The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How can giving your characters two bad choices raise the stakes in your stories? And how do you ask for the feedback you need from a critique group, and disregard the rest? Erin Dionne shares her writing and publishing tips after more than 20 years as an author and professor. In the intro, The Future of Listening Audible survey [Publishing Perspectives]; Spotify expand audiobooks globally; Audible announce immersive new AI features [Publishing Perspectives]; Writing Storybundle; SPS Live USA conference; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars in November. Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Erin Dionne writes middle grade novels, picture books, chapter books, and nonfiction, as well as cosy mysteries under a pen name. She's also a college professor, and her latest book for writers is Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Conversations About Writing. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes Why two bad choices beat an easy choice and a hard one How pre-writing in a notebook builds confidence in your characters before you draft Giving characters dimension beyond the bubble of their story How to ask for the feedback you want, and protect the core of your story Forming an indie press with your critique group How to get school visits through librarians and conferences You can find Erin at ErinDionne.com. Transcript of Interview with Erin Dionne Jo: Erin Dionne writes middle grade novels, picture books, chapter books, and nonfiction, as well as cosy mysteries under a pen name. She's also a college professor, and her latest book for writers is Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Conversations About Writing. So welcome to the show, Erin. Erin: I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. Jo: There's lots to talk about. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Erin: Sure. Like some of the other people that you've talked to on the podcast, I've been a huge reader and writer ever since I was a little kid, but when I was about seven, I realised that it was people that wrote books. I thought that they came out of a machine or something. When I found that out, I thought, oh my goodness, I love reading stories, so being a writer must be the best job in the world. So I was single-mindedly focused on being an author as a career after that. I wrote off and on in school. I wrote short stories and things. When I went to college, I got a degree in English and communications, and then I went and got my MFA in creative writing. While I was in school, I also decided that I wanted to learn about the publishing industry, so I worked as an intern for a local magazine. Then after I graduated, while I was in grad school, I actually worked in publishing for Houghton Mifflin in their marketing department. I became an editor for a magazine, and then ultimately, I became a professor, and I work at an art school. It was at that point, finally, when I was surrounded by other creative people, that I thought, “Okay, I've learned all this stuff. I need to actually put it into practice.” So I got serious about my work in 2005, and my first book came out in 2009, a traditionally published children's book, and I published in the children's book field for the next 11 years. I released my first indie book in 2021, and now I consider myself a hybrid author. I do some books traditionally published, some books indie, and I really like being able to have control in different aspects of my career. Jo: Well, that's great. Wow, you've just done so much across the whole industry. That's fantastic. I do want to ask you then, before we get into the book, you did an MFA, and obviously you love studying. I also love studying. I understand that. I wonder where you stand now on whether people need to study so much. I found personally, as someone who also enjoys studying, that sometimes I make myself not do the practice. I'd rather sometimes be learning than doing. So how can people balance learning a lot with actually writing the book? Erin: Yes, I think that's a great question. For me, my undergraduate degree in English was not creative writing focused. We didn't have that. So I thought, “I need to learn how to write.” What I really learned in grad school was how to revise and how to teach. I think now, 20 years later, with the cost of education, you don't have to have a master's degree to write. You don't have to have a degree in English to write. You have to read a lot, and you have to write a lot. I think the MFA is great for deep study on your particular genre if you feel like you need to learn more, and I think it's great if you want to teach, but it's not necessary to be a writer. To be a writer, you have to write. So sometimes we can hide behind learning and hide behind all kinds of things to avoid doing the work, but what it comes down to is you have to put your butt in the chair and you have to write at some point. Jo: It's funny, isn't it? I like the “hide behind the learning.” I still struggle with it because I love learning so much. I also just finished another master's degree. I can't help myself. I do a lot of research for all my books, and I almost have to just pull myself up sometimes and say, “Look, do you really need to do any more research in order to write this novel?” Erin: Exactly. Jo: Okay. Well, let's get into the book. So you start writing with characters first, and other people, like me, often start with a theme or a question or a place or something. So talk about your process of creating characters and this bad choices idea as well. Erin: Sure. Most of my books start with a character. Like you, I'm a discovery writer, but I love to do all my discovery work in pre-writing phases, and I pre-write by hand. I'm a big proponent of using a notebook. I carry a notebook with me wherever I go, and I have specific notebooks that are for specific projects. Most of my pre-writing is character-based. I really want to learn about who this person is, what do they want, what are they going after in their life and in the story, and what do they need? Wants and needs are always a big one for me, because I feel like a character should be able to articulate their want, but they don't always know what their need is. That's up to us as the author to identify that. Then through the course of the story, I always think about it in terms of the character is going after what they want, but they're going to get their need met by the end of the story. That brings satisfaction to the reader when a character gets their need met. So I take a lot of time to try to figure out what that is, because for me, that's going to drive the story. I really have to understand the character's world before I begin. When I feel like I have a really good handle on who these people are that the book is about, I'll do a beat sheet, like what Jessica Brody was talking about on your show earlier in August. I'll do a beat sheet to get some general ideas of plot points, and then I'm ready to write. Then that's where the bad choices come in. If you think about a character and they get to a crossroads in a story, lots of times the first thing that we think about are an easy choice and a hard choice. So for example, if we have a character who's 16 years old, and she's grounded, and there's a party on Friday night that she wants to go to, one choice is for her to just stay home and then hear about the party. The other choice is for her to sneak out and go to the party, and obviously sneaking out and going to the party could have higher stakes and better consequences. But that's also an easy choice, and both you and your reader know where the character's going to go. If you give your character two bad choices, that character is going to go to the party no matter what. So are they going to sneak out and have a friend pick them up, or are they going to sneak out and take their mother's car and go to the party? Now we have two bad choices, higher stakes, and more potential for story drama if they take that bad choice. So I'm always looking at ways that I can have my characters get into a little bit more trouble, make things a little harder. For me, that comes with those decision points, and giving them two bad options so that the reader knows, ooh, they're going to do something wrong. It's just a matter of what wrong thing are they going to pick? Jo: So it's interesting, because you said you're a discovery writer, and then you talked about your pre-writing phase and the beat sheet, and now these bad choices. So are you coming up with these bad choices at the pre-writing, at the beat sheet phase, or do these emerge once you're actually into the drafting process? Erin: They come out in the drafting process. I have a general idea by the time I start writing of some of the highs and lows of the book, but I don't know how the character is going to get there. Because I know my character really well, I can write with confidence, and I know that I'm going to figure out the path that they're going to take. Jo: The word pre-writing, maybe you could talk more about that, because I feel like some people listening are like, “I don't even know what that means.” So what is pre-writing for you? Erin: Brainstorming. I just throw down in my notebook all kinds of things about my characters. Everything from the way they look to what they think about, hobbies that they have, people that are important in their lives, people that have influenced them in some way. I make lists. If I'm writing about a young character, I make lists of things that are in their backpack, or I'll think about what their school schedule is, who their friends are, what their family situation is, and really try to figure out the dynamics of the world around their want, and why do they want this thing that they're going after. So I will spend three or four months just getting these ideas down on paper. I'll write letters from my character to me. And all of this is building confidence in who my character is so that I can inhabit them fully when I start to write. Jo: Wow, that is so interesting, and I have to say I've never done anything like that. Again, it's so fascinating, isn't it? I might spend all my research time on the mythology behind a particular place. I'm often fascinated in places where there's been a lot of death and killing and blood soaked into the ground, because these places have a historical and often religious depth to them, and then I'll stick a character there. Erin: Yes, it's just two different ways of coming at the same problem, right? And that's the beauty of writing, is we all do it in our own way, which is what makes our stories different and interesting. Jo: Totally. Well then, if somebody finds their characters are not interesting enough, maybe someone is more like me and they want to become more like you, how might they address this? How could they look at some of the common issues with characters? What are some of your tips if people want to enrich their characters before they write? I mean, you've given us some things there, but I feel like what is in a character's backpack, for me, just feels way too detailed. Erin: I think a lot about the reader experience, and readers want to connect with characters, and they want characters to feel real. I think sometimes as writers, we confuse that idea that a character is interesting with making them angsty or having all of these heavy issues around them. I like to think about characters in terms of dimension. What else exists in this person's life outside of the bubble of their story? I don't mean things that we don't see on the page, but we all have different interests, and we all have different fears that may or may not come up, depending on what's going on in our lives. So creating a character that has multiple facets, and things then bleed into the story. I can give you an example. There's a book by Angie Thomas, a young adult novel called On the Come Up, and the main character wants to be a rapper. She has a family history of performance, and that's her goal. She also characterises herself as a super nerd. She's really into Pokémon and Star Wars and Marvel movies, and these things show up in the way that she sees the world and the analogies that she makes and the references that she makes. All of a sudden you have this character that has so much more dimension, because she feels more real. So I'm always looking for things that I can pull in from other facets of my character's life to give us a lens that they see the world through. So thinking about, beyond what's happening in your story, what do they do in their free time? What are the things that they would reference when talking to a friend?What are some of the inside jokes maybe that they have, or cultural elements that they would carry through? Even just sprinkling in a couple of those things, all of a sudden your character becomes richer for your reader. Jo: How do you take that further and turn that deep character into plot points on your beat sheet? Erin: So I always think about, how is the character moving through their life and their story? What type of story am I telling in terms of genre? And then how do those things intersect? So I have a book called Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking, and the character is solving a mystery, but she's also really good at math. So she uses geometry proofs as logical paths to help her solve the mystery. I am not good at math, so I had to figure all of that out for her. Then all of a sudden, this character has a very different type of problem, and she's literally using her logical problem-solving skills to solve it. So there are those moments where we can see how these other elements intersect with our characters' lives, just like they would if things were happening to us in real life. You use the skills that you have. I think that also ultimately ends up making you more confident when you approach the page, and readers can sense that confidence in your work. Jo: Yes. What are your thoughts on character flaws? This is another thing that everyone emphasises. Do you focus on flaws, or is it more those wants and needs? Erin: I think in creating characters, everybody has flaws, right? So I don't so much think about what is their major flaw in this story, but in terms of getting their need met, usually their need somehow feeds into a flaw. Maybe they're a character who needs to be more generous, so by nature they're behaving in a way that's more selfish. Or