When people ask me, "How can I become a better writer?" I can tell they’re expecting advice about sentence structure, grammar or perhaps even stylistic flair.

But I’ve realized, from years of navigating my own creative journey and editing hundreds of essays, loads of market materials and black lines / manuscripts, that those aren’t the keys to truly finding your voice.

Because to me, voice isn’t about how you sound on the page.

It’s about how you sound inside yourself.

It’s about who is allowed to speak inside your mind to you, about you. To me, the process of uncovering your voice is much less technical and much more biological, spiritual even.

I know this from observing writers who squeeze their hardest to write a second best-seller. I know from thousands of hours of practice in my 20s and 30s, and recognizing none of the writing advice I read or the classes I took ever made me a "better" writer in the way I hoped they would. My words remained technically sound, but something was missing.

The true journey to becoming a better writer isn’t just about perfecting your sentence structure or transitions or adding the most precise through line.

It’s about learning how to be with yourself.

How to sit with your thoughts, your emotions and the often tangled narratives inside you, and let them unfurl.

Becoming a Better Writer Means Learning to Belong to Yourself

Recently, I had the chance to create a series of reflective questions, flashcards and reading prompts for a business owner.

It was a deeply personal process: standing in front of my bookshelves, pulling out just the right book, finding the perfect passage and distilling the questions that I knew had been keys to hidden doors inside me. It was the culmination of years of exploration — asking myself hard questions, following where my curiosity led and learning to listen not just with my mind, but with my entire being.

When we ask, "How can I become a better writer?" what I think we’re really asking is something deeper: How do I belong to myself?

How do I find the stories that are lodged inside me and coax them to the surface, gently and truthfully?

I want to help others find their own answers to that.

Not through grammar exercises, but through a process of deeper self-exploration.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be carving out a new section of The Editing Spectrum to make room for this offline work so it has an online home with you. I’ll be stepping into my role as a guide for writers and creatives who want to dig below the surface — those who want to learn to listen and write, not just with their heads, but with their hearts, their bodies and their whole selves.

Introducing The Nurtured Writer

As part of this new direction, I’m excited to introduce a new section of this newsletter: The Nurtured Writer.

See The Nurtured Writer Section

This is where I’m pulling together a lot of my earlier interviews (some of you probably remember my Cave of the Heart series!) and my pieces like Luck Needs a Place To Land and Writing Seasons. In addition to these resources now having a more organized home, I’ll be sharing brand new practices, reflections and prompts that I’ve been working on behind the scenes.

These are the fruit of 20 years of being an editor and writer behind the scenes in a lot of industries and spaces. They’re also the fruit of being a woman who’s masked for most of her life and who’s fought hard to find a sense of inner home and belonging.

I want to share with you what has helped me connect deeply with my own voice, navigate tumultuous life circumstances and find inner grounding even when everything seems to be crashing all around me. Because the writer’s work is never siloed just to the page or a tied newsletter publishing queue — it spills over into each moment of every day of our lives. And I want to start finding a way to give you everything I have gathered from my bookshelves, conversations and decades of fighting to hear myself first and foremost.

In the coming weeks and months, I’m looking forward to sharing with you:

1. A Series Exploring 3 Types of Body-Based Meditation
   As a trained mindfulness awareness meditation instructor, I’ll be exploring the nature of meditation in my life and it’s intersection with writing. And how I used trauma-informed tweaks to help find safety, grounding and accessibility in three separate meditation styles.

2. Somatic Signaling Guide™
   I’ll be introducing regular writing prompts and reflections that weave alongside my Somatic Signaling Guide™. I’ve designed these so that others can tap into their own innate wisdom in moments of decision making and/or overwhelm.

3. Reflective Questions & Prompts
   Occasionally I’ll be digging into my bookshelves and sharing what I’ve gathered over years of exploring my own inner landscapes. These questions and prompts will be designed to help you dig deeper, ask the hard questions and perhaps find the stories that have been waiting to surface.

I know this might be a different kind of journey for some of you, and I want to honor that. If you’re here for pure newsletter strategy support and data insights, that will continue to be available to you each month, and you can simply skip The Nurtured Writer section if it’s not for you.

But if you’re curious about exploring where strategy meets intuition, I hope you’ll keep The Nurtured Writer section toggled on. Also, here’s a question to consider:

Take a moment to sit with that, and notice what comes up. The Nurtured Writer is a space where I want to explore questions at this intersection — where we can nurture creative momentum, challenge the status quo and approach writing as a practice of both growth and belonging.

Leave a comment

Paid Member Strategy Chat:

Curious about this strategy shift in The Editing Spectrum? I’m opening a chat later today to answer paid members’ questions about the “why” behind this editorial change (it’s a long time coming with a lot of factors behind it that come up often in my 1:1 editorial centering sessions. So I want to make myself available to share some of that with you).

Come-and-Go Editorial Chat

Here are a few links to resources I mentioned on the livestream.

1️⃣ I’ll be using the Somatic Signaling Guide™ in our first group Editorial Centering Session. You can sign up below.

Editorial Centering Session Sign Up

2️⃣ If you’re interested in getting a copy of the Somatic Signaling Guide™, you can share your email address on this informational page.

New to Amanda and The Editing Spectrum? Every month, I’m helping established writers and creative entrepreneurs build momentum inside their newsletters, one core theme at a time.

Subscribe now

In my one-on-one work as an editorial strategist and creative advisor, I also offer Substack data audits and 1:1 Editorial Centering Sessions.

Subscribe now

When invited me to join her podcast, The Burnout Rebellion, I knew we’d be exploring some personal and transformative territory.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much clarity the conversation would bring to my own personal and professional journey. Anna has a gift for uncovering the threads that connect burnout, resilience and identity, and I’m honored to have shared this time with her.

In our discussion, we explored a few of the pivotal moments that shaped my understanding of burnout and healing:

• The realization that even a dreamlike mountain retreat couldn’t shield me from the deeper burnout caused by a lifetime of masking and striving to belong.

• How my body’s signals — like a churning stomach or persistent exhaustion — were early warnings that I had ignored for years, and how reconnecting with that wisdom became key to healing.

• The powerful moment of clarity when burnout became a “welcome mat” to my diagnoses, offering an opportunity to live authentically as an autistic woman.

• How reconnecting with my voice through writing — particularly on Substack — became a transformative tool for unmasking and rediscovering who I am.

