull from your experiences. Your empathy can help you as a creative. Jennie points out that, “The things Mel is talking about is not being able to control what you feel. What we’re doing when we write a book is controlling what the characters feel and playing with that emotion like it’s clay. But you recognize that you can’t control what you yourself feel.”
    Mel admits to feeling all her feelings. All of everyone’s feelings. ALL the feelings everywhere. Yet there was no emotion connection in her story. “I was afraid to put it in there, or I didn’t know how, or I couldn’t narrow down what I was feeling in a way that was useful.”
    But finishing her pages-- even junk pages—felt like a win. A win that Melanie needed.
    But is anything she wrote salvageable? Mel jokes that she did great on one paragraph, and she’s keep it!
    Abby asked Jennie if this is typical? That every writer everywhere, somewhere over the course of their book will have a bad streak. Jennie says, “100% of the time. And 100% of the time when I reflect that opinion back to the writer, they’re not shocked. And then there’s always some reason. Writing is not separate from who you are.”
    Jennie reminds us no one is immune from real life—sickness, accidents, loss, doubt.
    We can’t have our only metric be page count or word count. Or how fast we wrote them.
    “Slow writing, like slow cooking, it just takes time.” –Jennie Nash
    In craft talk, Mel has an uber-dramatic scene that she wants to keep. Jennie said that sometimes when you have intense drama, the writer stops writing and acts like a camera, forgetting that the reader is still looking for meaning.
    Mel did her best to tamp down her feelings in real life, and her characters stopped feeling, too. Abby jokes that Mel’s characters took Zoloft and quit feeling. Jennie says that Mel’s Infinity Device in her story is like super-Zoloft! What she’s writing about is what happens if you tamp it down.
    50 min
  • Episode 56: A Writer's Brain

    Jennie stereotypes Mel's musical tastes.

    Check out Melanie's 8-hour writing playlist.

    Jennie eats her breakfast of avocado toast on Ezekial bread with Penzey's everything bagel topper.

    Jennie and Abby discuss world building and how your details serve the story.

    “What do I need to have happen in this scene? What do I need to have happen in this world? Why is it even there? Because if you can't answer that, you want to take it out.” - Jennie Nash

    Don't just think about what's cool or plausible, but think about what serves your story.

    Abby's discusses how watching the TV show The Goldbergs triggered a chain reaction of thoughts that took her from The Goldbergs to Ferris Bueller's Day Off to a memory from her days teaching high school to the book Wonder to the new, fabulous ending to her story.

    Sometimes you have to stop along the way and go backward in order to replan how to move forward based on new discoveries in your story. Abby had to go back and remake the last half of her two-tier outline to fit the new ending.

    Abby thinks it's important to draw on things that have happened to you and weave them into your fiction to make it more believable.

    “One of the worst things you say to a fiction writer is, 'Did that happen to you? Like, is that real?' because it diminishes the work. Like what *Abby* just did of filtering everything, and massaging it, and making it fit the story... All those decisions and all that work, that's the creative process.” -Jennie Nash

