#403 – How to Move Beyond Creative Block with Ramona Ausubel

0:06Hey, writers, you're listening to the Kobo Writing Life podcast, where we bring you insights and inspiration for growing your self-publishing business. We're your hosts. I'm Tara Kremen, director of Kobo Writing Life. And I'm Rachel Wharton, author engagement manager at Kobo Writing Life.

0:24Ramona Ausubel: on today's episode we chatted with ramona azabel the author of six books most recently unstuck and the novel the last animal which was a national bestseller she is a multi-award winning author and her work has been published in the new yorker the new york times the paris review and many more she is a professor at colorado state university and lives in boulder colorado with her family We talked all about writing in this episode with Ramona, who is a wealth of knowledge. We talked all about getting unstuck, which is really the premise of her book, which has 101 doorways or writing prompts to help you get unstuck.

1:01So her latest book is all about giving authors creative nudges and permission to exist in what Ramona calls the middle of the book writing process. I really do think that it is a must listen for any writers out there. we're joined this week on the Kobo Writing Life podcast with Ramona Asibel Ramona we're so excited to talk to you thank you I'm so glad to be here before we go further could you start off by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself yeah absolutely so I'm a mostly a fiction writer I've written three novels and two short story collections and I'm working on another novel and some more stories as we speak so I'll just continue on forever and ever I think in this sort of manner I've been writing seriously since I was like in my 20s.

1:44And I have, in addition to the published things, lots of unpublished things, messes that got abandoned, things that were revived and utterly transformed, all of that stuff. And I also am a mom. I've got a middle schooler and high schooler. And I'm a professor at Colorado State University.

2:02Ramona Ausubel: So you said you started writing seriously in your 20s. But did you always want to write? how did you end up in this career? I really did always want to write. I have writers in my family, so I sort of knew that that's one of the things that grownups could do. And I was a really shy kid. So when creative writing was introduced to me in sixth grade, I mean, I had like, you know, played around and written things, but I hadn't, I hadn't really thought about it in the sort of formal way. And then in sixth grade, somebody came to teach us poetry and I was like, oh, I can, I can be understood maybe if I put these things down because otherwise I was like, I didn't know how any sports worked.

2:45I didn't know. I had like none of the cool hammer pants of the time. I was like, not, I was not in the thing. And then I wrote these poems and kids in my class were like, well, this is really interesting. I really like it. It's like nice image. And I felt like, whoa, this is, this is something I got to hold on to this. And I continued on. I wrote, I was a poet for a long time, mostly in high school and college. And then And I had an idea for a novel after college. And I sort of like, I mean, I set to work on it with absolutely no idea what I was doing. And realized after about a year that I was going to need some support.

3:21And I applied to graduate school with that stuff and learned how very much I didn't know. Was there a moment when you realized you wanted this to be kind of your career or something more than a hobby? Yeah, I think it was that that turn between applying to grad school and sort of just doing it on the side that the year that I was working on the novel by myself, I just I had a crappy job as a personal assistant. But I won't work Monday through Thursday so that on Fridays I could write. And I did I was I was very consistent. But I, I could feel that there was like, I just it was like sort of too loose.

3:58I didn't have any I didn't have any structure. I didn't know anything about what a novel how a novel should work. and I felt like I just needed other people to be part of that and when I applied I felt that was sort of the like okay I'm ready to do this in a in a different kind of serious way and to continue for as long as I possibly can I knew then I probably knew before that that I would write forever no matter what happened if I ever got paid for it or not I still feel that way like nothing is ever guaranteed you know I'm gonna keep going so at some point somebody will be like oh that novel's horrible we don't want that and I will continue along so yeah it was somewhere in that turn between going into an MFA program and spending those three years where writing was the center of my life.

4:40And when I graduated, that was my commitment to myself is that I will do other things for money because nobody, I mean, hardly anybody gets paid enough as a writer to just write, at least in fiction. I mean, there are a few people, but it's certainly not something any of us can count on. So I was fine with doing other things for money, but I committed that I would always keep real space for writing and that I would continue to take it seriously. It's interesting you say that because I think that sometimes it's seen that that's the goal is to be a full-time writer. And that's the only way you make your money.