Anna masterfully created a space for these reflections, blending thoughtful questions with her own grounded presence. Her work as a podcast host is an extension of the same wisdom she brings to her mission: helping others see burnout not as an ending, but as an invitation to realign with what truly matters.

This conversation is a behind-the-scenes look at the often-overlooked emotional layers of burnout. It’s for anyone navigating identity shifts or seeking to rebuild after hitting a wall. I hope you’ll give it a listen, subscribe to the Burnout Rebellion not just for my episode but for the powerful dialogues Anna is crafting.

💬 Have you ever felt burnout was trying to tell you something deeper?

Let’s talk over on the podcast episode page — I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Burnout Rebellion

What is the Cost of Hiding Who We Really Are? Talking identity, universal connection and healing with Amanda Hinton.

TW: Pregnancy loss…

Listen now

a year ago · Anna Rose and Amanda B. Hinton

Imagine not fussing over whether you’re a real writer or not.

Imagine what could transform if you could say, “Today I told a story,” and then you kept moving from a place of accepting relaxation.

The Writing Seasons framework emerged last year as a way to examine how every season of writing and creativity can be productive — whether in a moment of momentum or in a phase of indecision.

→ I developed this approach after editing and coaching others for 15 years and as a personal philosophy. It reflects a lot of my own journey as an autistic person and endless questions about what it means to create magic with your voice.

Not a box to put you inside, the Writing Seasons help recognize where you are, so you can work with your creative rhythms productively, confidently and compassionately.

Today I’m here to remind you that you are the expert of your voice — no matter how many accolades, readers or degrees another person has, you know what you’re here to say.

Many thanks to this month’s co-curator

I’m honored to co-curate this Writing Seasons Digest with my friend, , publisher of On the Commons, whose thoughtful recommendations add a beautiful layer of depth.

📚 Together, we’ve gathered books, workshops and essays to support you, no matter which Writing Season you find yourself in. (Note: I added Nia’s book to the recommended reading list.) 😊

How to use the digest: If you’ve taken the Writing Seasons quiz, start with the section that reflects your current season:

Craft Resources | Musing Resources | Tending Resources | Rest Resources

If you haven’t yet discovered your current writing season, I warmly invite you to take the quiz or simply explore and see what resonates with your writing journey in this moment.

Let’s continue to grow together, embracing each season as it comes.

Take care,
Amanda

P.S. While the Writing Seasons Digest is a fresh expression of my philosophy on creativity, my broader work as a strategist and guide continues through The Editing Spectrum.

Season of Craft

Featured Book Authors: , Natalie Goldberg, Charles Finn, William Strunk and E.B. White, Jr. and Mary Oliver (The strange, purple non-cover book is one of Amanda’s go-to resources for editing/working intentionally with poetry).

Explore the Season of Craft Books Here

Workshops

The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy by

Essays

Things to do when you’re stuck by

Patience (and Which Reader to Trust) by

Writing from your gut and creating with confidence by (an interview with Amanda Hinton)

Season of Musing

Featured Book Authors: , , , Antonia Malchik and Richard Wagamese.

Explore the Season of Musing Books Here

Workshops

SneakyArt Hangout hosted by (It’s free!)

Essays

10. On Writing with Children by

feeling stagnant? try THIS… by

Happy Doggo by

Season of Tending

Featured Book Authors: Robert Cialdini, , Robert T. Kiyosaki, Joseph Sugarman and .

Explore the Season of Tending Books Here

Workshops

Audit Your Substack Data Like a Strategist by Amanda Hinton

Essays

I changed my mind about pricing by Lucy Werner

The 5-Step WITD Method That Helped Get This Writer Into The NYT. She Calls It "A Total Game Changer." And You Can Use It, Too by Jeannine Ouellette

9 Things I’ve Learned About Growth & Self-Promotion (From Someone Who Would Rather Just Write) by , as a guest post on ’s newsletter, How to Write for a Living

Season of Rest

Featured Book Authors: Camille T. Dungy, Pema Chodron and Mary Oliver.

Explore the Season of Rest Books Here

Workshops

make sacred space – november hosted by

Essays

Self Love through Sewing, with Sarahbeth Larrimore by

You Are Okay by Dr.

When Prioritizing Your Mental Health Means Leaving the U.S. by

For the Burned Out, Fried, and Exhausted | Emily & Amelia Nagoski – a relevant podcast episode from Dec 2023 via

Thank you for reading the first Writing Seasons Digest!

Subscribe now

This evening’s Green Prescription is a gift of calm and reflection—an offering for Substack writers and parents who give so much of themselves every day. In partnership with the brilliant Dr. Mariana Calleja Ross (she goes by Dr. Mariana!), this final part of the series is meant to nurture your soul and bring balance to your busy life.

Dr. Mariana, whose Green Prescription Club dives deeper into these practices each month, has generously shared this exercise as a way to help you reconnect with yourself after a long day. Whether through breathing exercises, meditation or simply a moment of stillness, this prescription is designed to help you find peace amid the chaos. It even has a surprising suggestion with the science to back it up!

It’s a moment of calm, a way to end your day on a reflective note, and it’s my gift to especially to my paid members, with Dr. Mariana’s guidance, for all the amazing work you do. Look for gift from Dr. Mariana (She calls it “Editing Spectrum Love”) at the end of this piece.

A Green Prescription For the Soul

The soul is an essential part of wellbeing. Mind has its own rhythm, as does the body. In Western medicine, the soul is not a regarded topic. However, we know from Eastern ancient medical practices that the soul is an integral part of who we are. The soul is difficult to explain but we all know it, feel it, sense it. The sense of calmness that we can reach is part of such soul feeling and connection. If you’re looking for your greatest ally in your well being journey, start becoming aware of this unique part of who you are. As writers and creative entrepreneurs, in order to keep serving the people we want to reach, finding our own unique soul connections and rhythms is so important. 

The soul is impacted by all the work we put into our mind and bodies, and there are activities we can do to reach a deeper level of relaxation and awareness, which is held in the soul. Ancient wisdom often prioritizes certain sound frequencies, or even practices like meditation. This evening, I invite you to work with Curiosity. 

These deeper layers of yourself—also known as the autonomic nervous system—are best approached by stimulating a sense of curiosity through calming activities. Our soul work this evening will make us bridge the subconscious and conscious levels of work we have done today. 