maybe they're a character who needs to have stronger relationships, and so their flaw would then come out of that need, and they are a little bit more withdrawn or standoffish. So over the course of the story, the events of the story cause them to change, right? The experiences that they have cause them to move a little bit further over on the continuum to getting that need met. Jo: Another thing I think about a lot is characters in series. As I said, I do character a bit different to you. I'm more of the Lee Child, Jack Reacher vein, or James Bond, where the characters stay similar in each adventure and the plot moves around them. For people writing series, and you write cosy mysteries, sometimes there are little things we can do. If people want to have a long-running series, how should they construct characters in that way so that you're not running out of ideas for that character? Erin: That's a great question, and one that I've been wrestling with with my cosy mysteries. The way that I am addressing it is I'm acknowledging the experiences that she has from book to book. So in the first book, she gets herself into trouble solving a mystery, and she gets captured by the criminal. Then in the second book she's struggling with that. She's having nightmares. She's got a little bit of PTSD. So now she has a new problem that she has to wrestle with for herself that has never happened to her before. So in that type of a series, where it's not so episodic, where you do have a longer line, you can pull and build from book to book. You can also build in overarching issues that take two or three books, or four or five books to resolve, whether that's a larger external mystery or a larger character issue that you want to explore. Lots of books have on-again, off-again romances, will they or won't they, that add to the stakes, and that's also a way that you can explore how the character is dealing with relationships. What's preventing her from connecting with that other person? Why is she skittish? What would cause her to trust? What happens when trust is broken again? So I think that there are all different ways to come at it, depending on the type of character you're creating and the type of book that you're writing, and also what type of audience you have for your stories. There are certain expectations depending on genre for certain audiences. So I think having an understanding of what your audience's expectations are and what it is that you're writing is also really important. Jo: Yes, the longer the series goes on, I mean, if your character's already been kidnapped and has PTSD in book two, by book 20, they're pretty beaten up. Erin: She's going to be a mess. Jo: Exactly, and then you have to keep thinking about how many awful ways they can be attacked. It can get pretty tough for our characters. But then, happy people in happy land, as I think James Scott Bell says, is not a story that anyone wants to read. Erin: Exactly. You just have to come up with new ways to torture them. Jo: Exactly. Now, just coming back to the book, you have a great chapter on the art of giving critique, and you also talk about receiving it as well. A lot of writers go to classes or writers' groups and get eviscerated, often by other writers, for whatever reasons. Personally, I don't do group work. I hire an editor, a professional editor. How can we give critique better and receive critique better, and also not even take it from people who we don't value? Erin: Those are great questions, and there's a lot of things to unpack in there. In terms of the way that we give critique, I talk about in the book how I had an epiphany in my daughter's second grade classroom watching their writer's workshop. I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is the way that I've been teaching writing and have been taught, to just read your story or hand your story over and just take whatever feedback comes for you.” It was the exact opposite of what I did in my real professional life. I've been in a critique group for over 25 years, the same group. That's pretty long. That's a long time to share your work with people. What I realised is we ask for the feedback that we want. Most of the time, those of us who are writers, we know where we're struggling and what we're not doing well and what we need help with. So when I turn over a piece of writing to my group, or when I'm working with my students and we're sharing work with one another, I always say, “Identify the areas that you feel like you're doing well, identify the areas where you need help, and make sure you tell the person where you are in your process.” I've been a professional writer for 15, 17 years, and when I'm working in a brand new draft, if I'm giving something to my critique group and I haven't even finished the book, I don't want to lose that momentum on the story I'm working on. So I tell them, “This is brand new. I need some help figuring out this problem, but I also want your encouragement to finish.” And they deliver. They also give me a little extra stuff on the side, which is great, but I'm asking for what I want. I'm not telling them, “I only want happy things. I only want to hear good things.” I'm asking them to be honest, but I really believe that guiding people into giving the feedback that you're looking for is really helpful. I think it's incredibly important. So identifying those strengths and weaknesses is key. I also think giving and receiving critique is a skill that we all have to build. It's not something that comes easily for us, and so practice, and practising with a critique partner that you trust, is really important. In terms of receiving critique, I think the biggest thing we have to do is identify first, are we ready for feedback? Do you actually want feedback from somebody, or do you want them to tell you that you're doing a great job and this book is awesome? Real feedback is not just sunshine and rainbows. So being ready for that, I think, is key. Then understanding—I refer to it in my book as the core of your story—the thing that is so important to you that you would not change, but that everything in your story serves. So whether that's a theme or an idea or the thing that's at the heart of your book, you have to be willing to understand that any feedback that goes to help you strengthen the core is valuable, and then feedback that's taking away from the core of your story, you can disregard. I'm not going to change this sister relationship in the story, or I'm not going to take that out. So I'm going to disregard anything that tells me I need to take out that portion of the story. If that makes sense. Jo: Yes, I think a lot of that makes sense. Then again, we're both experienced writers, and I feel like creative confidence is something that you grow into. Writers who are earlier on in the journey, they might have 20 years of non-fiction writing, and then they're writing their first novel. I think this is really common, where if you've written a lot of non-fiction or different forms of writing and then you try a novel, it's such a different form of writing. Or even if you're trying a different genre. I feel like taste is such a big deal as well. I have a lot of writer friends, and some of their writing and my writing, they're just not the same. I wouldn't want their critique and they wouldn't want mine when it comes down to it. How do we get this creative confidence around taking critique? Erin: I do think it's a skill. I also think that practising advocating for your work is really important. So if a critique goes off the rails, being able to say, “Whoa, this isn't helpful.” Or directing somebody back, “Hey, I want to talk about X, Y, Z. I want to talk about plot and character, not about my dialogue.” I think that that's another skill to build, and I encourage people to actually practise and have some of that language ready when you go into a critique, so that you can say, “Hey, this isn't helpful to me right now.” Or if you're in a group, make sure that the other people in the group, if they see something going off the rails and you get that frozen, deer-in-headlights look, that somebody else can step in and say, “Hey, let's shift gears a little bit.” And you can stop a critique that's not going well. I think the difference, though, is understanding that feedback is part of the process in whatever capacity, whether it's a critique group or an editor or a reader. This is part of what it means to be a creative person who puts work out in the world. So developing this skill and practice is important, because it's coming. Right? And sometimes in ways we can't control. Jo: Yes, there's going to be a review eventually, and you're going to have to take it. That 25-year group, that's so interesting to me. What have you and the other people in that group learned and done in order to keep that together so long? How can we all foster groups like that? Erin: It's pretty remarkable, and I'm so grateful to all of them. We've definitely grown together. I think the biggest piece of it is we all respect one another in our work. We write very different things. Not everybody writes children's books. Some of us write children's and adults. We've had different phases where people have been doing short stories or novels, or they bring an essay. So it's being open and receptive and understanding. This might not be something that I am super familiar with, but I'm going to help you in the best way that I can. Again, having that communication around what it is that we're sharing, being able to say, “This is what I need help with.” It's really helpful to be on the receiving end of that and say, “Oh, okay, I may not understand the topic really well, or I may not read this type of book, but I can definitely look at your dialogue, or I can definitely look at the openings of your chapters and tell you whether or not I feel like I'm being pulled in.” So being able to communicate with one another, respecting one another's work, trusting one another, and all of that takes time. So putting that time in and respecting the work that other people are doing, I think, is really important. Jo: Yes, and it brings up something else in the author community, which is the comparisonitis. Someone else's book has done really well and mine hasn't. Why aren't I as successful as that person? So has that come up at all? Because I imagine in 25 years, some people have done really well with book deals, some people haven't. How has that gone? Erin: Yes, that's a great point. My whole career I've been about creative community, and I really believe a rising tide lifts all boats. So for years I was actually the only person in our group who was traditionally published. We've actually formed an indie press together now that we're indie releasing our members' books, which is another road we can go down. I think it's inevitable, right, to have those feelings of jealousy, or that you're not good enough, and to just recognise that those feelings happen and that's okay, and to bring it back to the work. We're learning together, we're working together, and everybody's running their own race. I'm going to help you as best I can run yours, and you're going to help me run mine, and eventually we're going to get across the finish line. It doesn't matter what order we cross in, whatever that finish line is. So having that kind of generosity, I think, trumps everything. That's what I always go back to when I have those moments of, “Oh, I wish my book had,” or, “Oh, I wish I had done X or gotten Y.” I think about the community that I'm in and how generous people are and what can I share with other people to help us all get a little bit further along, and that usually sets me back on the right path. Jo: I think that's good. I was going to say generosity is a good word to use. So let's come to that indie press then. What made you decide to go that way, and how are you doing that amongst a group like that? I think it's becoming a more common thing, but also the practicalities of publishing and marketing can be quite difficult. Erin: Yes. It was during the pandemic. We were meeting on Zoom, and I may have had maybe one more glass of wine than I should have. Jo: Excellent. We all did in the pandemic, right? Erin: During that time… and I had been listening to you for several years at that point. We were having just a regular critique meeting, and I said, “Hey, we all have these different skills.” One of our critique members is a copywriter, one is a former English teacher, one actually works in publishing in design. We all have these different skills. We're all great critiquers. I said, “Why don't we learn how to indie publish together?” Because it seems really overwhelming. I wanted to release some projects on my own, and I thought, why not do it with a friend instead? So we formed Table for 7 Press. They all went along with it. I don't know. All the wine. Jo: All the wine. Erin: They got really excited. So we had a couple of conversations about how we would do it. Now what happens is we help one another prepare our projects. We are each responsible for creating our own accounts and uploading our books. Last year we actually decided that we were going to create an anthology together, and so we each wrote a short story that takes place in one night at one Vietnamese restaurant. Everybody has a different character at the restaurant doing different things at their table. So we published that as a group, called Tonight's Specials. We used Draft2Digital to do the royalty splitting, and we all promote and we all market it and we all talk about it, and we all have work in the world and we made this thing, which is amazing. It was such a fun experience. Jo: That is lovely. I think that is a nice way to do it, and having the royalty splitting is so good, because that is a pain in the neck, as you know. The amount of money that you'd be paying each other and trying to split is not tons. You're not splitting a million dollars every month. Erin: Exactly. We're lucky if we can each buy a cup of coffee. Jo: Yes, absolutely, and especially after the initial promotional periods. So anything that you've learned in your indie publishing life that surprised you? I mean, even if you were listening to this show, or you knew about it intellectually as somebody who studies a lot, obviously. What practically might have surprised you, or that you think people should know? Erin: It's really fun. Jo: Oh, that's good. Erin: It's so fun. I love having the control. I was surprised at how much I loved doing