    33 min
  • Episode 55: Ending Chapters & Doing Some Research
    All writers struggle with something. That something may change every time you sit down to write, but Abby has pretty consistently struggled with how to end her chapters. Jennie gives Abby some story-specific advice about how to end her latest submission.
    In this episode, Abby also does a little research. Let’s face it, Abby’s research is way more boring than Mel’s. Abby didn’t get to go to a gun range and learn to shoot. Abby didn’t take her car to an ill-frequented gravel road, open the back doors, and peel out. Mel has done some pretty bad-ass research. Abby just talks to people.
    But today, Abby talks to someone pretty special— Jennie’s daughter! Jennie’s youngest daughter, Emily, makes an appearance on the show. Home from school for a break, she comes in to talk about how old she was when she first read Pride and Prejudice. It’s an answer that both surprises and delights Abby. But even better is the why behind why she picked it up in the first place. (Spoiler alert: to learn about boys!) The conversation helps Abby pin down more story-specific details.
    30 min
  • Episode 54: Author Accelerator Book Coach Julie Artz on MG vs YA
    In this episode of MomWrites we talk with Julie Artz, novelist and author of blogs at  Terminal Verbosity, The Winged Pen, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle-Grade Authors, on Twitter, or on Facebook. Julie has also been a PitchWars middle grades mentor, and is active in the leadership of her regional SCBWI.
    One of our friends in a writers group asks Julie: How do you tell if your book falls into middle grades territory or YA territory?  Can you write about a first kiss in middle grades? 
    Julie: Yes! Totally appropriate to have first kisses and a little bit of romance, but the important thing is that it's *awkward* first kisses. Very much beginning stages of interest in romance and the opposite sex. See Barbara Dee's Starcrossed and Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me. 
    We talk categorizing children's lit and how to categorize where various MG and YA fall? People "pretend" there are three children's categories (picture books, MG, and YA) but there's really a lot more. There are subcategories within categories, lots of nuance and several different formats ranging from beginning readers to advanced readers, even within a small age group. Middle grade is even being split into 8-10 and 10-13 (lower MG and upper MG, respectively), and YA is similar, with a younger YA category and an older, more adult YA category. It's not as black and white as it used to be! Books like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games have blurred the lines quite a bit. 
    Crossover between age ranges does make things difficult for new writers when trying to "follow the rules" for age ranges and genres. Abby was struggling when trying to decide what age to make her protagonist, and Jennie told her  "Just make a choice and write to that age. Don't worry about isolating the readership." She used Harry Potter as an example - when the series starts, he's 11, and it works, because we read to find out what we'd do in the situation these characters find themselves in. The world of Harry Potter is incredible and universally interesting, and that's why you find people of all ages reading it.  
    "Voice is really really important in MG and YA. If the voice isn't there - you can assign whatever age you want, but if your 12 year old sounds like a 16 year old, it's not going to work." - Julie Artz
    Another way to differentiate between YA and MG is where the character's focus lies:
    Middle grades: friends and family are still the focus of the world. There's a little bit of focus on turning towards adulthood.
    YA: Individuality and questioning where character's place in the adult world is paramount. 
    OR how the book ends:
    Middle grades: There's usually an uplifting message or hope for the characters at the ending of the book.
    YA: Doesn't necessarily have a happy ending or "hope".
    OR explicit content:
    Middle grades: watch the violence and the swearing! No sex! Awkward first kisses are ok. 
    YA: violence, swearing and sex is more accepted.
    It's important to remember that there's a lot more gatekeeping by parents and teachers with middle grades than in YA. There can be edgy subjects (drug addiction, mental illness, self-harm, teen pregnancy), but in general those characters experiencing those things are not the POV characters. Example: Kate Messner's The Seventh Wish dealing with drug addiction (the drug addict is the sister of the main character). Rather, the POV characters in these MG novels are dealing with these issues but removed from them by at least one degree.
    45 min
  • Episode 53: Writer Friends and Written Cliches
    Finding good writer friends can be hard. And once you throw your work into the mix, things can go bad. Fast. Abby and Mel talk about how they used a FB writers group (Writer Moms, Inc.) to find ladies who give them what they really need from writer friends— emotional support.
    Also, Melanie finds herself trapped in an embarrassing situation. She finds herself describing one of her characters as if she were writing a a very cliched scene from a romance novel. We have a few good laughs reading it out loud (and thankfully Mel is a good sport about it). But Jennie walks her through what to do if you find yourself writing cliches with a simple fix to help you move on.
    38 min
  • Episode 52: What's the Worst That Could Happen?
    What's the worst that can happen if you don't sit down and write? Well, your book never gets finished. Book coach Jennie Nash and Melanie Parish talk about fear as it relates to getting words on the page.
    Book coaching is partly about craft, but just as equally if not more so about support. Great words are the end result of an emotional process that takes two people - the writers, and the readers. The book coach stands in for the reader and can give you the "you can do this!" motivation you need to get it done.
    This week Mel celebrates getting done on time with the help of some MAJOR coffee intake. How did she take time to do it? Sheer determination, and the knowledge that taking time to write and the end result of getting her pages done is much better than wallowing in self-doubt and not spending the time to do it.
    "Every time I sit down to write I'm still nervous, it's still nerve-wracking...it's taken me a really long time to come to terms with the fact that this is something I can do, that this is something I'm good at." - Mel
    Self doubt throws up roadblocks ALL the time - but the alternative is going nowhere and not finishing your projects. The other alternative is to just try - even if it's hard, even if it's scary, even if you fail a bunch (we all do!).