Read more

As a gift to all the incredible Substack writers, parents (fur and plant parents count!) and professionals in our community, I’m excited to share a special three-part Green Prescription from Dr. Mariana Calleja Ross (She goes by Dr. Mariana!). 

Dr. Mariana spent a decade in palliative care before “making a U-turn,” as she calls it, and turning toward occupational medicine. Dr. Mariana believes in science-based medicine and is also interested in all the ancient wisdom and knowledge from eastern medicine, such as Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine. She’s passionate about bridging both Western and Eastern medicine and believes both can co-exist as she helps patients (and readers of her newsletter) find wellbeing and solutions in their health processes. 

Today Dr. Mariana is generously offering her wisdom as an extension of her Green Prescription Club.

This morning’s Green Prescription focus is on the mind—specifically, how to reset and recharge your mental clarity with a simple, creative exercise. We all know the pressure of juggling multiple roles—parent, professional, creator—and how that can lead to mental fatigue. This prescription is designed to help you step back, take a breather and give your mind the space it needs to thrive.

It’s a small, impactful way to reclaim a few moments of calm during your day. Let’s begin with this gift for your mind, courtesy of Dr. Mariana’s insight and generosity.

A Green Prescription For the Mind

Our first prescription of the day is intended to encourage a manual, creative activity to get the mind away from the rush of the morning or any stress loads that have started building up. This helps the neurons change gears from stress in order to decompress, which helps in creating neuron connections and releasing endorphins, also known as happy hormones — serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin.

Any of these activities, even if they’re performed for just 5 minutes a day, will allow the brain to switch and relax almost instantly. This Green Prescription is designed to be used like a first aid tool to engage in a creative/relaxation activity and disengage your stress signals. Science is showing us more and more, how creativity works in the brain and how it boosts brain cell connections not only in developmental stages but also as we age. 

Interested in the science behind all of this? I have some resources for you.

• Here's a good explanation of this by psychiatrist Dr. Grant Hillary Brenner from Psychology Today.

• The American Psychology Association has also conducted studies with eye-opening conclusions on the science behind creativity.

• Did you know there's even a Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity? It's incredibly fascinating.

I hope you’ll find a way to give yourself a relaxing space throughout the day, while enhancing the brain’s health and supporting future prevention of cognitive and mental health issues.

The examples below will help reinforce an equation I love:  “Engage Thriving Mode, Disengage Survival Mode.” 

Green Prescriptions To Choose From:

• Knitting in the car while waiting for kids at school

• Gardening while taking your morning or afternoon cuppa coffee

• Practicing music/instrument/singing 10 mins in the day

• Having a shower with music or soft light/candle light without distractions (this is a powerful tool to ask for help (subconsciously working the “I can manage everything” syndrome, so common in mothers.)

• Going for a short walk with a podcast

• Podcast learning while cooking or washing up dishes

There Are More Green Prescriptions Coming Today

As part of today’s generous gifts, Dr. Mariana has crafted a three-part prescription. Stay tuned for the next Green Prescription coming at midday, which includes a simple, energizing movement to keep you feeling refreshed and ready for the rest of your day!

In the meantime, tell us in the comments which Green Prescription was accessible for you this morning.

What did you notice?

Leave a comment

Note: I’ve expanded the Writing Seasons Quiz to include more advanced outcomes.
For about a year now, I’ve had a version of these four expanded seasons workshopping in my brain and through my 1:1 client work. While I originally launched the basic quiz, I didn’t expect how quickly there would be demand for more advanced insights (and the ability to get a copy of the results, which you can get now, too!).

Based on what I’ve observed and developed with writers at various stages, I’ve now added four new evolved seasons: Mastering Craft, Sustainable Rest, Innovative Musing and Strategic Tending. These new seasons are designed to reflect the growth that comes from intentionally shaping your writing, whether through newsletters, creative projects or entrepreneurial efforts.

Take the quiz here.

As writers, we’re often navigating between two opposing forces—our deep creative instincts and the reality of paying the bills.

Whether you identify as a DIY writer, immersed in the craft for the love of it or as a creative entrepreneur with a focus on making your writing a viable business, both approaches require one key element: clarity.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared various tools to help you think strategically about your newsletter, from applying e-commerce principles to understanding the difference between DIY writers and creative entrepreneurs. These tools help you balance creativity with practical newsletter growth, whether you're trying to attract readers or create a consistent income stream.

Today, I want to introduce a tool that helps bring clarity to your creative process itself

If you’ve ever felt the push-and-pull between different phases of your writing—wanting to dive deep into new ideas but feeling pressure to tend to what’s already out there or struggling to rest even though you know you need it—then my Writing Seasons Quiz is for you. This tool is designed to help you recognize which creative phase—Craft, Tending, Musing or Rest—you’re currently in.

Each season comes with its own rhythms and needs, and if you're in one but pushing yourself to operate in another, you can easily feel stuck. Knowing where you are can help you lean into your natural creative energy instead of fighting it. Whether you’re a DIY writer focused on your craft or a creative entrepreneur managing a business, understanding your season is essential for making the right choices in your writing journey.

What to expect from the quiz

When you take the quiz, you’ll get personalized insights into your current writing season. It’s quick and reflective, designed to give you clarity without forcing an outcome. There are no strings attached—unlike many online quizzes, you don’t need to provide your email to get the results. And, not every result will direct you to my newsletter. Instead, depending on your season, I’ll also point you toward other trusted resources and creators I admire—because often the best guidance comes from diverse perspectives.

That said, if you do want extra resources and more personalized guidance from me, you’ll have the option to opt in and hear more.

Where are you in your writing season?

Understanding your current season gives you the freedom to honor where you are creatively. 

It’s easy to think the most productive season is always “Craft,” where you're building something new, but every season—whether Tending, Musing or Rest—plays an important role. Each one feeds the next and by knowing your season, you can align your writing decisions with your creative energy.

Like the e-commerce principles we discussed earlier, where timing and presentation are key, knowing which season you're in helps you decide how to approach your writing work and release it into the world. This clarity allows you to make strategic decisions that match your current needs and instincts.

So, take a moment to check in with yourself.

Where do you see yourself right now—Craft, Tending, Musing or Rest? The Writing Seasons Quiz might just give you the clarity you’ve been looking for, helping you align your next steps with your true creative energy.