interior design. I use Vellum, but have played with Draft2Digital. I've played with different formatting software, and that's something that I never would have thought that I would have enjoyed. I'm not a graphic design person. I've just been delighted. I love learning new things, and so there's so much to learn and there's so many options that it's really exciting. As somebody who also has had a traditional career and can continue to have one, it's a really nice balance. I can produce works and share them with the world that I know wouldn't fit in a traditional bubble. So I get to make those choices, and I love the control that it gives me. Jo: Well, that's great. I think the freedom and the creative control and the financial side of it, for me, is still exciting. And starting on a new project, I've just started another book this morning, actually. Erin: Oh, fantastic. Jo: You can't stop us, right? Erin: Right. There's always something new to do. Jo: Yes, there is. On that as well, I did want to ask you about your school visits and workshops. So on your website, because you do middle grade, you do picture books, chapter books, children's publishing and children's marketing is quite a different beast, I think. So tell us about these school visits and workshops, and how do these play a part in your author business? Erin: My school visits are definitely an important component of that. I love being able to go into schools and talk to readers and talk to teachers and librarians about books. They wax and wane for me because I am a full-time professor, and so I have to work around my teaching schedule. So I'm not one of those people who's doing 30 to 50 school visits a year. I'm a little bit more selective. I tend to stay maybe a little bit more regional with them. It's an important element for me, and I love being able to connect with readers, and that's the best thing as a children's book author, is seeing a kid who just falls in love with your book and is so excited to talk to you about it. So it is a significant portion of my business at certain points when I have a new book out, or at certain times of year when I'm maybe a little bit more available around my teaching schedule. Then the workshops that I do tend to be for writer organisations and talking about craft and craft elements, and those I do regularly all year long. I do a lot of them on Zoom or at conferences or on weekends, and so that portion of it is a little bit easier to fit into my schedule. I love being able to share craft elements and talk about craft with writers at any level, because, again, that element of sharing and generosity and creating creative community is really important to me. So I'm always looking for opportunities to do that, and I really, really enjoy it. So talking to readers and talking to writers, it's the best job in the world. Jo: Well, just back on those school visits in particular, how are you actually getting those in the first place? How are you marketing to schools and librarians? Erin: So there's definitely legwork involved. I have presentations that I've refined over the years and practised at local library and school events. I do a lot of outreach to librarians. I join the local state library lists. I live in New England, in Massachusetts, so the Massachusetts School Library Association, the Massachusetts Reading Association, they have conferences every year. So I try to pitch myself to go to the conferences, and then you're in front of people who work at a whole bunch of different schools, and you can get school visits that way. I don't do as much direct marketing out to individual schools anymore, just because typically it's the parent organisations that would bring in authors, through grants and funding, and those parent volunteer leaders change. So I try to always go through the librarians, and then the librarians can take it to their school officials. So working through those conferences and those organisations, they all have Facebook pages, and so being able to connect with them, and then things spread by word of mouth. So I'm able to get visits that way. Then, on nice occasions, my book ends up on state reading lists across the United States, and then that's another opportunity where librarians will see books that show up on those lists and invite authors to come in and speak. So I've been very fortunate to have that happen as well at different times in my career. Then once I go somewhere, it's like anything else. You keep track of who you meet, where you've been, get their email address, and then keep in touch with them and remind them that you're here, and would love to come back to their school, and build those relationships. Jo: It strikes me from everything you've talked about that you have very much had a long-term view of your career and your relationships and the generosity, and that your career is built because of that, as opposed to trying to achieve something at a specific point. It's almost like you've just had that long-term view. Erin: I think it's definitely emerged. I learned and realised very quickly in the traditional sphere that diversification is really important. I'm somebody who's had a bunch of different books published, but I've also been involved in all of the turmoil in the traditional publishing industry. I've had editors leave. I've had imprints close. I've had books go out of print. So, very quickly I learned that I can't put all my eggs in one basket. I'm also fortunate in that I have my skills as a teacher that I can incorporate in my writing life in sharing and talking about craft. So it became evident that being able to do lots of different things in the community was beneficial and important to me. I love being able to talk to new writers who aren't as established. It brings me a level of satisfaction that I did not even expect when I first started this. Being part of the writing community, and learning now about the indie community and being part of that community, I just find it so valuable. I think that that contributes to longevity, is being able to adapt and change and diversify yourself, and give back. Jo: Oh, fantastic. Well, it's a great book, and that is Bad Choices Make Good Stories. So where can people find you and your books online? Erin: My website is the easiest place. It's ErinDionne.com. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Erin. That was great. Erin: Thank you, Joanna. It was so much fun to talk to you.The post Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Character, Critique And Community With Erin Dionne first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you keep writing when midlife brings grief, exhaustion, rage, and a creativity that seems to have dried up? How can you accelerate if midlife brings you more energy? And how can you market your books authentically when your energy and your interests have changed? Jordan Rosenfeld shares what she learned from writing through her own pause. In the intro, how to write short stories [Novel Marketing Podcast]; Bestsellers: Excavating the Tools and Techniques of Successful Novels – Kristen Tate. Plus, Hugh Howey: The AI Bubble Explained; NEO writing software; Will the AI Bubble Destroy our Retirement? By Mr Money Mustache; Future Vision X Prize winner, The Gifted; and my Cathedral Zero trailer; How to Market a Book Fourth Edition survey. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  Jordan Rosenfeld is the author of psychological suspense novels and books on writing craft, as well as an editor and writing coach. Her latest book is Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes What midlife is, and why so many changes seem to arrive at once Disenfranchised grief, empty nest, perimenopause and the losses nobody talks about A fallow period is a germinating period, not a dead one Don't isolate, try something new, and learn to write as play How to market your books in a way that reflects who you are at your core Vulnerability, curation and how much of yourself to share online You can find Jordan at JordanRosenfeld.net. Transcript of the interview with Jordan Rosenfeld Jo: Jordan Rosenfeld is the author of psychological suspense novels and books on writing craft, as well as an editor and writing coach. Her latest book is Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing. So welcome to the show, Jordan. Jordan: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. Jo: Yes, this is an excellent topic. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Jordan: Absolutely. I'm really one of those annoying writers who's been writing all my life since I was a little girl, and it was all I really wanted to be or do. I'm a Gen X-er, so of course we grew up before the internet, and I read for pleasure and escape. So I was really dogged in figuring out how does one go about becoming a writer, because it was the only thing I wanted to do. I remember going to the library and checking out—eventually, later in my 20s—this massive tome, I forget what it was called. Like the Writer's Guide to Publishing, one of those big old things that has all of the editors, agents and stuff. It was really just figuring out how to do it and sending snail mail queries and going to writing conferences. So I think I was just dog on a bone with it, really, since I was young. Like anything, once you get your toe in, it's a little easier to keep publishing. I laugh because the first traditionally published book of mine was actually a book on writing craft before I had published any of my novels. So that felt strange, but I wasn't complaining at the same time. Jo: So when was that, and what has your career looked like so far? Jordan: So I published Make a Scene: How to Craft—oh my gosh, I'm forgetting my own subtitle—Crafting Powerful Scenes in 2005, which means I pitched it in 2003. That was the beginning of my era as a writing craft teacher as well. I was right out of graduate school at that point. Then eventually I published my first novel. When I say my first novel, I just mean the first one that hit the world. It wasn't my first one written, but Forged in Grace. Then I eventually started putting out a writing craft guide every couple of years, just thanks to the wonderful people at Writer's Digest. I just found a niche early on. Sometimes that just happens. I also like to point out that I was pitching books at a time before this whole concept of platform was a big deal. So you could be just any old body without a big following, because we didn't really have social media. I did write for the magazine, the Writer's Digest magazine, which I think gave me a leg up in the book part. So writing craft became my niche, and then I always have really found success with small press for my novels. So my current publisher is called Sibylline Press, and they are a publisher of women 50 and over, actually. That's their whole thing. Jo: Oh, okay. That's interesting. Well, we're going to come back to the book in a minute, but just in terms of that journey, it's quite interesting. You mentioned platform there, that changed, and Writer's Digest publishing themselves got into trouble, didn't they? They got bought by a different publisher. Jordan: Yep. Jo: So you've been through some changes. Well, we're going to be talking about change in general, but changes in the industry have also happened. So how have you navigated all that change over time? Obviously a lot of listeners to this show are independent authors as well, so thoughts on how things have changed in the industry. Jordan: Well, what's interesting is Writer's Digest actually went bankrupt. They got bought by another company who just mismanaged it, called F+W Media, and they went bankrupt. So a lot of us authors were terrified that all of our books were going to just revert. I mean, it was fine to have the rights back, but we didn't want to republish ourselves at that time. So they did end up getting bought by Penguin Random House, which means our books are still alive in that traditional way. So Forged in Grace, my first novel, I was in the process of querying agents, and then a friend of mine and I decided to start this thing. This was 2012, '13, this independent publishing collective. So we were going to act like a publisher but publish books. Basically it was people doing work trade. We had someone who did cover design and someone who could do layout and marketing and all these things, and we came together. So I did publish my novel that way, and actually it was the time when Amazon was still quite favourable to indie authors. You could really make a decent amount of money. Then my partner and I just… It didn't last. There were a lot of different reasons why we didn't, and it has nothing to do with the idea, which was totally working. I have really seen how the capitalist machine seems to continually come in and eat away at whatever profits there are for independent authors. I've seen authors have to become marketers. We went from being people who could write, and then someone else would handle that, to having all of us have to do it ourselves, and now content creators. So I think a lot of us feel really exhausted, which actually is not unrelated to the book of mine that's coming out. So I worry. Of course, we haven't even talked about AI, if we even want to, but I do worry a little bit about the future of publishing, but I'm not a pessimist in the sense that I don't think it's going away. Jo: Oh, no, absolutely, I agree. Changes, I think, are what this is all about. Well, let's get into the book then. Let's start with a definition. So what are you defining as midlife, and why is this such a change for many people? Jordan: It's a very buzzword, midlife. So I will say it's a mental state as much as an age, because a lot of people start calling themselves or saying they're in midlife in their 30s, right? So it's not a hard age, even though you might say it's in your 40s or 50s. For me, it's really the point at which I find people start to realise that they have less time ahead of them than behind. You might find yourself maybe a little past what I'm calling the striving stage of life, where you're focused on building career and identity and family, and all of that. It also seems to coincide for people with multiple challenges at once. So maybe you're dealing with health issues or perimenopause or aging, and maybe you're helping your parents or your fledging teenage children, if you have children. So there's a lot going on for people, it seems, at this stage of life, and I've interviewed 28 people for my