5:15And that can often be such an unrealistic goal or one that people don't realize that writers aren't really doing, or that if you're doing it full-time, you miss the break that comes with the other work that you're doing. So yeah, it's really interesting that you touched on that piece. Yeah, totally. I thought when I was early on, I sort of thought that was the idea. Like you, you start a thing, you build that thing, and then that thing is it. But yeah, it's not. That's just not. It's not enough. And it's really true that I think having other things in your life is actually a positive for, at least for me, for my writing.

5:51I need to be alive and out in the world and talking to people and seeing stuff and overhearing conversations and having that. I couldn't write eight hours a day, even if I had eight hours a day to write. It's too much of that concentrated time, too much time being alone. And I start to spin out and feel like a crazy person. So I need to like, it's like a pleasure to then go to work, write for an hour, go to work. And I think about it though. It's in the back of my head, all of that the rest of my life as long as I'm coming back to it pretty much every day the rest of my life ends up being writing time too in a way because it's all like stewing around in there and ideas so many ideas have come to me driving my kids to school or walking my dog or all the things that are that that don't look like writing but totally are

6:37Ramona Ausubel: writing and speaking of outside of writing you are also a teacher of writing what inspired you to pursue teaching? I loved teaching when I, so in my MFA program, I had a graduate teaching assistantship and I really liked it. It felt like a conversation I got to have with other brains, like that we were all reading the same things and then we were talking about them. And then my students would write wild and weird and interesting pieces that I never could have conceived of. That felt like such a privilege to just get to be in that kind of space. And I, so I really loved it and then when I graduated and I didn't end up they offered me a like a lecturing position to stay on at UC Irvine and be a lecturer but I also got a fellowship that allowed me to go do other things for a while so I put teaching aside for a little bit and did some traveling and a bunch of work and sold my first two books and then I had a baby so then there's like that that pause got a little longer and then I started teaching in a low residency MFA program which is sort of like a distance learning.

7:42You've come together for 10 days at a time. And then the rest of the time students are just sending their mentors big chunks of work. So I would, so I was, that was my first sort of official teaching job. And I just, I just like, I love it. It's so important to me. It feels like such a, a way to understand myself and my own work way better. And also to just take care of this, like the whole thing that we're making. I feel like it's a collective project. We're all writing the literature of this moment. I am going to write one little tiny piece of it and I want to help foster other people to write their pieces.

8:15Ramona Ausubel: One of my favorite questions to ask authors and writers who also teach the craft of writing is if there's anything that you've learned from your students that you've adopted into your own writing process and creative process. Oh my god, so many things. I feel like just all the time, constantly. There's a way that I see people experimenting early on in their careers, like writers who are, who are come to an MFA program. So they're, they're like in it. They're serious. They mean it. They're not just like checking it out, but they are, there's like open heartedness and a feeling of, I don't, I don't know what I am.

8:52I don't know who I am as a writer yet. So I'm going to try this short story. And then I'm going to try that short story. And then maybe I'm going to like take a run at a novel for a little while. That is, I think they often come to me and say, help, I don't know what I'm doing. I should be, I should have a clear path by now. And I feel the opposite. I feel like, sure, like you want things to come together as a whole project. We all do. But in the meantime, often the best work happens when we're in that kind of open-hearted state of abandon. So I try to like not be mid-career. I try to be like, every book is, I'm just like a baby at the beginning of it.

9:26And I don't know anything. And I'm like, all possibilities are open to me and I need to be, I need to like, yeah, be like a baby and then a toddler and not, I don't know what it is. I don't know any more about what it is than I have with any other project. And that's a good thing. That's the way it should be. We're going to jump into your book Unstuck, but I kind of wanted to, a little bit in the same vein, in this book, you write about how that novel changed when you were writing the very first one. Like you talked about your travel and how the idea totally switched. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and how it kind of informs, I guess, the work that you're doing and what the final novel looks like.

10:05Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So my first novel I wrote at the end of this, though I went to a three-year MFA program, and the end of my second year I was like, okay, I had been writing short stories the whole time, and I thought, all right, I think maybe I'm ready to try this novel. So I went to one of my teachers and said, could you, could you just receive pages as I write them? I don't need feedback. I don't need anything from you. I just need somebody to be on the other side of this. And he agreed. So I would, I wrote 10 pages a day for five and a half weeks until I had a draft of like 250 pages.