Take the Quiz

I’d love to hear where you land on your creative journey! Every season brings its own unique insights, and I’m excited to see what you discover. Feel free to share your results with us all below when you’re ready—I’ll be highlighting some of your reflections to inspire and uplift our community.

Jodie Benveniste is a writer and psychologist, author of four non-fiction books and the creator of a Substack, Just Between You & Me…a space for sharing, reflection, musings, and deepening about our inner universes. Her debut young adult contemporary romance, Never, Not Ever, is about family dynamics, finding yourself, and falling in love (and has some sneaky wellbeing in there too).

Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.

I’m writing this from my home office, downstairs, with views to the city past the treetops on my left and a beautiful gum tree lined valley to my right. There’s birdsong, a bright sun, even though it’s autumn here now and should be raining, and an occasional car passing on the road below. I’ve meditated and journaled and now I’m at my computer writing this with a pot of tea and essential oils burning on the desktop next to me. So, yes, I’m in my happy place!

Childhood

Amanda: Given a choice, were you the child who would run barefoot outside or were you inside reading?

Jodie: I was the child who was both running outside barefoot and inside reading. We grew up in country South Australia - small country towns with lots of wide open space, gum trees, sunshine and a sense of freedom. I remember many days of roaming with my friends, creating cubby houses in the backyard by throwing a blanket over a branch and creating a nook against the tree trunk, making mud cakes, serving up tea to my dolls in the shade, dressing up the next door neighbour’s dog in a skirt and top, and setting up my portable chalkboard outside and teaching class.

But I was also a big reader who always had a book on the go. When I was 8 years old and we lived in a smaller country town, I’d actually read everything in the local and school library so they had to send me books from the city library to read. I also used to borrow books from family friends who lived in the next town and they always joked that I’d have read the big stack of books by the time we got home.

I was big into my imagination. We weren’t overly monitored or coddled growing up because we lived in a safe community and it was also an era where ‘parent’ was more a noun than a verb. ‘Parenting’ hadn’t been invented quite yet, certainly not in the way it is now. That allowed for a greater sense of creative freedom and imaginative play - both outdoors and indoors, playing and reading.

Influences

Amanda: If you had to choose one person from your past that most influenced who you are today, who would that be and why? This can be a person from history, an animal, a fictitious character in a book, TV or movie.

Jodie: I had three important teachers in my life who recognised something in me that I hadn’t understood and others hadn’t seen or articulated either. When I was 7 years old, my Year 3 teacher picked me out as a sharp and observant reader and writer. My English teacher in my first year of high school called me a writer and put me in the advanced English class where I got to delve more deeply into books and story. And a teacher in a post-school writing class said bluntly, “Well, you’re a writer.” I didn’t believe any of them. Not for years. Even though I’d published four non-fiction books, I still didn’t believe I was a writer. Until one day, something clicked within me and I started to own it. It then took me several more years to turn my heart to my true love, fiction writing.

Creative Spark

Amanda: What do you think about the concept of a “creative spark”? Is it something we all have access to?

Jodie: I truly believe in creative sparks, that intuitive hit that resonates so deeply within that you have to listen. I say hit, but oftentimes, it’s more like a whisper for me. For a lot of my life, I ignored my intuition, not always, but certainly when it came to my creative practice.

I had this driving desire within me to create something that would have impact, help people and make a difference so I sought out what seemed like safe and stable ways to do that. That’s why I studied psychology, started a business in parenting education and support, and developed books, programs and speaking topics in that space.

It was worthy work but it didn’t feed my soul. I also worked so damn hard in that business that I burnt out three times and no matter how hard I worked, I never achieved the level of success I so desperately desired.

After a time and A LOT of self-work, I’d created enough space within me to not only hear my intuition but trust it. That’s when I got the nudge to write fiction. At first, I tried to game my success, again, by thinking up an idea for a book series. But it didn’t really hold my interest deeply enough. Then I got this creative spark to write YA contemporary romance. And the book literally poured out of me like it had been waiting so long to finally be realised. It was a joy to write. It’s my new release, Never, Not Ever.

Writing Process

Amanda: What does your writing life look like today, and can you compare/contrast it to 10 years ago?

Jodie: Ten years ago, I’d just experienced my worst, and second bout of burnout, so much so that I had to take a year out of work and put my business on hold. A friend had recently set up an art space in the hills and I took up a room there to “write.” I told everyone I was working on a project but I wasn’t really. I was recovering. I was fortunate to be given one paid project that gave me enough income for the year but that took very little energy and effort. I “pretended” to be working because I still felt like I needed to be productive, doing something worthwhile, contributing in some way. After that year, I rejuvenated my business and continued on. That’s why I had a third bout of burnout because I hadn’t fully learnt my lesson — yet.

Where I am now is the result of a three year process that began with closing my private practice. It was the first time I’d changed my work situation with nothing else to go to, no income, no plan, just a nudge I had to honour, which if I’d ignored, I’m certain would have led to another round of burnout. For the first time in my life, I took a sabbatical and sat in the unknown. It was lovely and a bit uncomfortable. But it’s the reason I’m where I am today, writing fiction, doing project work on the side, trusting my creative insights, feeling the most myself I’ve ever felt. I’m launching my debut novel and I have no doubt that I needed to become the person who could honour this story and represent it well so it can resonate with and find its right readers.

Resources

Amanda: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?

Jodie: The most important resource that supports my writing life, and me as a whole is Internal Family Systems. It’s an evidence-based therapeutic approach that I used in my psychology private practice with my clients and it’s also a model for self-understanding. It’s had the single biggest impact on my healing process, it’s the framework through which I live my life and it features in my fiction writing. I’d actually written a non-fiction book that translated IFS into a self-help model, which I never published, because I really wanted more people to know about it. But then I realised that what really sung to me was embedding these ideas in story, allowing the narrative to lead and opening up space for people to connect more deeply to themselves as teen readers or to their inner teens as adult readers. This feels like my true work, what I’m here to do, and it lights me up.

Now to you…

Jodie talks about the importance of trusting one’s intuition. Can you recall a time when listening to your intuition led to a significant decision or change in your life?

YA romance often explores themes of self-discovery and first love. What YA novel has resonated with you the most, and why?