book who range in age from 37 to 81. So there is definitely a wide range of age. Jo: Yes, I think that's interesting. I almost wonder whether it is a realisation of changes. I mean, again, we'll just say menopause because I feel like for me, that's when it really kicked in, was there was a health hormonal shift, and I started feeling very different. I started questioning a lot of things, and so much came up for me that I almost felt was out of my control. I think that was the biggest thing that happened for me, was realising, “This is out of my control,” and I don't particularly like that. It felt like there was a lot of grief at midlife, and you mentioned there parents. Obviously some people's parents are dying, children are leaving. Is grief a big part of this, do you think? Jordan: Absolutely, and I like what you said about it often is a stage where people feel out of control of things, their bodies, their life circumstances. There's also a little bit of a, did I do everything I wanted? What will the next X years of my life look like, if they can get there? Grief is a huge part of the transition, and I think grief is interesting. Right now, I'm in empty nest. I just fledged my son a month ago, and it did hit me harder than I thought it would, even preparing. So there's these kinds of grief we don't really give cultural credence to. You can call them disenfranchised grief, where nobody died, and in fact, the things happening could be conceived as positive if you let them. But a child moving out of the house and you having to completely rearrange your identity, there's a grief involved in that. Or not seeing that child that you love so much. Aging, dealing with aging parents in a healthcare system that doesn't offer supports, while you're trying to be a creative person. Or the perimenopause thing is huge for a lot of people, because a lot of people were not told anything about this transition, and it can last 10 to 15 years for many people, and radically change your mind, your mental energy, your capacity, your executive functioning. It's huge. So I definitely started writing this when that was happening to me, the perimenopause transition, but I also like it. As a creative person, I like the idea of a pause for anyone being a number of things that can happen in midlife. Jo: Yes, and I think that's really important because, as women, that's one thing, but men go through different things, and people who identify in different ways go through different things. So we're not saying that it has to be specifically around menopause at midlife. I think there are lots of different ways that this can show up, and of course, this is a show for writers. You're writing the book for writers. So in talking about creativity, let's talk first about if people find that their creativity has just dried up, that it's almost died. How can we learn to accept a fallow time, or perhaps accept and embrace a time of not plenty? Jordan: That's a great question. First of all, I really looked into the idea of what fallow means, and you realise that a fallow period is not a dead period, it's a germinating period. It's necessary, right, for crops to come back. So I really love this metaphor of not seeing it as dead or gone, but as germinating. I took a lot of relief and inspiration from this, it only exists as an audiobook, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. She's the one who wrote Women Who Run With the Wolves, but she wrote a book called The Creative Fire, and she describes creativity as an infinite creative source that is never gone, but what happens is our access to it gets blocked. So when I conceive of a fallow period as something in me is blocking access to my creativity, not that the creativity is gone, that was the first key for me. I also recommend that people work backwards and ask themselves, what life experiences, frustrations, disappointments, what burdens have you been dealing with? There's usually a path back to what is preventing you from having access. And I really find the first thing is you need to apply gentleness and patience with yourself, and second, honestly, it sounds silly, but really reframing this idea that your creativity is not gone. It's not dead. It's germinating. My therapist gave me the term rooting. She's like, “Oh, you're rooting,” like you're putting down roots, but you don't know what, if anything, is going to flower or bloom. I was like, “Oh, I'm rooting. I'm not dead.” So I think it's a lot of reframing what we can do about it, rather than just conceive it. Jo: Yes, I remember listening to that audiobook. I remember her voice saying la chispa. Do you remember? La chispa. I don't know if that means fire, but I remember it. I've listened to that, and you brought it up again. La chispa, yes. I feel like that Women Who Run With the Wolves is just such an excellent book that we come back to at different points in our lives. On other things, I feel like sometimes—you mentioned the word exhausted earlier—sometimes people are just exhausted. You are just tired. You're fatigued, and perhaps you just need a break. It doesn't need to be anything more than that, right? You can just say, “I've got a lot going on. Maybe I just need to not do anything.” Jordan: Absolutely. Actually, I find a lot of creative people are very driven in different ways, not necessarily ambition-wise, but driven to create or driven to express themselves. So sometimes that drive energy persists even when you don't have the energy for it. So then we go into all this mental stuff about, “Well, something must be bad and wrong and broken,” rather than, “Oh, maybe I do need to be resting or conserving energy for myself right now.” I think really it's having that confidence or trust that it's going to come back that is hard for a lot of us at midlife. We really think it's gone. I do think that this is a stage of life where really getting support is necessary, whatever that looks like. I understand that things like therapy are not always accessible to everyone for cost reasons or time, so maybe it's your best friend or someone you see at the coffee shop or the gym or partner, anything. Or it's two people who are both feeling creatively stuck and frustrated who say, “We're just going to get together once a week and see what happens,” talk, laugh, that kind of thing. I just want to add that I really feel that if we're relying on our usual, typical, or former ways of doing things at midlife, they often fail us. It often requires a shift. Jo: Yes, I also think that our mentors in books—I mean, you've mentioned there the Clarissa one, and of course your own book. I found when I needed to withdraw, I was reading a lot of books on the power of the older woman. Reclaiming the crone. I mean, I love this reclaiming language. The hag. There's these words that we could reclaim around becoming older, and the cultures that respect elders, and what does it mean to move into that stage. I must have read 20 or 30 books in a period of a year of really trying to get to grips with things. I feel like we can find therapy in these book mentors, as I like to call them. Jordan: Yes. Absolutely. I don't know where I would be if I hadn't had book mentors most of my life. In fact, in a later chapter in the book, I quote Ursula K. Le Guin, who was obviously a science fiction writer, but notorious for really reclaiming older age. She has a whole essay on the crone, and really the beauty of that stage of life, which is what I'm now aspiring to, because you've gone through the hardship of midlife, but you come through with more wisdom, more certainty. Maybe just a little bit more, “Oh, yes, I've been through these ups and downs, and I know I can come out the other side.” Jo: So I guess on the one hand it can be, at that time, a fallow, it can be that time of exhaustion. As we say, this isn't just a moment in time. This can go on for years. Sometimes it can be a quickening. There can be a desire to accelerate even, and also sometimes we might need some tough love. I think that might also help. So what are your recommendations for those who feel the need to shift up a gear, or who want to move forward? Jordan: Yes. I mean, I think one thing is not trying to do it all yourself. Seek out other people who you can connect with. For me, what got me out of my fallow period was I joined someone. We do a silent write and then we talk shop afterwards. It was a fellow writer. So I logged on at 8:00 in the morning and we all just got together and wrote, and then we talked. There was something about not isolating, I think, is key. So not isolating. Then I'm really just a big fan of trying something new. It's that whole metaphor, right? If you're doing the same thing, expecting different results. So if something has changed for us at midlife and we don't feel the same and we can't access our creativity in the same way, then we have to do something different. Another thing that I had to let go of was every time I sit down to write, it has to be purposeful. It's going to become a book. It's like, can you just play? What does it look like to write as play? That was a really new concept to me. Obviously I have joy in the writing process, but I was attaching it to a product. So that's honestly one of my biggest pieces of advice drawn from my experience and others, is try something new. Be a little bit brave. Maybe it's not brave, but don't be afraid that everything is going to lead to something that'll be hard, that'll be scary. Let's face it, nobody's going to do it for us. There's always that reminder. If you just sit around feeling bad and wonder when it's going to stop, it may not stop on its own unless we try something new. Jo: Yes, reframing things. I think also as creative people, as writers, we do feel better if we are creating and writing. It may be that writing isn't the thing you need right now. It may be that you want to get into, I don't know, painting. I've been doing different things, like I did some stone carving, and I'm doing really random things, and not in a serious way. So as you say— Maybe writing for us is too serious, and so we need to just change it up a bit. Jordan: I had a lot of my interview subjects do that. They are like, “Well, when I can't write, I paint. When I can't paint, I knit.” I was really impressed at how many people will just keep that creative energy going in another form. I found that very inspiring, because while I don't consider myself deeply creative in any other medium, it did make me think, what else could I do that feels creative? For some people that's cooking food or, I don't know, organising closets. I really don't know, but there are ways to transmute that energy. Jo: Yes, and I mean, you mentioned there about trying something new in our writing as well, and I did find that my interest shifted, and I did a lot of long distance walking and I wrote a pilgrimage memoir, which is quite out of character. Then I also did a book on writing the shadow, that darker side of psychology. This did not fit with what people expected from me at all. I feel like it is scary, but we are also making money out of this, and when things don't fit with what people expect of us, it can change things in terms of our business. So how do we deal with that? How do we lean into change but also bring our audience along? Or I guess just lose some of them. Jordan: Well, it's interesting because I think that this relates to marketing ourselves, but I really think that authenticity is where it's at. If you can present yourself as real, authentic, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm interested in, that is very appealing to people, right? More than, well, this is the niche I've been in my whole career so I can't break free from it. I love when a writer I've been following for years does something different, suddenly experiments and writes a new book. I actually find that very exciting as a reader. So to me that's a lot of external pressures that say you have to stay, if you're known for being a crime writer you have to stay a crime writer. That's very much the publishing industry, the culture. That's not true to how people are in real life. There's a writer that I mention in the book, she's Margaret Mead's daughter. Of course, this is midlife, names go out of my head. It'll come back to me before this is over. She talks about how in her interviews with people—so she researches people in midlife and beyond—most people's real careers and creative lives are not a straight line. They don't follow the neat plot, the hero's journey, right? They actually are very meandering, particularly women's. Women's tend to be more meandering, probably because, yes, they interrupt their careers to have children. They caregive, all of these things. So I am really a big fan of let that meandering happen. Be open to that rather than, it has to be this way and only this way, because we don't grow. That's not a growing edge, right? If we just stay doing what we always did. Jo: Yes, and as you say, some people will come along with you. Also, obviously we're a very similar age, and you tend to attract the people who are similar to you, and who are either going through similar things or recognise themselves in you. So I do agree with you. It is about being authentic. The problems only come when you try to hide that change, perhaps. I mean, I laugh at, sometimes you see author photos that were taken 30 years ago. You're like, “I've met you. You just don't look like that anymore.” Jordan: You don't look like that. I know. I'm a big fan of truth in advertising in that regard, too. Oh, and the author, it's Mary Catherine Bateson, so she was anthropologist Margaret Mead's daughter. Jo: Well, on that, let's just mention this, because I sent you written questions for this interview. Part of the reason I do that, one, obviously, I'm respecting the person I'm interviewing, and I want to show you how the interview's going to go, and I never mean to catch people out. But also, as a woman in midlife, I forget things all the time. If we're having a conversation and I forget where we've gone—I take notes and everything, but I need to write things down more. If I am having an interview myself, I write down notes, even about my own books. So this is something that's changed. I used to be able to remember things a lot better. So this is something that I've had to actively do, and presumably you have, too, in order to continue to be the professional we've always been. It doesn't mean we're not allowed to forget things, but it's almost