10:37And I was, I did like no laundry. I was like terrible at all other things in that period of time, but I got this novel draft and I spent the next year revising it on my own. And then I showed it to some teachers and I kind of revised after their notes. And then I thought, okay, maybe, maybe this is like every, every draft. I thought, are we done? Is it done? Is it time to be done yet? I think it might be done soon. And every draft it was not done, but I didn't know because it was my first novel. I didn't know just how many drafts it was going to be. And then I graduated and I had a story published and I got some notes from agents based on that story.

11:12And they all said, we love the story. do you have a novel? And I was like, yes, I do. I do. I have a novel. And I sent it to them way too early, even though I knew in my heart of hearts that it was not finished. And one after another, over the course of a few months, they all said no in different ways. Some of them were like a little bit like mean and like, what is this thing you sent us? It's not like what you described at all. And I was like, I tried. I don't know. But the last one of those notes was from an editor and she asked a question about the point of view and the sort of scope of the book.

11:48And she said, it just, I don't feel rooted. And I had like a first, I was like, you don't know what you're talking about. This is my novel and I know it. And you don't, who do you think you are? And then I thought about that. We were traveling, my husband and I were traveling on that fellowship for a year. So we were in Morocco when I got that note. It was the beginning of our trip. We traveled and traveled buses and trains through like Western Eastern Europe and then through Middle East. And then we were in India. Oh no, in Egypt. And I realized, okay, she's totally right. I need to change the point of view of this novel.

12:21And I need it to become much more centered on one character and have that sort of rooted feeling. And I sat on this little tiny couch in a tiny little, very cheap hotel room in on the Red Sea in Egypt and change the point of view. And all I did was just like change all the, you know, the wheeze to she's basically not all of them but a lot of them and I could just feel how much it was like coming into focus and feeling like it gathered like the way that like a dust storm might gather into a singular force it just felt so clear to me that it was much better and just way more interesting and deeper so then I then I still had lots more to do but it was yeah it was just it was a really good decision, but I wasn't ready for it earlier.

13:08And the fact that I tried this crazy experiment of writing a whole novel in first person plural, which is what it was, was important to the book, growing up into itself. I couldn't have done that. I couldn't have written it in a more efficient way because I would have lost all of that dust, all of those particles and particularities and things that I was like pulling in, which were dispersed all over the place in that, in those early drafts, then they came together and they were, they made the whole thing bigger and better. I could have, I feel like we all think like, I want to write an outline and then I want to like start and I want to write to a straight line until I'm finished.

13:49And then I will maybe like polish it up and send it out. And that is for almost all of us, maybe not some people, but I think for most of us, that is a myth and not a real thing. And that in fact, The project will be its biggest, best, best, most interesting self if we allow ourselves to wrap our arms around all the crazy first and then find a way to pull it together.

14:13Ramona Ausubel: I have to imagine, because you mentioned the number of drafts it takes, that it's really easy to get lost in the drafting process and searching for perfection. How do you know when it's time to just let the story live and leave it alone? that is like yeah that's such a such a personal question in a really good way and we each have a slightly different way of knowing my version is i've worked on it i've like completely given myself over to it i've really like merged with the project there's nothing i'm not holding anything back and i have accepted it as the thing that it has become i've sent it out to a few people for feedback.

14:56So I have a little writing group. I have a couple of dear writer friends who read early drafts and my husband and then my agent. So it'll be like probably two readers and then my husband or he's first and then my agent. And the other, so there's like, and I really paid attention to what they said and worked on it. That's like the first half of knowing. And the second half is that I feel ready to let it go. I feel ready to move on to something else. I feel like, I have raised it up real good, given it everything I can to fed it delicious things. And now I want it to move on. It's like, doesn't belong to me anymore.

15:33It's time for me to send it to the next person. It belongs to a reader now and not to me. And then I, that that's when

15:40Ramona Ausubel: I know it's really time to, to scooch along. And it actually, some people wonder if it feels sad to let a book go. And some, there's some way that like living in that world, it's weird to just leave it after having lived in it for so long. But I don't know. I really love that part where I feel like it's off to live a different life. And I am not needed for that anymore. It has what it has of me with it. And I go off to do the next thing. It goes off to do the next thing. And everything is great. I love that. And I love the imagery of handing the book from writer to reader. but in your latest book those readers were also writers and we're so excited to talk to you about that book which is unstuck 101 doorways leading from blank page to the last page which is a guide to help writers move beyond writer's block or imposter syndrome or whatever it is that's blocking their creative process and i really want to dive into this book but before we do i also want to chat about what your process looks like.