Jodie transitioned from psychology to writing YA fiction. Have you ever made a major career shift based on a passion or interest? What inspired that change?

Leave a comment

Like so many writers who started out with little to no readers, writing The Editing Spectrum has been a journey of finding my voice. 

Writing for and talking to so many of you has been the healing work of my 30s that I never saw coming. 

And what started as an experiment in sharing how I make my way through the world as an autistic person—while also writing and negotiating the complexities of an online presence—is now culminating into a first-time experience for me.

Tomorrow I’m joining the Content Spark Summit in:

From Gut to Great: An Editor’s Advice on Writing With Instinct

I’ll be joining a bevy of other Substack voices, including:

; ; ; ; ; ; Robert Draper; ; Sarah Fay ; ; ; and

Registration is free for the day of the event.

Register here!

When , the event organizer, first invited me, I was intrigued by the concept and knew the speakers in the event were some of the best Substack voices around.

I also felt hesitant about participating as a member of a panel. 

It takes a lot of effort for me to synchronize what I'm hearing while processing facial cues while also formulating how I see or approach a certain topic. All these layers typically add up to a challenging experience for me to feel that I’m really involved in a conversation. 

I almost declined Christin’s invitation, but after a bit of consideration I realized this was a moment to advocate for myself and see if there was some flexibility available in the summit. I didn’t know Christin, but her communications had been warm and friendly, so I decided to express my excitement and a few concerns.

She was quite receptive and supportive, offering to provide the questions in advance and modifying the format to a one-on-one conversation. This preparation helped me engage deeply and authentically on the day of our interview. I felt the conversation went incredibly well, and seeing the initial clips felt surreal. I've always been behind the scenes, but now my voice and expression are centered. 

Here’s my interview with Christin

In our conversation, we dive into:

» What makes for really good writing? (And what I’m looking for as an editor and editorial strategist.)

» What does it mean to “write from the gut”?

» What my editing process is like!

» How to approach the concept of “tone” in your own writing.

The Content Summit

Interview: From Gut to Great | An Editor's Advice on Writing With Instinct

From Miranda Priestly, the formidable editor-in-chief in "The Devil Wears Prada," to Max Perkins, the legendary editor who nurtured the talents of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, editors ha…

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2 years ago · 23 likes · 17 comments · Christin Thieme

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’s memoir, The Part That Burns, was a 2021 Kirkus Best 100 Indie Book and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women’s Literature, with starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Her essays and fiction appear widely in literary journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Narrative, Masters Review, North American Review, Calyx, and more, as well as in her popular Writing in the Dark on Substack, where she also teaches writing. Additionally, she teaches at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and Writing in the Dark: The School, a creative writing program she founded in 2012. She is working on her first novel. 

Amanda: Before we start, can you describe the setting where you’re answering these questions?

Jeannine: Outside, the sky has gone a little dark even though it’s only late afternoon, and thunder is rolling in from the northwest. The branches of our burr oaks are swaying in this wind, as is the pride flag hanging from our front porch. Which is where I am—on the porch. And our porch is the best porch for writing because it’s huge and wide and a good portion of the south end is screened in and furnished comfortably enough for family dinners or late evenings with friends or to sit on a couch with my computer on my lap, as I am doing now, with the rain sheeting down all around me. There is nothing like a good old-fashioned Midwestern thunderstorm: the sound, the smell, the way it keeps changing as the sun comes back to illuminate the raindrops. It’s absolutely lovely. And yes, some of it is blowing through the screens. Delicious!

Childhood

Amanda: Were you a chatterbox as a child, or were you quiet or something else entirely? When you spoke up or expressed a preference, what sort of response did you get?

Jeannine: I was a very quiet child—not just shy but scared. I wrote about that a lot recently when I filled out ’s Oldster Questionnaire, because I am curious about the kind of child I might have been in a healthier, safer family. One issue was that my family didn’t have much money, and—as often happens with working poor families, when financial precarity drives decisions—we moved a lot. I went to about ten different schools before finishing high school. This sensation of repetitive loss and being constantly plunged into new schools where I didn’t know anyone exacerbated my shyness. I spent a lot of time too terrified to speak.

But I really appreciate you asking about the kinds of responses I got when I did speak up, because it varied so much between home and school. At home, when I spoke up—which did happen at times, in spite of being terrified, because I was also fiery and stubborn—I would be punished, and often severely. Spankings, yes, but more often my mother would simply slap me. She was fast and strong and those slaps hurt. The worst, though, was being sent to sleep in the basement, sometimes for multiple nights in a row.

In contrast, at school I was usually rewarded when I was brave enough to raise my hand. As a result, I was one of those very quiet new girls, always the new girl, who surprised my teachers and classmates by knowing the answers, solving the math problem, being brave enough to volunteer myself for whatever the teacher wanted us to do. This created a positive feedback loop at school: the more I spoke up, the more encouragement and praise I received, and the more encouragement and praise I received, the braver I felt about speaking up.

As you might imagine, I am very grateful to my teachers, one and all. Teachers are heroes. Without my teachers, I would not be who I am today.

Influences

Amanda: If you had to choose one person from your past that most influenced who you are today, who would that be and why? This can be a person from history, an animal, a fictitious character in a book, TV or movie.

Jeannine: I’m going to cheat a little and pool all my teachers together as the greatest influence from my past. I cannot overstate how influential teachers were to my short and long-term sense of self, and my ability to imagine myself into a better future. My teachers saw me in a way that no one at home did. They saw me as curious, brave, and deeply eager to please! Gosh, that made me vulnerable later, that eagerness, that desperate need to please, but that’s another story. In elementary and middle school, at least, the qualities that made me who I was, that made me feel like me, were recognized, supported, encouraged, and even rewarded by my teachers, which ultimately convinced me that I was someone the world could love and accept, too.

I’ll give a couple of quick examples because specifics matter. In first grade, a classmate tattled on me for not having my head on my desk during rest time, and I was horrified and literally paralyzed over what would come next. But my beloved teacher said it was fine, that I was being quiet and didn’t need to put my head down. For whatever reason—who knows, maybe she was discouraging tattling—she made me feel safe and seen instead of punishing me. The world was suddenly a more just place. Later, many teachers commented on my writing and encouraged me to write more and share my stories and poetry. In fifth grade, my teacher let me write a play for our class and allowed us to practice and perform it for the whole school. Later, when things got untenable at home, not long before I wound up in foster care, I started missing a lot of school, and my geometry teacher approached me. I was, as usual, terrified. But what he said was that he knew something was going on in my homelife—he didn’t have the details, he just saw I was having a hard time, and he wanted to say he saw me as a hard worker with an inventive approach to how I solved the math problems without actually doing the homework. That, he told me, was a good sign that things would be okay for me, eventually.