like I am shifting my practices in order to help my midlife self. Jordan: Absolutely. That's a really great way to put it. I talk about it in the book as adapting. We adapt ourselves. I use an example, one of my students who came to take my classes in his late 80s or early 90s, I kid you not, who was still treating himself as a student of writing. During the time he was in my class, he actually ended up having a stroke and had to relearn to speak in his 90s, and did, and write. So he was constantly adapting new techniques to be able to come back to his creative self, and he really inspired me. That's a very extreme example, but I do the same thing. My desk is littered with Post-it Notes. My phone, I put anything you can possibly imagine as a reminder into my phone, with an alert. I've also accepted output has changed. So this idea of I used to be able to be so prolific, I don't expect that of myself anymore. If I sit down to write, I meet myself where I am, and if I get some words out, great, I wrote. It's a lot of that gentleness, just appreciating that I am different rather than trying to force my old modes upon myself, which doesn't work anyway. So I can try, but it will fail. Then I'd be frustrated with myself, which was part of my midlife transition, was trying to do everything the same way, failing, being mad at myself, that whole journey. So I'm grateful to have moved beyond that and recognised that I have to move slower. I am less productive. I am narrowing the scope of my creative life, and that's not a bad thing. Jo: Yes, and that's not a bad thing. That's the important statement there at the end. It's funny that I feel the need to emphasise that, because why do I have to emphasise that? Because we're just in this culture of obviously more must be better. So that's the thing. I guess I've also felt a similar way in that I have a much better ability to say, “I don't want to do that, so I won't do that.” Or, I asked you if we could reschedule this interview because my energy just wasn't there, and I know that I can't do an interview like this without some energy, and that's the way to serve the audience, and you were very graceful and said, “Of course.” So I think this, “I don't want to do this, so I'm not going to,” rather than pushing into it. But then, of course, we have to sell books. We have to do marketing. So how do we balance these things? Jordan: That is the frustration. Well, first of all, you need to honour that feeling. I hate that it sounds cliché, but we have to honour that part of us that says, “I don't have the energy to do that anymore, or in this way,” because if you ignore that, you're going to end up sick or injured or frustrated or something. So the way that I have been doing it… It's just a reality of marketing yourself as a writer that you must have a presence somewhere online, right? And you must put something out there to let people know where to find you. Unfortunately, there's too much noise, too many writers, too much competing for people's attention. So I realised the only way I can do it is when it reflects who I am at my core. Which means if I'm going to make videos, which I have been doing lately, they're going to be goofy like me, right? I can't do a serious, polished video. It's not in my nature. If I am going to have to keep a Substack blog, which I do, and write content, it's going to have to be about issues that are of interest to me at this time in my life. I also find the more that I can interweave my marketing with promoting other writers in some way, that feels really honest. So interviews, like you do, I do them on my Substack. That feels really good to me because then it's not all about me, right? So I think that's really the key, is finding this fit, and I think that in a way that's actually what's made a lot of content creators somewhat, let's say, famous, is because they have found something that works for them. It's comedy, it's serious, whatever it is, it reflects them and it feels true to people, whether or not it is is another story. So for me it's not so much truth, but afterwards, do I feel sick inside, or do I feel like, no, I was pretty much myself? Then I can do it, and then it's actually fun. I also have to say, I've never been very tech handy or gifted, and I was like, “I'm goint to learn Canva. I'm going to learn edits on reels.” I'm just not going to be that person who says, “I'm too old to learn,” or, “I've done it this way for so long, I can't do it another way.” That's actually been really fun and freeing. I didn't expect that. Jo: Well, yes, you have to learn something new occasionally. I mean, even this podcast, which I've been doing since 2009, how I did it technically back then and how I do it technically now is completely different because the tools have changed. It's still the same RSS feed, amazingly, even though people don't even talk about those anymore. So, yes, we do have to learn some things, but we don't have to learn everything, I guess. We don't have to do everything. You talk there about being yourself and authentic, and you have a chapter in the book about unmasking the self and this vulnerability, which can lead to creative breakthroughs, but this can also be really difficult. Certainly the hardest bit of the time I was going through the early perimenopause and the depressive end of things, before I found HRT, which I know doesn't work for everyone, but worked for me. I didn't talk about it then, and it took a couple of years before I was able to talk about these things. So how can we embrace vulnerability but still protect ourselves from the world when we need protecting? Jordan: It's interesting, because I've thought a lot about this. I think that we misconstrue vulnerability as only baring our soul, or baring our soft parts, where we're open to judgement and attack. The more I think about it, I actually think that authenticity can be vulnerable, and also being more direct. Just being like, “This is what I will allow. This is what I won't allow. This is who I am. This is who I'm not,” is a form of vulnerability. That might sound strange, but it's a way of saying, “This is what I'm allowing you to see of myself.” It's an honesty, I think. I find with online stuff, a lot of people are getting to the realisation they have to protect, I think, more from a privacy standpoint. Not tell too much that leaves you open to attack, or leaves you open to having somebody actually come in and steal information from you. So the way that I've conceived of it for myself now is vulnerability is to be honest and direct, but that doesn't mean giving everything away. I guess this word curation rolls around right now. I don't think curating is a bad thing. It's like, I'm going to tell you as much as I feel comfortable telling you. In this book, I call it partially like a memoir, because I reveal personal things about myself, but I'm revealing them very carefully, let's put it that way. I'm also trying to protect other people's stories. My family, if I'm talking about them, I'm being very careful about how I talk about them. I'm also like, I have to say something about me. I can't talk about this experience but not share my own process, right? So it is a line we walk. I have a couple of interview subjects who found for them, the way they are vulnerable is to transform their personal truth into fiction. So they tell real truths, but they fictionalise it, because that way the truth is still coming through, but they don't have to do that whole soft belly open to the masses, if that makes sense. Jo: Yes. I think for me, it was just time. When I read some of what I wrote then, and even what I put into my pilgrimage memoir, for example, I'm not that person anymore. There was a period of time when that happened, and I read it and I'm like, “Goodness me,” but the distance helps. You can share what happened later on in a way that almost feels like fiction, even though it happened. Jordan: I like that. I like the fact, too, so in memoir there's this concept of two voices. There's that voice of the moment, the lived experience, and then the voice of greater experience that comes later, the meaning maker. So there's a nice tension that can exist when you look back at who you were, or writing that came from a different time, and you bring the version of you today. I find I have a lot of compassion for my former self. I can see how hard I was working, or how hard I was trying to impress someone, or any of those things. I think if you can be compassionate towards your older self, meaning even a month ago, then that can come through, too. It's interesting. Jo: Yes, and we've been all gentleness and kindness and lovely, but let's get into anger, because anger and rage is also part of grief as well. I was thinking about this, and I have a little mantra that I use on difficult days, which is, “Don't burn it all down.” Literally sometimes I just say to myself, “Don't burn it all down.” That might be a day I don't do an interview, or that might be a day I don't go anywhere near the internet, and I don't go anywhere near social media. I just try and get away, go for a walk or something. This is difficult, because sometimes you should burn it all down, and I do struggle with this, too. When do we know that radical change is needed? And when should we go slow and not kill it all off? Jordan: That's a good question. It's going to be individual, right? But what your question made me think about is that the people I've spoken to find that at this stage of life, I describe it as a heightened sense of either more or less. Either there's a lack they can no longer sit on and it's causing frustration and anger, or there's a too muchness, like burnout or overwhelming responsibilities. So couple that with hormonal changes for a lot of people, and it's a fire keg. I myself have gone through it. I will say in the early stages, when that kicks in on a hormonal level, a lot of people find that it almost has to take you by surprise, I think. You almost discover you're going through it by having a rage reaction. That's my experience. Once you do, then it becomes our responsibility to not spew anger at everyone. So it is about finding ways to channel it that are healthy. Whether that's, “All right, I feel it coming on. I'm taking a walk. I'm going into nature where I can be my full self, or I can let it simmer down.” I also find I'm more honest and more direct as a result of it, so I don't check all of it. But it's a good question, because I feel it too, and there have been times it literally felt like somebody flipped a switch in my back, and rage emerged, or frustration, whatever the feeling is. So I think it's really paying attention to yourself. I hate the word triggers, but let's just use it here to understand what's triggering it. You've got this baseline, perhaps changed hormonally. You may be going through a lot at midlife. What in the moment triggers that urge? And see if you can either avoid it, or can you remove yourself from it somehow. I'm just going to be honest, people in midlife are going to lash out, and sometimes the best thing other people can do is get out of the way. I am a big fan of saying it is our responsibility to not wield it inappropriately, I should say, but acknowledge that it's real. Jo: Yes, I mean, maybe sometimes it is a good feeling. There's righteous anger for things that we should be angry about in the world. It's just sometimes it doesn't come up that way. Sometimes it might not be so much, and I think for me, it's when do things come up over and over again? And are there ways that it could be changed? This is not something that I get angry about, but this podcast, for example, regular listeners will know that for a long time, for, what, 15 years or something, it was on a Monday, and I got to this point where I thought, “I need to kill this podcast because I'm working every weekend,” because I often was, I need to record the introduction. So my attitude was, “I just need to burn it all down, kill the podcast after all these years.” Then I took some time out to think about it and moved it to a Wednesday. Jordan: Yes. Jo: And it was like, “I'm sorry, how did I not figure this out ages ago, that all I needed to do was move it?” And so if you do feel, people listening, if you feel like, “Oh, I just have to destroy this whole thing because I need…” Whatever it is that you need, sometimes there is another answer. It might feel obvious later on, but perhaps you just couldn't see it at the time. Jordan: Absolutely, and I'm trying to think how to put this, but there's a version of this process where we go through this change in our emotions that is a little bit out of our control, and we have to just go, “Wow, I'm changing, and in the process of that change I might behave in ways I don't prefer to continue behaving,” right? It might happen, and then there's a reaction. I think we really just have to be aware and patient, and then learn to do things differently, like you're saying. We have to change in relationship to this change. We can't try to keep being the old version of ourselves who was nice and agreeable and didn't ever get angry. I know so many women, and also non-binary and gender fluid folks, who are just like, “What? Who am I? Where did this come from?” You're like, “My operating system is actually different now,” which is fascinating. Jo: It really is fascinating. Well, as we come towards the end, let's also reframe this whole narrative. I feel like we talked a bit about this, about reclaiming the crone and all of this, but how can we make this next phase incredible? I'm 51. I think we're a similar age. I'm fully intending to march into at least my 90s. So we've got many years ahead of us. It is not all downhill from here. I lift weights, I do a lot of stuff, and I feel like this should be an upswing in a different way. What can we put in place so this positive aspect becomes true? Jordan: Well, I think the first thing is we need to not see it as midlife crisis. I hate the word crisis because it suggests something negative, and I like to think of it as a midlife transition. It's really, I think, only crisis in that, first of all, we scare ourselves, but when we don't get the support, or we don't heed the call that our psyche is asking of us, or we buy other people's attitudes about what midlife should be. I am a big fan of this great book by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot called Third Chapters or Into the Third Chapter, and she writes about people who decide—and I think this is part of it, it's intentional. You have to decide, this third chapter of my life is going to be something wonderful, and you decide, what is the thing I want to do? What am I going to focus on? So I think, first of all, just making that mindset shift is really important, and it's all the things we've been talking about. It's trying something new. It's figuring out what makes you thrive and feel excited at this time of life. It's acknowledging and honouring that you feel different, and mourning what you've lost, but also looking at what you may be gaining going forward. So I think just so much of it is about attitude. If you decide that you're in crisis and that it's all misery, it's harder to make those steps forward. If you see yourself as germinating something new—and allow yourself to be surprised—and the only way to do that, in my opinion, is to try something new, to do things a little differently, and embrace all the wisdom you're about to gain. Jo: Yes, and all the other people who are on that journey with you. I think your friendships shift as well. I was walking in Portugal last week and met a group of older women, and it was just such a laugh. It was just really fun. Just recognising the different parts of life, and that the kind of laugh I would have had with women in my 30s would have been a very different kind of laughter. Jordan: I love that. I love it. Keep company with people you want to be more of, or more like. I think that's really important, too. Jo: Great. So where can people find you and your books online? Jordan: Anywhere books are sold, actually, but you can go to my website, JordanRosenfeld.net. I like to promote, if you're going to online shop for books, I like bookshop.org, or go to your local indie bookstore. Or you can buy many of my books directly from SibyllinePress.com. All of my Writer's Digest books are available through anywhere. I also like to draw people to my Substack, which is called Writing in the Pause, and that's JordanWriteLife.substack.com. Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jordan. That was great. Jordan: Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was fun. The post Writing And Creativity In Midlife With Jordan Rosenfeld first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you teach yourself anything, even when it challenges the way you see the world? And how can you organise what you learn so it turns into books your readers will find? J. Daniel Sawyer shares his self-education toolkit after decades as a largely self-taught author. In the intro, Spotify for Authors has expanded AI-assisted creation of audiobooks [Spotify]; Who is Narrating the Future? [Publishing Perspectives; 9 ways AI will disrupt authors and publishing from 2019]; Author Voice, Creativity, and Building a Career as an Intuitive Author-Entrepreneur [How Women Write]; A fallow season [Systems and Soul]; How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories – Joanna Penn. Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn  J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book is Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.  Show Notes What is an autodidact, and why school doesn't teach you how to learn How to triage information in a world of way too much How to recognise fear in your body and turn it into excitement for learning Sandboxing dangerous ideas so you can learn without threatening your worldview How to organise research and check quotes when writing nonfiction Why you should never publish a book dead You can find Dan at JDSawyer.net, and The Autodidact's Bible is out now on Kickstarter. Transcript of the interview with J. Daniel Sawyer Jo: J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book is Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible. So welcome back to the show, Dan. Dan: Hello, Joanna. It's great to be back. Jo: Yes, indeed. You were only on the show a few months ago, which is rare I have somebody twice in the same year, so that is quite exciting. We talked about voice mastery last time, very different to the topic of today. But because we did talk a bit more about your background last time, we're going to jump straight into the book. So what is an autodidact, and why write a book on it? Dan: Well, an autodidact is someone who teaches themselves things rather than taking a course. It's not incompatible with being taught by others, of course, but there's a set of skills for being able to pick up new information, new disciplines, new hobbies, whatnot, that's really useful to have. I wrote the book because I was mentoring a friend's kid through high school. They weren't teaching her anything, and she was having a hell of a time figuring out how to get an education in a school that was just not interested in providing one. The process of the conversations over the course of a year forced me to surface all of the tools that I had developed, starting as a child, that allow me to pick up all of those disciplines you were talking about before, plus blacksmithing and academics and other stuff like that. While I have had access to a lot of amazing teachers in my life, I'm largely self-taught, and have become the world expert on a couple of topics as a result. I realised that the tools that you need to teach yourself and the tools that you get in school no longer overlap very much, at least in the US. The old style of classical education, and then the middling style of early school education, both gave you those tools so that when you left school, you were able to continue through the world growing. Nobody does that anymore, so I realised I needed to write a book about all this stuff while it was fresh in my mind, so I did. Jo: I love that. I don't know if it always was like that for some people, too. We all know now more about neurodivergence. Back in the day, when you and I went to school, that wasn't really talked about. It was like if you couldn't learn stuff in the way that it was thrust at you, then you were just dumb, maybe. Dan: Well, what you and I got in school was the very late end of the German model. The German model of education is what arose in the industrial era, and its job is to create good, obedient workers, not necessarily to create independent citizens who can think for themselves and who can move through a world that's changing and learn things. That kind of education came from an older tradition, but it wasn't well suited to pulling people out of the hinterlands and putting them in the factories in a way that they could understand what they were supposed to be doing. So the Germans developed a regimented system that was built around memorisation exclusively, rather than processing. Memorisation and repetition. Whereas a more classical approach would have you do memorisation as part of repetition, processing, evaluation, and creativity. So when you go to school, you get some of the toolkit you need, but not all of it. Jo: Yes, and then I think some people were just so bashed over the head with stuff that they didn't enjoy the process of learning, and maybe just moved away from it now. I want to come back on something you said there, that it didn't enable the independence, the thinking for yourself. We're living in this really weird time now where we're almost in a splintered world where you can find information on anything you want, but a lot of people are finding information, say, on TikTok or in AI-generated books with no rigorous fact-checking. So how can you think for yourself in a world where there's almost way too much now? Dan: Well, one of the most foundational skills of thinking is information triage. The world has always been full of unreliable information, if for no other reason than the state of the art in any given field at any given time is guaranteed to be about 80% wrong. So even if you're being very careful about only hewing to the most accepted body of facts, facts change over time, partly as we learn more and partly as the world changes underneath us. Thinking is different than knowing. Thinking is the ability to evaluate the information you're coming into contact with and figure out what's likely to be useful, and then to check yourself based on what you are more inclined to believe because of the way that you're made up emotionally. It's being able to curb your impulses with an error-checking layer so that you don't get sucked down into a very nasty rabbit hole, which everybody's prone to on one front or another. So that explains the how and why, but the what is things like knowing your basic logic, knowing the informal logical fallacies that everybody's prone to, things like the bandwagon fallacy. We're partly herd animals. We tend to want to join a group for protection and identity. So if we're in a group that believes a certain thing, we're likely to believe it out of fashion, which is great for group solidarity. It's not so great for actually knowing if what you think you know is correct. I've got a whole section of the book devoted to the top 30 or 40 most common informal reasoning fallacies. Knowing how to do basic critical reasoning is one of the things you have to do if you're going to be learning in a way that's useful to you. Then of course, there's another reasoning kit, which is the non-rational reasoning kit, which I also talk about. That's something that you and I as fiction authors use all the time. Jo: Explain more about that [non-rational reasoning kit] then, because people might not know what that is. Dan: All right. So rational reasoning involves logic. If X is true and Y is true, then Z must also be true. That's basic deduction. It basically lets you figure out what's implicit in the body of knowledge you already know. Then subsidiary to that is induction, which is, if X is true and Y is true, what might also be true that could explain X and Y? That's the scientific method. It's less reliable than deduction, but it actually grows your knowledge rather than just revealing it. Non-rational reasoning is things like reasoning through analogy, reasoning through metaphor, reasoning through intuition. These are all reasoning modes that allow you to bring something foreign into your understanding, or to deepen your understanding of something you're already familiar with, in a way that incorporates not just logical propositions, but also emotional truth and relational truth and things like that. Frequently it can generate things you can then subject to logical evaluation and pull new information about the world out of. A really good example of where this happens in science is in visionary experiences. The periodic table, for example, came out of someone's dream. Now, the fact he dreamed it doesn't mean it's true, but what happened while he was dreaming is he had a non-rational reasoning chain that brought him this vision, which he then brought out into the real world and started doing experiments on to see if it would work, and it did. Jo: In that case, yes, I can picture the periodic table, and I often see images of things that help me organise information. So that to me makes sense in terms of somebody who had certain amounts of knowledge, who had some kind of picture in their brain and then was able to prove that. I wanted to circle back. You were talking about critical things, rational things. You mentioned logic, and you did briefly mention emotion and intuition. Coming back to where we are at this point in history, so much emotion is being triggered through the media, whether that's social media or traditional media or whatever, that all of those logical, reasoned things can be almost triaged immediately by a big emotional response to something. So how can we understand that that emotional response perhaps has to be part of the triage? Dan: Well, simply by stating it outright. What you just said is exactly correct. I've got a model in the book where I talk about the difference between feelings and emotions. Feelings, in this model, are your interpretive layer. That's, I feel angry or sad or excited or depressed or whatnot. Those are your feelings. The emotions are the base physiological states that those feelings are laying over. So elevated heart rate, increased skin conductance, things like that are associated with any excitable state, like anger, sexual arousal, anticipation, fear, that kind of thing. Then depressed heart rate and whatnot, those are associated with depression, relaxation, and a whole bunch of other things. Learning to recognise the base physiological layer within yourself that's being stimulated allows you a certain amount of freedom about interpreting that base physiological state. That can help you separate your reaction to your own physiological state from your rational evaluation of what's going on around you. One of the things that our world runs on right now is fear, and there's reasons for this. If you read Edward Bernays' Propaganda, he lays it all out. Fear shifts your mind into a survival mode. You're less likely to take time to think through things. You're more likely to be easily steered because, as far as your physiology knows, there's an active threat to you, and you've got to take care of that. You've got to get away from it. If you stimulate fear in somebody, you can direct who they hate, who they love, who they trust. Very, very useful for anyone who wants to build a cult or sell a product or get elected. If you learn to recognise in yourself that the physiological state associated with fear is the same one associated with excitement over something new, then you can train yourself, to a certain extent, and it's a learned skill, to do an end run around the fear part and concentrate on the excitement. Then you can deal with whatever it is that's stimulating you in the way that you would a new piece of information, a new bit of learning, a new adventure. Instead of fear, which closes you down, adventure opens you up, and that's a much better state to engage in learning and exploration than fear is. Jo: When you said, “That opens you up,” this is exactly what I look for, what is expansive for me. I often reflect on this. When do I feel expansive, and when do I feel like I'm being reduced? When do I feel like I'm hunkered down? When I'm working with AI tools, I feel expansive, I feel more creative, I feel excited. I feel all these things where I just see so many possibilities, and the horizon is off out there in the distance. Yet I know other people, some people listening, will feel that that crushes them, that even mentioning it just makes them reduce into