16:46Ramona Ausubel: Like you've mentioned, you've published three novels, two short story collections, and now this guide. Does your writing process, or what does your writing process look like, and how has it evolved from that first MFA novel to where we are now? So I still like to write a first draft kind of quickly. I don't go as fast as that, partly because that's just like not realistic in my life anymore. There is no way I could write 10 pages a day with all the other things that I do. But I also trust myself a little more. Part of that super fast first draft for that first novel was that I did not believe this was possible.

17:21It seemed like one degree away from impossible. And I, so I had to like run through that one tiny little hole and keep going so that it didn't close and shut me out forever. So I wrote that was speed was the way that I counteracted all my doubt because I just had to keep getting work on the page. I didn't have time to ask questions or wonder whether it was possible. I still basically feel that way that I that the first draft is like, it is it's I'm like a dog with my nose to the ground. I am just looking for interesting things. And it doesn't need to have the shape of a book yet. It can be like, I think of it as the primordial slush draft.

17:57It's like, the matter of the universe is here. The universe does not look like the universe I will know later. It looks like crazy nonsense but that's the point and then in the second draft I come back to it and it starts I read it all through and I begin to see the patterns and the way the themes are developing the way characters are developing and I can start to sort of like shape it into a book shaped thing or a short story shaped thing whatever it is and then I go I mean I basically just like keep going back and forth between that like wild abandon and then pattern seeking and control and those I need both of those modes and I need to do them at different times because it just feels like I have both those possibilities capabilities in me but they get confused and feel like they're at odds with each other if I try to do them at the same time so I'm sort of in like a filling it in maybe it's even just sometimes one day like today is a writing into this day tomorrow is like the working on that chapter to revise it and make it clearer stronger all the things and then I just like however many drafts it takes.

19:01That first novel took 18 drafts. Like so long. So many drafts. And all those times I was thinking, surely this must be the last one. It just wasn't for so long. But I think the second novel was like maybe like eight drafts. And the third one might have been five real big revisions. And this new one that I'm working on now is like has been like maybe three and there'll be one more with my editor. So yeah, I guess embracing the fact that most of what we do and most of where we live as writers is the middle. Like we, you said it's like spark of inspiration and you start something and there's that first fun day where you're like, I have this word.

19:42I'm like, good idea. I'm going to try it. But by the next day, usually it's like, oh, it's going to be harder than I thought. I don't know. And then there's the like moment when you finish it and maybe you send it to somebody and you feel like, whee, I sent that off but everything in between that is the middle and the middle is way mushier and foggier and weirder to think about because it doesn't have a clear like length or a clear I don't know feeling it's not like oh yay or I'm like high five I'm done but the middle is where everything good happens so I try to really go in knowing and being excited about staying there for a long time not trying to get to the finish line, but being like, the process is the prize.

20:23This is the best part. And it will keep, I will keep getting to know the work better. I will keep having new ideas. It will be, it will be a relationship that I get to have for as long as that is, however many drafts. I was having conversations with students who would say like, wait, what do you do when you revise? What do you mean when you say you're revising? We know it's not spellcheck, but what is it? And I started to think about all the kinds of approaches that I take to a draft, whether it's a very early draft or a later draft. Like, how am I re-entering this so that I see it in a new way?

21:00Or I can, like, turn it so it, like, catches the light differently? Or I cut and change it? All of the different things that I do, I just started to pay attention to them as individual, sort of what I thought of as doorways. And I first, it was like, I gave it as a craft talk at an MFA residency, and then it expanded at other lectures and expanded, expanded. And then I got a little fellowship at work to do some research and I worked on it some more and wrote a book proposal. And then I had this table of contents that was 101 and I had like probably 40 of them. So I had a lot more to do. And I have the stable of contents that I myself had created.

21:40So it was also kind of a like a test for me of like, is this, is this really, what do I do? What really works? What can I honestly like pass on as like an offering to other writers to see if it works for them too. And I really wanted every single doorway in the book to be genuine to me. Like not, this is not, I did not pull this out of thin air. This is like something I really mean.