Those are just a few examples of hundreds. Can you imagine how much those interactions shaped my future? Inevitably that’s why I was destined to become a teacher, and why teaching is as fundamental to my creative practice as writing. I am not just a writer who teaches. I am a writer, and I am also a teacher. I am equal parts both.

Creative Spark

Amanda: When you get an idea for a new essay or project, what does your first instinct look, sound or feel like?

Jeannine: What a grand question! I had a creative idea like this lately, not for an essay, but for what I wanted to do with my Lit Salon section of Writing in the Dark. The idea arrived fully formed in a bright flash of inspiration, where I knew I wanted to publish work from readers who were writing in response to the exercises I teach each week. I knew they could describe the exercise they wrote in response to, and then I could describe what I saw in their work that compelled me to select it for publication, and in this way, we could have this incredibly rich, almost meta experience of the writing process from start to finish. I was so excited my heart sped up. I was almost trembling!

I ran out to my porch to tell my youngest adult child, , about the idea, because they help me with Writing in the Dark, which makes them the first person I run to with new ideas. Anyway, they knew as soon as they heard it that it was as exciting, and I launched the new endeavor two days later. It’s been wonderful. But the point is, I felt it one thousand percent in my body that this idea was right because everyone would benefit—writers get a place to share their work, I pay them and publicize their work, my teaching and editorial process is spotlighted through the writers’ Author Notes, and readers gain access to the “back room” of writing, from idea to draft to wrestling with revision, and, finally, editing. Ideas like this, that are so aligned and offer so much to all participants, are my favorite kind.

Writing Process

Amanda: What one thing do writers most often do that erodes self-trust and they don’t even know it?

Jeannine: They try too hard, but not hard enough. What I mean by this is that they insist on writing well—in the way they already know how to do—and as a result, they avoid risks.

Most often, people do this without even realizing it, because they’re still somehow writing “for the grade,” just as they learned to do in school. In the digital age, this converts to writing for clicks or reactions. And, yes, this kind of writing has a place, of course—sometimes we just have to write a thing and get it out there in the most expedient way possible! But if this is the only kind of writing we do, this kind of “write, rinse, and repeat” stuff, we are not writing creatively.

And here is a good moment for me to note that I am answering this question from the perspective and therefore the bias of a writer who teaches creative writing, which is a specific kind of writing—it’s broad and can mean many things, not just literary stuff or poetry or hybrid or flash, etc. The term creative can be applied to almost any kind of writing, even copy and “content,” as long as the writing meets the central definition of creative. And for a thing to be creative, it needs to take us somewhere new.

Creative writing requires that we depart the comfortable confines of the familiar and explore new ways of approaching the page, new strategies for putting words together, whole new concepts for what a thing built of words can be. In other words, we have to experiment. That, in turn, requires us to make some messes and accept that our experiments might fail. In science, something like 70% of research experiments fail, or at least turn up no usable results. That’s what it means to experiment! But writers want to think everything they make is somehow usable. I think that’s a mistake. We need to play around more and be willing to make fodder we can’t use in any productive way. It’s about process.

So, what I am saying is that when writers fall—often without recognizing it themselves—into the pattern of doing the same thing on the page over and over again, driven by the need for “productivity” and risk avoidance as well as avoidance of doing other, less certain new things on the page, they can paradoxically erode their own trust in themselves.

And it is a paradox.

You might think that writing very serviceable prose repeatedly would build our trust in ourselves. But I don’t think that’s true for creative writers who mostly already know how to write serviceable prose, which is why we want to write creatively in the first place. Serviceable prose is just mechanics. What brings us closer to the world, ourselves, and each other through our words is the wild, unpredictable and sometimes painful bramble of the new.

Resources

Amanda: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?

Really tough to narrow it down to just one, especially something unlikely. But I think I would have to say poetry, and I think it’s fair to say that’s surprising because I am a prose writer and have only ever published one thing called a “poem,” in the poetry journal Up the Staircase Quarterly, and it was more than 1,500 words long! So, I for sure don’t identify as a poet. I’m a prose writer. But most of the readings I teach with are poems, because I have learned and keep learning so much from poetry. It’s not just what I learn about how to write—the images, the economy of language, the music, the breathtaking leaps to meaning. It’s also about observation of the world, and what it really takes to see the world up close as it really is. That alone is very difficult to do. To go a step further and see the world up close as it really is and also find words that convey the world—sharp, wounded, glorious—that’s truly remarkable, and certainly accomplishes more than whatever poem might result from the process. In the end, it has less to do with writing and more to do with living, this process of poetry. It is about how we live in the world, and who we become along the way. Poetry is the best teacher.

Oh! And I should add: poetry needn’t be difficult or off-putting, even though so many people think of it that way. Sure, some poetry feels like that, but so does some prose! Any kind of writing can be difficult or off-putting, and sometimes that kind of writing is well worth the effort anyway, right? Although, for me, it oftentimes is not. What I am most interested in these days is writing that opens the curtain between me and the world, not writing that builds walls around itself with feats of complexity. I want writing that shows up for me and reveals the world more clearly. Good poetry does that.

For anyone intimidated by poetry, try:

• Ross Gay’s A Small Needful Fact 

• ’s Good Bones 

• Ada Limon’s What it Looks Like to Us and The Words We Use 

• Ellen Bass’s The Thing Is 

• Marie Howe’s The Boy 

• Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays 

• Sharon Olds’s The Clasp 

• Jane Kenyon’s Evening Sun 

• Wendell Berry’s Peace of Wild Things

• Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese

These are a good place to start—with so many more I could add!

Neurodivergence

Amanda: Can you share about how you relate with neurodiversity, and how you have tended to your needs through writing?

Jeannine: I have complex PTSD acquired from my childhood history of abuse and sexual abuse.