    Mel says that book coaching has absolutely been vital to her motivation in working on her book. Getting validation on what she's doing well vs doing poorly has been instrumental in the sense that she's gained an understanding of what works, and why it works, and how to move that through the rest of her writing while ditching the stuff that's holding her back.
    "When you do things well and you know it, you can keep doing that thing well--you can be conscious of how you're doing that thing well... it's like if you go to a golf coach because your swing isn't working, they'll tell you that your stance is good, you grip is good, but you need to work on your shoulders." - Jennie Nash
    The reason why a lot of writing workshops and typical teaching in writing doesn't work is that you don't get the kind of individualized feedback that you get with book coaching. If you don't get any specifics on why something works or doesn't work, you can't take that criticism or feedback and better the rest of your writing. Abby says that in her fine arts classes in college, you weren't allowed to say "I like it" or "I don't like it." You were forced to be specific in your criticism or praise, and that's what book coaching does as well. You can't be steered in the right direction with generalities.
    "Writing is a teachable skill, and good writing is a teachable skill." - Jennie Nash.
    54 min
  • Episode 51: Writing Under the Influence of Emotional Exhaustion
    This week on MomWrites!
    "THIS IS HOW A REALLY BAD AGATHA CHRISTIE KNOCK OFF MURDER STARTS!" - Abby, stuck in a dark Macy's dressing room, sans pants.
    Abby deals with some S-H-I-T : emotional exhaustion! Power outages! Migraines! ER visits! Parents! Writing wedding vows, shopping for dresses, trips out of state and sick kids! Writing gets pushed aside sometimes when we're dealing with real life. This week Abby channels her emotional woes into her writing and uses it to write an epic car crash scene for her book.
    (One of the great things about Author Accelerator coaches is that they totally get that you have a real life and they're not going to give you a hard time when you've got to drop everything and deal with it. As parents, our families always come first!)
    "We talk all day long about show don't tell - what that means is what you're doing right here. We see Bernadette's dad trying his very best, trying so hard to be a good dad, but he's FROM THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. What we feel is the impossibility of this situation." - Jennie Nash
    Abby admits that she wrote this chapter twice - the first time around felt a little flat. When she went back and read it, she put the action in but not any thoughts or feelings that Bernadette is experiencing. She added in what would be happening to her emotionally, all these extra details, that really made the scene on the second go around. Learning to write better is about self awareness - there are NO RANDOM THINGS in writing. Everything has meaning, everything connects to the story, everything drives characters and plot and meaning. Make your events, your characters, make everything matter, and it's going to matter to your reader.
    Or another way - it's like braiding hair, according to Jennie. You can put something in and the reader holds onto it, and when you bring that thread back into the braid/story, it's very satisfying to the reader to see that character or point or thread again. When you don't re-weave a storyline or a character back in the reader wonders what happened and what they're missing.
    "Moms who write - what we have is a more active imagination than the average person. Our job as a writer is to imagine other people's worlds, make things go wrong, make bad things happen for our characters. You can't be a good writer and sit down, do that imaginative work, and then shut it off in the rest of your life. Writing is emotional work, too--it's not just intellectual work." - Jennie Nash
    39 min
  • Episode 50: Clint Edwards and #Expectations
    NSFK. Let me repeat. NSFK. (Not Suitable for Kids!)
    Buckle up, Buttercup, because this episode will take you all over the map when it comes to parenting and writing. Mel says we're "grade A bullshitters" and Clint said, "We gave the podcasting world a real gift with this one. You're welcome." We cover everything from children who narc on their parents, to dogs who pee like fountains, writing when you also have a full-time job, and... well, LIFE. Because sometimes you just have to sit back, look at things, and laugh...
    In this episode:
    Today we're wrapping up our June Father's Day series with Clint Edwards about parenting, writing, and all the glorious mess in between (figurative, mostly, but also literal. Kids are freakin' messy).
    Clint is the author of the popular blog, I Have No Idea What I'm Doing: A Daddy Blog, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (Parenting, Marriage, Madness), and I'm Sorry...Love, Your Husband. He's been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Scary Mommy, and like, a dozen other awesome things that you can totally check out by going to his website, www.byclintedwards.com.
    Clint gives us the skinny on balancing a full time job and great writing while ALSO being a husband and father. It's a lot, you guys, but we all understand because that's what we're all about here at MomWrites/DadWrites/ParentWrites. It's hard to prioritize your writing when you've got everything else on your plate, and it often involves getting creative when you're finding time for your work. (Yes, sometimes this means getting up really early or devoting your lunch breaks to writing instead of food, or handing your children the iPad and letting PBS Kids raise them for an hour. We're sorry/notsorry about that.)
    We also talk about realistic expectations when it comes to making a living as a writer - it's a hard road, and you may never get to the point where the only job you have is putting out amazing work, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. For many of us, it's part therapy/part creative outlet, and it does us no favors to ignore or pack away that part of ourselves. Plus, it teaches our kids that we're actual human beings with dreams and ambitions and not just walking/talking/scolding snack vending machines.
    "It's not really about money, it's really about passion and interest in what you're doing." - Clint Edwards
    Ain't that the truth.
    46 min

About Mom Writes Podcast

From the publisher's feed

Two writer moms and a book coach meet each week for coffee and chat about writing and parenting. Follow along as veteran book coach Jennie Nash of Author Accelerator helps writer-moms Abby Mathews…