22:07Ramona Ausubel: And I love the structure of the book where you have four sections, you enter a doorway, and then you give the reader or writer a key, which is a piece of advice or a writing exercise to accompany the previous passage, which really touches on your personal writing journey. How did you come up with all of these keys and figure out how to pair them with their respective doorway? At first, it was all doorways. There weren't actual keys separated. Some of them had a prompt sort of built into the doorway. And then in some conversations with my agent, as we were working on the book proposal, he suggested, he was like, what if we pull the keys out?

22:46And then that gets to be its own thing, which felt so, it felt so good. Like, yeah, that's absolutely what we're going to do. Because it allowed me to both be really honest about my part, which is the doorway. Like this is, here's me. Here's how this has worked for me. Here's something true for me. but recognizing that we're all different and that's good and wonderful and it's the point so I'm not trying to tell you come be like me I'm trying to say here's what's true for me and here's something you might try to see what's true for you and it just felt I just also like the visual like thinking of it's like I'm giving you the key now the key belongs to you and maybe a tough question because you have 101 but do you have a favorite exercise I think the one that I use the most often is the what ifs.

23:31So this is a list where wherever I am, early, middle, late, however far I am into the process of writing something, when I get stuck, instead of like hitting my head against the wall in the document itself, I go to this other document that is my what if list for that piece. So it'll be titled with the name of the piece and then what if list. and I write 25, I like to go along, possible what-ifs for what could happen next, what might be going on for the characters under the surface, things that might change in the setting, objects that could be introduced or removed, just anything that might shift to like wake me or and or the story back up again.

24:14And I have never not come away with at least one of those what-ifs being like, oh, that's interesting.

24:22Ramona Ausubel: I want to see what happens with that. And the reason that it's so magical is that it's completely safe. There's no stakes in the list. The list can go on and on. Things can be like bananas off the wall crazy. They can be really fine to like fine grain or big picture. I can try, I can like test out an idea and feel in the, in like all of my intuitive senses how that feels to me does it feel like does that like spark something and open it up or does that feel like it limits me and closes things down which is so much more efficient than trying it right away and then having to feel it in the story it's like a yeah it's like this sort of like like proving ground like beaker system of like what i'm gonna pour things together and see if they start bubbling and if they start bubbling then i think that and the bubbling is me the bubbling is like my intuitive sense of yes that's interesting to me and then i try it and if it doesn't work that's okay.

25:19It's not, I'm not married to any of these things, but I get to like come up with crazy things and then pick one to move forward with. For the, my last novel, The Last Animal was, I think the book's about 275 pages. And my what if list was almost a hundred pages long. That's how much time I'm spending in that mode. I'm like, I'm just going back and forth between these things all the time. Sometimes I look, read through and discover some brilliance that I had on day two that I didn't know, recognize or know what to do with yet. It's also kind of fun to see the things that didn't, all the roads not taken.

25:52Yeah. It's like, it's the number one thing for me.

25:55Ramona Ausubel: Do you have an example of a what if that when you were starting it, you were like, oh, this is bananas. This is going to go nowhere, but I still want to see what it is. And then it ended up in a book. There are probably so many that I couldn't even name them all. So the last animal is about a mother and her two teenage daughters who end up, she's a geneticist, and they end up with a gene-edited woolly mammoth embryo, and things happen. So in that novel, there was a lot of, I'm not a scientist, I felt, I knew this was interesting to me, but I didn't know where I was going to stand in it, and I didn't know how the whole story was going to play out.

26:36So there was a whole lot of that what if-ing to like try what if a mammoth is born what if the mammoth is still born what if the mammoth is like it doesn't work what if they get caught and get arrested like so many things that felt like they needed I needed to like really think them out and that list was that was like my little like world in miniature that I could go to and see what it felt like to to put those things together. And then like that novel also, there used to be for many drafts, a dad in the picture as well. He was alive and well. And, and I realized very late, like last big revision, I realized that he was really not important in the story in like as a present and alive person, he was just sort of like the shadow of the mom.