Most sources acknowledge PTSD as an acquired form of neurodiversity. And in that vein of writing with complex PTSD, I would say this: Everything I just described about poetry has been foundational and transformational to a safe writing practice, because it keeps me in the present moment. Writing as a "practice of attention," which is how I see it, and careful, true rendering of the world through language, is ultimately a form of mindfulness. You can see this clearly in the work of the poets I listed above. They write through the body, and reading poetry has, over the years and decades, taught me to write through my body, too. That has not only made my writing better, but it has also made my life better, because it’s healing and enlivening. Every day, I learn to pay more attention—but not in the hypervigilant, PTSD-based way I learned to do in my childhood, which kept me safe but was not healthy. Poetry is a way of seeing truth, and for a kid who grew up in an unsafe world, there’s nothing more reassuring.

Now to you…

Jeannine talks about how much teachers made a difference in her life as a child. Tell us about a teacher who impacted your life when you were younger—or even one who is teaching you something about yourself now.

Each week, Jeannine is publishing essays with some of the most heart-opening writing prompts I’ve ever seen. To me, Jeannine’s work feels how I’d imagine it felt when rivers were carving out the Grand Canyon. Have you participated in any of Jeannine’s work—and if so, would you like to share with us where you hope to be taking your writing practice?

I want to be let in.

I want to see if I can decipher who the writer was when they began writing a piece, where they got lost and where they landed by the end. I want to discover through their nuances, their style choices, their vocabulary, who is this writer in their heart of hearts?

This may seem like a tall order, but it’s not—not really. Because underlying all the layers of writing that can be turned in, what I want most is to feel that the writer is themselves, without pretense. 

I don’t think I’m alone in aching for writing that whisks us all away. And what’s one way to do that? Well, Strunk & White say:

Write in a way that comes naturally.

Write in a way that comes easily and naturally to you, using words and phrases that come readily to hand. But do not assume that because you have acted naturally your product is without flaw.

The use of language begins with imitation. The infant imitates the sounds made by its parents; the child imitates first the spoken language, then the stuff of books. The imitative life continues long after the writer is secure in the language, for it is almost possible to avoid imitating what one admires. Never imitate consciously, but do not worry about being an imitator; take pains instead to admire what is good. Then when you write in a way that comes naturally, you will echo the halloos that bear repeating.

You were born to imitate

I was probably nine years old when I visited my grandmother and asked how she liked the letters I’d been writing her. 

She said, “Well, they don’t sound like you.” 

My heart dropped into my stomach. Grandma had a blunt, straightforward way. A stalwart reader and researcher, she never minced words. She grabbed my last note and tapped her fingers on words and phrases that confused her and that I instantly recognized from the 1994 version of Little Women I’d been watching (and then simultaneously reading) on repeat. They were some of my favorite moments I was trying to adopt into my own language of expression, not realizing that people in the 1880s used more flourish than necessary today. 

As Strunk & White point out, imitation is the foundation of all language. We start by echoing back the facial expressions and sounds that surround us from a young age. This container for language never really leaves us. Whether it’s poetry in high school, research papers in college or answering to a publisher’s guidelines for publication, the sound of other people’s voices and their boundaries push back onto us. This is why surrounding ourselves with a variety of ideas, cultures and points of view is so important in the development of voice. When we read people we disagree with, the echo chamber surrounding our writer’s voice gets some walls pushed down. 

Mary Oliver agrees with the usefulness of imitation. She says in A Poetry Handbook that imitation “is a very good way of investigating the real thing.” She

Read more

is the author of the New York Times-bestselling essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias and the novel The Border of Paradise, which was one of NPR's Best Books of 2016. She won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize (2016), was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in their decennial list (2017), received a 2018 Whiting Award, and was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2018. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, Esmé lives in San Francisco. She is the founder of The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy for ambitious writers living with limitations and can be found at esmewang.com.

Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.

I’m working in bed with my laptop propped up on my leg—one is crossed over the other. I have a fan unit blowing on me, because I’m sensitive to temperature and the sensation of wind blowing on me helps my symptoms. I’m on top of a mess of floral blankets the color of mustard. I’m surrounded by a pen case, thick notebooks, assorted pens, a sketchbook, and my phone. The bed is like a nest where I settle in to work, think, and doze.

Childhood

Amanda: Given a choice, were you the child who would run barefoot outside or were you inside reading?

Esmé: I did play outside. I have a younger brother, and he and I would often play games that I orchestrated: Space and Cavemen were games that we frequently played outdoors. But I was also a wildly bookish girl—I wasn’t athletic in the slightest, so outdoor games mostly had to do with imagination. For example, Cavemen meant I’d be the cavewoman collecting eucalyptus bark (which was “food,” in our game) and inedible berries while my brother slaughtered animals; then we’d retreat to the cave-like area at the center of the backyard and play-act cooking and eating. Indoor activities, such as reading, were imaginative as well. I convinced myself at one point that I myself was a character in a book, and the book was being written by someone far above myself.

Influences

Amanda: Who in your life has shown the most self-trust, authenticity, and inner-knowing? How did they embody it?

Esmé: I’d have to choose between my best friend and my husband here—I’ll talk about M because I talk less about her than I do other people. We became friends in graduate school, and I thank the heavens every day that we became friends, because she is the kindest woman with the most ferocious, leonine protectiveness. She lives across the country from me, but we text every day, and we have phone calls every week—sometimes five-hour long conversations that remind me of how passionately I’d use the phone when I was in high school.

It was M who pointed out that I tend to put myself down, and that my self-esteem is 10 feet below the floorboards. She is kind enough to gently correct me when I'm being hard on myself—my foundational sense is that I am bad, and so I respond violently to additional evidence that I’m bad. She helps me to understand my own buried self-trust, authenticity, and inner-knowing. I love her; she is a blessing.

Creative Spark

Amanda: When you get an idea for a new essay or project, what does your first instinct look, sound or feel like?

Esmé: Usually it’s just a small kernel of something. A quote—I have a quote written down to the left of me right now that says, “There are teeth marks on everything he loves.” It’s from Yusuf Komunyakaa. It caught me—it snagged on me, and so I put it on an index card and pinned it to my linen bulletin board. The cards will grow and multiply as I find other things that are relevant to that initial seed.

Writing Process

Amanda: What does your writing life look like today, and can you compare/contrast it to 10 years ago?