themselves and shrink because of fear, I guess. I also think that a lot of people are feeling those things because they haven't learnt enough perhaps. They are just responding to emotions. So how can we change those things so we're more open to learning? Dan: Well, one of the things you run into with creative types is we've all got something weird in our background that makes us do this. We're not just inclined to be creative, because you can meet welders and electricians who are very creative people. They just apply their creativity in a limited domain. People who go into the arts tend to be either people who grew up in incredibly open conditions, or people who grew up in incredibly closed conditions and had to fight against them. People who grow up in closed conditions and fight against them tend to be a little better at sticking around for the long haul of an arts career, which can be punishing financially and emotionally. One of the reasons they can stick around is that they had a lot of practice in sticking around through horrible situations when they were younger. So they're going to have a negative bias when they come up against things that they don't understand. If you have a negative bias with something you don't understand and it turns out to be wrong, you're not going to lose very much. But if you have a negative bias when you come up against something you understand and it turns out to be right, you're going to survive that thing. Whereas a more open person might just walk into the jaws of the shark, right? To change that and make your experience better, and give you access to all the advantages that the person who's got a more open temperament has, you've got to find a way to make it safe to experiment with the dangerous thing. For every dangerous thing, and probably for everyone who's encountering it, it's going to be a little bit different. With AI, people are worried about the market eroding to the point where nobody cares about human creativity anymore. In fact, my first publishable short story, which is called We Create Worlds, was actually about a novelist trying to outwrite the AI novels. It's become weird. Jo: What year did you write that in? Dan: That was in 1999. Jo: Awesome. Dan: It's still a great short story. I did do it in podcast form, which you can find on my website at jdsawyer.net, and it's also in ebook on Amazon, and it's part of the Sculpting God short story collection. But the fear is that humanity gets crowded out of the market in the face of the relentless onslaught of the machines. It's not a ridiculous fear, especially if you look at the history of artisanship. Everybody and their brother used to have an artisanal business, and now we've got machines that weave socks and make just about everything in our world. So people like me, who spend half my day every day in a blacksmith's forge making hooks that you could just make by machines way cheaper, are kinda crazy. But there's a market for that. Humans like things that were touched by other humans, as long as they can afford them or justify making a luxury. On the other hand, the people that adopt tools early and figure out how to make them work for them, those are usually the people that win at scale over the long haul. So, AI is coming for our jobs, guys, but you know what? You can keep it out of your creativity and build agents that help you deal with your scheduling and your bookkeeping and your marketing, all the other stuff that takes up your time as an author. Then instead of threatening your creativity, it gives you more space to be creative. Jo: So it's reframing things a lot of the time. Dan: A lot of the time, yes. Jo: I think that's true of everything. Reframing can help you learn. Reframing things can give you a reason to learn, I guess, when in the past, maybe at school, you hated learning… Dan: Yes. Jo: Now by reframing it into a reason why. Dan: That really helps, and it also helps the second big problem with learning, which is worldview threat. I think I open the book with an entire section on how worldviews work and how that limits us, and how we can't get away from them even though they limit us. Your worldview is the matrix through which you experience everything around you, and it's not a window, it's like a lens. It distorts everything, it filters everything, because it's the reflexive layer that helps you make sense of the world, and it's built out of your experience and inflected by your personality and other things like that. There are things you can learn, and for everyone it's going to be a little bit different, that threaten everything about your worldview. That's a problem, because your mind experiences your worldview not as an interpretive matrix, but as a survival tool. As far as your deep mind goes, your worldview is perfectly okay because you're still alive. Its job is to keep you alive. So if you learn something, or come close to learning something or thinking something that could unspool a big part of your worldview, you'll just emotionally go blank. You'll shut down. The information you're encountering will not register, or it will make you angry and you'll steer away from it. This isn't very good if you're wanting to learn things or grow. So there's a set of metacognitive tools you can use to help you push past that and navigate the existential crises that can sometimes ensue without crushing you entirely. I spend a section of the book talking about that as well, and detailing what some of those tools are. Jo: Better give us a tool. Give us one useful tool. Dan: All right, so one of the basic tools is one that anyone who's a developer in the audience will be familiar with, and it's basically sandboxing. You create a little playpen where it's okay to play with this dangerous idea, and you make yourself the promise that until you're really familiar with the dangerous idea, you're not going to connect it to anything else in your worldview. Then you've got the option later on to decide whether to integrate it or not. But you've got to play with this scary tool. For someone who comes out of a fundamentalist religious background like I do, one of the big ones here was textual criticism, where you learn about all the manuscript traditions that make up the New Testament especially, and the development of Christian scripture. I had to know about this stuff because I had a paid writing gig that required me to know about it. But I was a biblical literalist and believed that it all came straight out of God's mouth, and I couldn't even go near it without going, “Ah,” because intuitively some part of me recognised this could be a threat to what you believe. So I made myself a sandbox. I said, “This is a literary project. If I actually believe in the doctrines of my religion, then this can't be a threat, because even if the words themselves were changed all over the place, the Holy Spirit would have ensured that the important parts of the theology got through unscathed.” So I had a sandbox. I didn't really have to think about it. I could just learn the topic, and I got through. It was a two-year project, I had a fabulous time, and I came out knowing more about textual criticism than anyone ever should need to. I actually got to know someone, a friend of my father's, who actually makes the Greek New Testament from the surviving original sources. I learned all sorts of things about biblical translation and about classical literature. It was great stuff. I sandboxed it until I understood it, and then I decided whether or not to integrate it, and I did integrate it. It didn't actually have anything to do with me ending up being an atheist now. That was because of my research into mythopoetics several years later. When you sandbox something like that, you give yourself an imaginary play space. This is something you do any time that you go to a movie and you cheer for characters who are doing horrible things that you would never do or condone in real life. It's a fantasy play space that allows you to explore other aspects of life that you can't touch in real life. When you're learning, you can use that same set of skills of fantasy play and fantasy role play for trying out and exploring topics that might threaten the way you see the world. Jo: Well, that actually brings up a good reason to do this, and one of the reasons I love to learn new things is to turn them into books. You mentioned earlier your short story about AI, for example. That's a great way of sandboxing and playing with a dangerous idea. I'm actually writing a lot of, I guess we would call them science fiction, in the science fiction genre. I've never written science fiction before, and suddenly… Dan: Welcome to the party. Jo: Yes, exactly. I'm now writing science fiction. I haven't published any of it yet, but it's possible that I'm moving into science fiction because I am weighing up a whole load of these things as I'm learning about it, and I'm like, “Okay, how would I play with that idea?” So that is one way to use what we learn, or even, like we said, reframing it. One good reason to drive the learning in the first place, I guess. But in that way, I wanted to ask you, because your books are very detailed. How are you structuring knowledge as you learn it, in a way that is useful for turning it into something else later? Dan: Okay. Associatively. The way that the brain stores knowledge, it looks a bit like a spiderweb, or like a map of galaxies in the universe. That's probably too geeky. Let's stick with a spiderweb. Everyone's seen a spiderweb. You don't record discrete tabulated facts like a spreadsheet or a database. You actually record associative memories, and everything you know is associated not just with other things that fact might be associated with in a library catalogue. It's associated with the smell that you were smelling when you learned that thing, and the emotional state you were in when you learned that thing. The more associative connections you can make to any bit of knowledge, the easier it is to record. When I sat down and wrote The Autodidact's Bible, I literally wrote it front to back without an outline. There have been some books I've done this with where I had to rearrange afterwards. With this one, I didn't have to, because this is one of the places I live, so I've just got a good structure for the information in my head. I knew that if I wanted to convey this toolkit and all the things associated with it, I needed to start with what is knowledge and memory, and how does understanding work? Then move into worldview and the way that emotions affect the way that we learn, and developmental psychology, which has to do with the way the human being is designed to learn from the get-go. We start off with raw input. I call this in the book type zero learning. We get a fire hose of information we don't know how to make sense of, and our brain adapts itself to the inputs. Then there's type one learning, where we play around with things and we experiment and we see what they do. It's the “what's this button do?” approach to learning. Then there's type two learning, which is someone else who knows something already tells us things or shows us things, and we pick that up. All three of these systems are involved at every stage of the learning process. Actually, it's hierarchical. So you can do type zero learning without doing type one or type two. If you're doing type two, which is what you're doing in school, or when you're learning from a mentor, or when you're listening to a podcast, then if the information is going to stick, you are also involved in type zero learning, which is just taking in a bunch of stuff, and type one learning, which is practising and doing trial and error. Even if, as you're listening to this podcast, you're just reacting with things like, “Oh, now that's an interesting idea,” and you're having a little fantasy about, “What if I did this?”, that's a version of experiment and repeat, and that solidifies the learning in your knowledge web in your head. Then the trick is figuring out how to go back and find those things. Jo: Well, this is what I wanted to talk about. In the book, you do have stuff on memory and that kind of thing. I have definitely found, and this has got worse with menopause, and this is a completely normal thing with menopause for women, the brain fog that means things don't seem to stick so well, and then the recall is also almost harder. I'm often reaching for things, and I can't get them back. I've always been somebody who writes everything down anyway, but I now do it even more. As you know, I sent written questions for this. I now rely on written stuff so much more. So when I'm writing a book, or like I've just been doing with this master's and a lot of research, I have to write everything down. So I guess my question was more about, for people listening who want to learn things in order to write books from that— What recommendations do you have for organising your research so that when you write the book, you can reference it in a good way? Dan: Well, writing things down is great, because that is part of the repetition that helps it stick in your head, and then you've got an external place where, as long as you can remember where you put it, you know where to get it. The more connections you can make to any piece of information, the easier it is to find. I do take notes, and I have a strictly hierarchical file tree where I know where to find manuscripts and files full of notes and whatnot. What often happens with me is I will make notes on something, and then I'll forget I did it, and then a few years later I'll write the book and then discover the notes again afterwards, and the book basically matches the notes. I think the reason that happens is that when I get an idea in my head and write it down, I just start subconsciously playing with the idea, and I play with it and play with it until it's well developed. Every time you take an idea out, or a memory, and play with it, everything that you're thinking or feeling at that point in time gets reconnected to it. So you actually alter a bit of what you're remembering, but you're also multiplying the mental paths you can use to get to it. So you've got a very strict external system to help you beat the brain fog. The analogy to do it without the external system is you create that kind of system in your head. You practise actually walking the system like it's a library or a museum. If you're a very visual person, and this doesn't work if you have aphantasia, you can close your