27:25And so I killed him because he was not doing anything alive in the story, he was like weighing it down, where when he died, suddenly there was this immediate grief that the mom and the daughters were circling. And that was very propulsive and also a really strong echo of the question of extinction that was in the center of the book. So that became like a such a motor of the story. And it seems crazy that I ever couldn't It wasn't that way all along, but it wasn't. And I, yeah, I needed, and that was on that what if list. Like, what if Saul is dead? Okay, let's see. If a writer is feeling a little bit stuck, how would you advise them to use your book, Unstuck, to assist their creative process?

28:11Well, it depends what part of the process they're in. So I organized the book in four sections. There are doorways in, so ways to enter into a story, doorways through. so continuing that just moving through that long middle doorways up which are getting some kind of perspective I can't outline because I get an outline just sort of like deadens the thing for me but I still need to be able to see the big picture somehow so these are all doorways related to like finding the big picture and figuring out what's at the heart of it and then the last section is doorways out so finding finishing and moving on and coming to the end and then finding your way out of the work.

28:50So depending on where a writer is, there are the whole big chunks around 25 in each of those sections. But the other thing that I really wanted is for it to feel like you could flip it, flip open to anything and try it that day and it might really work. There's only a few that are so specifically for a particular stage that they wouldn't work in other ones, but almost all of them could, could work no matter where you are. And they're all short. So the idea is a writer can be like, I don't know what to do now. I'm stuck and open the book up and read one page, maybe a page and a half of something from me talking about me and my writing experience and then a paragraph long key and off you go.

29:32So I don't want to interrupt the writing process. I want it to be, I want it to really be about the writer and their work and not like a, you know, full craft book that you have to like start at the beginning and read 300 pages of solid text. I liked the couple of doorways that you had that were around the books like a physical item. They were like, print it out, cut it up, like rejig things around, which we're so focused on the digital publishing space. And I know like when you're writing on a computer, like you probably don't always think about it like that. And I guess I'm just wondering, why did you include these?

30:06Or was that something that you have done yourself and have fun with? Yeah, definitely. It's so helpful for me to make that transition between the endless scroll of the word document and the reality of this thing existing in space and time even if it's going to be published exclusively online it still feels like seeing it laid out on the page holding the actual pages seeing the way the sort of like section sometimes i'll be like oh wow that chapter is why is that chapter 75 pages long and the others are all six pages i didn't really notice that that was happening and the cutting up so much story and narrative drive is accomplished through structure the way a book is laid out like the actual when you receive information how you get to know characters is structure is so important not just as like a delivery tool but as an actual meaning making tool and that is where the like cutting things up moving chapters around so i have like lots of i probably maybe i've started recycling them but for a long time i saved every different draft so down in my crawl space there's like boxes of drafts where I like print it out, staple the chapters together, arrange and rearrange and then realize like I need half the chapter over here.

31:14So I'm cutting and like glue and tape and all kinds of things. Yeah. Part of what this whole book is, is ways to access your own brain in a different way that we have so many different ways of thinking and seeing, but we get fixated on the one and that limits us to that one approach. But if you change it and move yourself around a little bit, you yourself will be able to solve a problem that seemed unsolvable before.

31:40Ramona Ausubel: And I know that putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard is a lot different than teaching in person. Has writing about the process of writing changed your approach to teaching it? A little bit. Well, the book and the teaching kind of grew up together. So I think that it's been, it's always been, the thinking this way has been intermingled with my teaching career since pretty much the beginning. but yeah it has there's in that that sort of question of starting and then with the eventual goal to finish the finishing is so brightly lit it is like the thing everybody's trying to do whether it's an mfa thesis or a dissertation or a you know or a book to self-publish or a book to send out to an agent the finished product always is the centered piece that's fine and it's fine to want that.

32:31I do too. But I really think that it needs to be moved away for the actual writing because it's not helpful. It doesn't have anything to say about what the thing is going to be and how it can come to life. So that, I think that that, my approach to teaching is not, let's start a story and then let's revise the story so that it's good and you turn it in and it's finished. But let's find ways for you to like live inside that story and feel really like to be able to turn 360 degrees around and like see what you've made and really feel connected to it and then once that's happened and you feel like I've really lived with this thing and I've gotten feedback and I've lived with it some more then if you want to call it done and send it somewhere that's great but you don't need to have been thinking that of that from the beginning so really trying to think be with my students and like you are here to be in the making that's the whole goal of our workshop or class and we will talk about finishing later one of my favorite parts of the book which

33:34Ramona Ausubel: happens pretty early on is about writer math which is funny because before we jumped on recording we were talking about how neither of us worked well in numbers but as a professional procrastinator And as somebody who has talked to a lot of writers who work best under deadline or who have a rapid release schedule, there might not be as much time to live in the middle of the writing process and explore creativity. Do you have any advice about setting realistic writing goals and still getting to exist in that space while also using time and deadline as motivation? Totally. I had a teacher once who said, who like, we're meeting in his office in the university and he like motioned around and was like, this entire campus, the whole thing, all it is is deadlines.

34:19That's the most important thing that happens here. And I think there's a real truth in that. It is very hard to trust yourself enough to create something without there being a hard line at the end that says like, you have to try. You have to actually do this. So a deadline is wonderful. And I highly recommend finding a writing group or a class or an accountability buddy where you can like that thing that I did with that teacher where I just said, I just need you to receive the pages. Don't tell me anything about them. I encourage my students to do that. If you're not writing first draft, it's probable that you don't need feedback at that point.

34:54But you still might need a pal to keep you accountable, to give you a thumbs up, maybe like take you out for a cookie every once in a while. and that shifts the whole thing into the realm of possibility in a way that it just is harder when you're all by yourself and my sort of system is to come up with a writing schedule and a plan for getting wherever it is I'm trying to get to in the stretch of time to one contain it in an envelope of time so I'm not doing this forever and ever I'm saying for the next maybe for the summer or maybe for this next through the fall or through this year whatever my sort of time envelope is I'm going to write in this particular way.

35:33I'm going to write for an hour solid every day without picking my fingers up from the keyboard. Or I'm going to write a thousand words a day or 500 words a day. Something that feels like it is a, it's clear where the lines are. So I'm not like, you should sit down and write something brilliant today. That's too hard. I can't do that. That is not a useful piece of advice. So instead, like I'm going to write a thousand words. They don't have to be good. Doesn't matter. I'm just going to keep doing that every day for the next three months during the weekdays. And I'm sticking in the realm of this novel.

36:07That's all I know for now. And then at the end of that, I can look up and I've got a lot of work that has been done. And I can actually start to see what this piece might be and then create a new schedule for the next period of time. Maybe it's working and I just continue. Maybe I feel like I'm ready to shift into some other different pace. Or I know like I've got two weeks off and I can really, really like write all the time, whatever it is. But my metric is a goal that is both realistic and ambitious. I am a better worker when there's a little bit of like, this is hard. This is going to be a lot.

36:41I think I just like feel like there's like a challenge in it. That's fun. And I can like my teeth like sink in, but I can't, I don't like to fail. So it can't be like, I'm going to write that like that for those 10 pages a day, that novel, that, that I would fail at that. And it would be a bummer and I would feel bad about myself. So I'm not going to do that. And like I'm headed into the semester right now and I'm going to, I'm, I've just, I've got an hour cleared every day and I haven't set a word count goal because I'm working on revision now. So it's more just like focusing for that hour every day.

37:12It's not a ton, but it's actually really enough to get a lot done. If I stay focused and turn the internet off, I put my phone away. If I focus for a full hour, like a lot happens. It doesn't, we don't need gobs and gobs of time. That's the great thing about writer's math is that at the end of the equation, it's always positive because you can just like flex the numbers around to suit you. I wanted to ask about, so you're primarily writing fiction and this book has a lot of yourself in it. What was it like writing nonfiction versus fiction? It was really fascinating to switch over to that. In some ways, there was a leap I had to take that was harder.

37:55I am, all right, I'm going to reveal myself here, where otherwise, I mean, I am all over the pages of my novels, but you don't know, you can't tell which characters are like me in which ways, and which dark secret actually belongs to me that I've given to some fictional character. but in this book I had to decide I'm gonna reveal myself and I it really it was only gonna work if I was gonna be really honest and and true so I had to choose to be good with that and feel like I was willing to put myself out there that way once I made that choice it was so much easier than writing a novel I mean it really gave me a lot of empathy for us all the all of us novelists like it's so hard to like make a whole world come to life and all these characters and to get everything to like line up and the architecture of the plot.