eyes and you can walk through the museum in your head, and you can turn to the left and see a room that's associated with everything you know about biology, and then you can start picking things up in that room. I'm actually being semi-literal here. I sometimes actually do this like I'm working in virtual reality. Most of the time it's not that concrete, but if I'm trying to find something and I get stuck, I will actually close my eyes and go into the museum and find the room. The other trick is you don't chase a particular bit of information too hard. All you're looking for is something that's in the neighbourhood. Because once you start working mentally in the neighbourhood, all of that knowledge map comes back to you as a side effect of being in that area. Let's say you're in England, and you knew neighbourhoods in Nottingham really well, and you wanted to go visit a friend in Nottingham. When you get on the road to go, and you're not using a map, you don't have the whole map loaded into your head. All you know is, I'm going to go that way on this road, and then you see the exit off the M1, or whatever it is, that you recognise. “Oh, this is the exit I take,” so you take that exit. All the other information in between, you kinda know it, but you drop it. You don't really actively search for it. Then when you get into the general area of your friend's house, you start to recognise landmarks and you go there. Memory of non-physical spaces works the same way, and you can actually develop the ability to engage it as if it's a physical space. The technique is called the mind palace. It was discovered in Ancient Greece, and it still works. Jo: Yes, and I agree with that, and I still have that kind of experience in a way. When we're writing nonfiction, and you have selected footnotes in this book, for example, although not to the extent of academic text, which is what I've been doing with my master's dissertation this week. As an example, I knew that Stephen King had said something like, “Writing is a form of telepathy,” but could I remember where it was? No. hTen I was like, okay, well, it's very likely it's in either one of his introductions or it's in On Writing, his memoir of the craft, because that is an iconic book. But in order to actually get the right quote, because if you're quoting people, obviously it has to be an exact quote as opposed to a made-up thought. Then if you're doing a proper footnote, for example, it does need what book it is and what edition and what page number and all of that kind of thing. So when you're writing the nonfiction books, are you doing the memory palace thing, writing the stuff, and then going back and finding where you got it from? Dan: Yes, and anything that's vague, I just put hard brackets around it. I don't remember all the people I quoted, but let's say I quoted Schopenhauer. If I was going to be quoting Schopenhauer and I could remember what he said, but I couldn't remember the words, I'd just put brackets around it and say, “Find the place where Schopenhauer said this,” and then put the quote here. I don't use hard brackets anywhere else in my writing, so I can then just Control + F, find the hard bracket, and retroactively do the research. Jo: Yes, exactly. I think that is the point I was trying to get to, which is it's all very well having the memory palace, but I can bet you that some of these quotes are not correct. Dan: Yes, always check quotes. Now with AI, there's search engine techniques where you can actually start from a paraphrase and then refine the search stepwise until you can get the exact quote with a reference, and then you can check it against the manuscript online. I use a lot of those when I don't have the book that I'm thinking of in my hands. Now of course with AI, I'm like, “Where did this author say this thing…” Jo: Roughly? Dan: Yes, roughly. The AI will come back with, “Well, he said this in these words in that book, and these words in that book.” And I'm like, “Oh, boy, I get to pick which one works better for what I'm writing.” Jo: It's very good. Coming back to what you were writing, I think you have balanced footnotes and source material, but you haven't gone as far as the academic footnoting of every single sentence, which is where I am at the moment. So for general nonfiction that is trying to reach a broader audience, where would you say the balance lies? Because I just feel now that we don't do enough of this in the indie community. I read a lot of nonfiction books which need a heck of a lot more attributions. Dan: First of all, I subscribe to the Terry Pratchett school of footnotes, which is that footnotes are places for long asides that need to be there, but that interrupt the flow of the text. I'm sure you noticed. Also, for me, it's really important, wherever I can remember where I got an idea, to point it out so that the reader can follow that rabbit trail if they want to. As a nonfiction writer, I feel like I'm in the business of providing value to the curious person. So anywhere I can point them where they might have fun exploring further is a value add. That's something I try to do, but I don't always remember, because in the heat of composition, you don't really realise where the ideas are coming from all the time. The second thing is, if I'm directly quoting or paraphrasing someone, there's always at least an attribution to the author, if not in the footnotes, then in the body text. You know, as Harlan Ellison used to say about being paid as a writer, or whatever. The great glory, and this is at least partly an aesthetic thing in my head, the great glory of nonfiction is that it taps you into an entire universe of conversations that have been going on as long as there's been a written word. To pretend that you're not participating in that conversation, okay, it might make you look cool to the novice reader, but you're really depriving your reader of even just the bare awareness that he's dipping his toe in a rich stream that he could follow forever. Especially in our world where we live in a TikTok world, but before that, we lived in a soundbite world, and before that, we lived in the newspaper world. These are all formats that try to pretend that they exist outside of time and culture, even though they're the most temporally dependent and culturally fickle sorts of entertainment there are. We've gotten used to the experience of encountering something that feels like it could just be from anywhere, and that's not the way it really works. Every TikTok video comes out of someone's experience, which is embedded in a culture, which is embedded in a tradition that's full of controversies that goes back to the beginning. It's not just full of controversies, but it's accompanied by stories, fictional stories, mythic stories, where those controversies get fought out and explored. I think as a nonfiction author, if you want to be really selfish about it, it makes you look better if you're also pointing at the tradition that you're standing in than if you're pretending that it's all coming from you. Jo: Yes. It makes you look better if you are citing things. I feel like that's such a good reframe. I was reading a book the other day, and I was like, all these ideas are coming from all these other people that I know about. This person would look a lot better if they actually accredited those ideas to the people they came from. My opinion of that person went down because they were not attributing. So, yes, I think it's so important, and that's the fun bit. Let's circle back to the fun bit of learning. Dan: Before you get onto that, I should point out that in my writing, I don't do this with academic rigour. I do it as it occurs to me. I write a weekly nonfiction article dealing with philosophy and history and arts and everything, and I don't always think, “Oh, the readers might not know where this comes from,” and stick it in there. But over the course of reading those articles, you get all the citations. They're just not always in every article. Jo: Oh, no, I've read your stuff, Dan. You do a good job. Obviously not to the academic attribution detail, but I do think this book in particular, Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible, has a lot of references so people can learn more. So I do briefly, before we finish, because you and I could talk about this forever, but I do want to ask about Kickstarter. So you're using Kickstarter to launch this book. You've done a couple of campaigns, but not for a while. So why use Kickstarter for this, and what are the pros and cons? Dan: Well, as far as I've been able to work out, doing a Kickstarter is the one way you can make sure that you don't publish a book dead. Are you familiar with this term from old publishing? Jo: You can expand on it. Dan: Okay. So in traditional publishing, there's a term called publishing dead, which is where the publishing house buys a book, they go to the trouble of laying it out and printing it, and then they just kinda drop it on the market with an entry in the bookseller's catalogue. There's no publicity, no fanfare, no attempt to get advance buzz going, and it just kinda sits there. Occasionally someone who buys for a bookstore will get a couple of copies, and they'll sit on the shelves, and a customer will walk by and buy one. Books that are published dead tend to sell 500 copies over a 30-year lifetime. It's not much. Jo: That's probably a lot of indie books as well. Dan: That's how most indie books are done. The first 10 years of my career, I was doing fiction podcasting, so everything I was publishing got published live, and they did really well. Then fiction podcasting kinda died at the same time that my life got really complicated, and so I decided just to let my podcast die with the wave. At just the same time, my personal fiction productivity went through the roof. I went from writing one, maybe two books a year to writing four or five. I was dropping these four or five books on the world and nothing happened, and all the sales were drying up anyway from the older stuff that had been supported by the podcast. So I decided I wanted to find a way to stop publishing things dead. I had done a Kickstarter for an audiobook years ago that I produced for Gail Carriger, and so when I was writing Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile, I decided there's a lot of Heinlein fans out there, so even if I don't personally have the name recognition, this is something that I could launch pretty well on Kickstarter. It did great, and I decided at that point that I was never going to publish another book dead. I was always going to have some kind of occasion to launch with, even if I had to manufacture it. In the years since, I've published very little, because I've been trying to figure out how to do that. I've got a big stack of books that are coming out now that I've figured it out. I realised that things like debuting in a book bundle, doing a Kickstarter, or finding a way to time a release with a news cycle, which is appropriate for some science fiction particularly, these are ways to publish a book without publishing it dead and then having to try to figure out why nobody's noticing it. So that's why I'm doing the Kickstarter. Jo: I also agree. What I like is doing the two-week campaign. I normally do two-week campaigns, because then I can just focus my energy before the campaign and then during those two weeks, and then I'm basically done, and then I put it up on all the platforms and everything. I focus most of my energy into that couple of weeks beforehand and then the two weeks of the campaign. Like you, I mean— We don't want to be spending all our time marketing, but to try and make it an occasion just helps us put a bit more effort into it, doesn't it? Dan: It really does. And the other thing it does, and this took me a while to figure out, but I've come to understand that most people's relationship with their favourite writers isn't like my relationship with my favourite writers. I've got about 70 writers I like, but I've got about 10 where I don't care what happens, I will buy and immediately read what they've done. I realised that for most people, their relationship with most of the writers they like is more at arm's distance. They stumble across, “Oh, I didn't know this guy had something new. I'll pick it up,” rather than being like, “I love the way this person's mind works, and I want to see what it goes at next.” So the bread and butter as an author has got to be in making sure that those people find you. It's not in serving the core base, the core 1,000 fans. They're really important, and you want to do that, but if you want the career to sustain and build, you've got to find ways to help people in that second group, the arm's-length fans, stumble over what you're doing. Because everybody's got more important things in life than your books. But if you've got excuses to be stumbled upon that don't involve standing right up and waving a sign saying, “Buy my book, buy my book,” then you're more likely to build momentum, because people talk about the book they just read and that they love. If they don't talk to someone in the first few days after they read that book, then unless it was one of the books that changes their life, they're never going to talk about it again. So you want to get as many people talking about the cool book they read last week at the same time as possible, to build momentum. Jo: Indeed. Right. So where can people find your cool book, as well as all your other books, online? Dan: Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible is currently Kickstarting. You can find a link on the top post at my website at JDSawyer.net. You can find all my books at JDSawyer.net/book-list, and you can find my weekly articles on maker stuff, philosophy, creativity, and history at jdanielsawyer.substack.com. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dan. That was great. Dan: It was a pleasure, as always. The post Reclaiming Your Mind: How To Teach Yourself Anything With J. Daniel Sawyer first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Is AI really the end of creativity, or the biggest emancipation of creative energy we've ever seen? How can authors thrive in a time of super abundance, when anyone can make anything? What happens when publishers become technology providers, and agents start shopping for books on our behalf? With Nadim Sadek. The post AI, Creativity, And The Future of Publishing with Nadim Sadek first appeared on The Creative Penn.