38:45And it's tremendously hard. So this was like, I knew what I, I basically knew what I wanted to say. I could tell a true story and then I could make an offering. And that was like, that was all I had to do. It was lovely.

38:59Ramona Ausubel: I'm curious what advice you have for authors who are just starting out on their writing journey. They're looking at that Word doc. They're starting their first novel. What advice would you impart to them? I would say, most importantly, that this belongs to you. It should come from your genuine interests. You're allowed to have fun. It will be hard, but you can always choose the most interesting thing for you at the time. The next most interesting thing will lead you farther than trying to meet somebody else's expectations. So I would say don't try to write the next whatever book. Don't try to meet the whole market.

39:42Try to do something that you genuinely want to do. And keep finding the thing each day when you sit down, something in it that you want, that you are curious about, that you are obsessed with, that breaks your heart and you need to take a look at. I think that we are our most important readers, each of us, for a long, long time. And to get work that is going to matter to somebody else, it has to matter to you first. So put yourself in, bring yourself, invite yourself in.

40:11Ramona Ausubel: I think that's great advice. And would you say something similar to someone who's, I don't know, published 10 books and are having a hard time finding themselves stuck in the creative process? Or would you have different advice for those seasoned authors who just need a little bit of a push? I think it stays the same in a lot of ways. But I think the thing, I mean, the second book is famously hard because the first one is like, comes from whatever. Sometimes it's a family story. Sometimes it's just like a burst of inspiration, an experience. And then the second book is like, okay, now can I do it again?

40:45Was the first one like a gift from the universe? And I'm not actually a writer? It just happened to me? Or am I, is this, is this a real thing? And so the thing, that might happen, not just the second book, but further on. Or a writer has like written a series of books that kind of fall into one vein and they want to try something somewhere else and feel like, do I have permission to do that? Am I allowed to do that? Will it work? Will I be able to do it? The way I try to think about it is that there will be at some point like a whole, there will be a completeness to my whatever it is that I've written over the course of my life, that will be all of it.

41:22And each book just needs to do the thing that it's doing right now. Similar, like, just like, what am I interested in right now? What is the writing that is about this moment, not necessarily literally about this moment in my life, but that is what the offering that I can make now. And that's all it has to be. It doesn't have to make a big decision about my whole career, what it says about the trajectory of my career, where I, if I'm taking a big turn, I want to take up whatever amount of the landscape that I need to. I'm going to make pivots. I'm going to move around. And each project is just that one project.

42:00It doesn't have to like shoulder the burden of everything else. And then after that, there'll be another one, which can be like, how fun. There can be something else. It's totally different. So taking off the pressure of this is it. This is the masterpiece. I have to make this one perfect. Nope. This is just, this is just the offering that you can make right now. And you've mentioned a novel that you're writing at the moment, but I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about what you're working on right now. Sure. So I've got a novel that's headed off to the editor pretty soon. So we'll see it'll, you know, there'll be another round of changes, but it is adult brother and sister who grew up in the desert in New Mexico and have been told by their mother that they are allergic to water, big bodies of water.

42:47And early in the book, the sister joins her high school swim team kind of as an act of rebellion and then ends up doing an open water competition in California with her coach, and she disappears. So yes, and stuff happens.

43:07Ramona Ausubel: And stuff happens. The back cover copy. Well, Ramona, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. And before we let you go, where can listeners find you online? First of all, it was so much fun to talk to you. Thank you both for your great reading and your wonderful questions. Mostly Instagram is the best place to find me. It's at Ramona Azabel all together and maybe eventually I'll do more stuff, but that's the easiest and best. Perfect. We will include a link to your Instagram in our show notes. Ramona, again, thank you so much for joining us. Of course. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Kobo Writing Life podcast.

43:45Ramona Ausubel: If you are interested in picking up Ramona's books, we will include links in our show notes. If you are enjoying this podcast, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you're looking for more tips on growing your self-publishing business, you can find us on socials. We are at Kobo Writing Life on Facebook, Blue Sky, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok. This episode was hosted by Rachel Wharton and Tara Kremen with production by Terrence Abrahams. Editing is provided by Kelly Robotham and our theme music is composed by Teardricker. And a big thanks to Ramona for being a great guest. If you are ready to start your publishing journey, sign up today at Kobo.com slash writing life.

44:24Until next time, happy writing.