Esmé: I have a career as a writer now, which is something that I did not have 10 years ago. I think it was exactly 10 years ago that I published my first piece—”Perdition Days” in the now-defunct website, The Toast—which ended up in The Collected Schizophrenias. But it started out as a fully formed piece sent to Nicole Cliffe, who replied that of course they’d take the piece. She didn’t touch a thing in the edits, and I received $50 for the publication.

Now I have accolades and so-called proof that I can make a life as an author, but the fear of losing my ability to put words together doesn’t dissipate. I fear erosion; just because I wrote two books doesn’t mean that I can write a third or fourth. But I do have experience and therefore some kind of confidence. I know myself and my writing practice with more solidity.

Resources

Amanda: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?

Pinterest. I love Pinterest and use it to collect images. I’m a highly visual writer, so the board for the novel I’m currently working on has about 1700 photos in it. I add to it every day. I did get them bound in an 800-paged hardcover (through the company Lulu), so that I can refer to them when I need inspiration.

Bonus! Neurodiversity

Amanda: Did being diagnosed neurodivergent affect how you see or interact with your writing life?

I feel as though my neurodivergency has been so obvious in my life that I can’t compare how I write now to how I wrote before a diagnosis. It’s true that I wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my teens, but I’ve now spent more time with a rattling brain than I have without. And so I know that I need to be careful. I can get lost in the writing. I’ve been haunted by hallucinations or ghosts, depending on one’s opinion, while writing an intense interlude. All of it has always been there, I think, and so I work with it the best I can.

Esmé’s writing program, The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy, is currently accepting students. Created for ambitious writers living with limitations, the full curriculum covers pre-writing to writing to publication, and includes twelve guest lectures from brilliant writers such as Hanif Abdurraqib, Leslie Jamison, and Suleika Jaouad. The Academy is run as a membership at $147/month, and we welcome students to stay and go as they please. Learn more at unexpectedshapeacademy.com.

I am a stream-of-consciousness explorer, writer, and designer based out of Kolkata, India. As a descendant of war refugees, I possess a natural tendency to ponder the imminent dangers of oppression. Other subjects that intrigue me include analyzing power structures, and cultural malaises like hustle, consumerism, materialism, and the attention economy. My curiosity is inadvertently fueled partly by my ancestors’ past that lingers in the shadows of my identity and partly by my lived experiences. I exhume these fossilized memories on my Substack, Berkana. I frequently meditate on themes of war, grief, and loss, exploring what it truly means to be human amidst such adversities.

I have been diligently crafting a body of work that awaits transformation into a manuscript. While it remains a work in progress, my aspiration is to bring it to fruition as a complete book soon. It has been massively inspired by Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s work.

***

In today’s interview with Swarnali Mukherjee, we’ll explore…

• prioritizing the intuitive voice over the cynical one.

• demanding muses

• how to not judge others when they can’t connect with your truth

• the role of negative emotions

… and so much more. You will love it, I’m sure. Read below:

Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.

In February of this year, I received a call informing me of the severe prognosis for my father’s ongoing cancer treatment. My husband and I made a swift decision to move across the country to be closer to our parents. Everything was fine for a while, and my father was even recovering well. But on the fateful day of April 8th, my father passed away suddenly and traumatically. This interview was recorded much prior to my loss.

***

: I am answering these questions from my newly set-up writing desk beside a window overlooking farms and unkempt patches of banana and bamboo forests. India’s eastern countryside is wild, magnificent and unruly. My experience of it is quite sublime, so I often find myself bewildered down to my bones. Throughout the day, it feels like any other city with construction noises pouring in, but as soon as dusk arrives, the entire place is blanketed in an eerie stillness. It is the kind of quiet that permeates through all the mundane edifices. All the gradients in movement seem to merge into a quiet oneness during those hours of prevailing darkness. 

It is in this hour that I am sitting down with these questions because nothing is as instrumental in the unfurling of mind as silence. Oh, and I can hear the jackals howling and yelping through the paddy fields; the crickets are singing in chorus too. I guess it must rain today.

Childhood

Amanda: Given a choice, were you the child who would run barefoot outside or were you inside reading?

Swarna: If it were up to me, I would always be tucked away in a corner, reading by a window, invisible to both grown-ups and children alike. I remember reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for the first time and creating scenarios in my head of a reclusive uncle somewhere in the highlands who had a secret wardrobe that opened up to a place like Narnia. I even invented imaginary characters and traveled with them for months at a stretch in my fictional world.

I was a quiet child, so nobody bothered to get in my way until one day my sister insisted that I, too, should go outdoors and make some friends. I was old enough to go by myself, so my sister never accompanied me. Besides, I guess my shy, introverted energy crippled her social life and made it hard for her to make new friends.

To make up for her awkward avoidance of me, my sister used to steal books from the school library for me since we did not receive enough allowance to afford the luxury of reading. We were students of a missionary school, so getting caught stealing would have brought dire consequences, but my sister risked everything so that I would feel less lonely in the company of great books.

One day she brought a copy of Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, and I just couldn't put it down for almost a month. Apparently, it is one of the greatest revenge stories ever written in French literature. I read somewhere that, because of his partial Afro-Caribbean ancestry, Dumas used to be bullied and ostracized as a child.

In some sense, then, the story of the illustrious Count of Monte Cristo seemed to be an alter ego of Dumas, who, through similar talent, connections, and strife, rose to a position of power and influence. Dumas and his story left an indelible mark on me, implying the gravity of words and their power to galvanize the universe in your favor. I think it was then that I truly believed that I could do the same with words, if I used them effectively. 

Influences

Amanda: How do you recognize when someone or something is a positive influence on your writing process and self-trust? What changes inside you and on the page?

Swarna: For me, cultivating self-trust means prioritizing the intuitive voice over the cynical one. I reflect often on the Cherokee parable of the two wolves—one symbolizing darkness and despair, the other light and hope—wherein the wolf that prevails is the one I choose to feed. When I meet someone new or read a new way of thinking about the world, I tend to observe which voice they nurture. I find the ones that encourage the intuitive voice also positively influence my writing and self-trust, which in turn also foster a seamless flow of expression. I don’t find these sorts of connections often, but when I do, I notice the change in my creative process.

I work diligently to avoid conformity or being trapped in an echo chamber, which is why I also ask a lot of questions—of the world, of people and of myself. I engage in rigorous self-inquiry. I scrutinize my own biases and convictions, challenging the most entrenched aspects of my perspective. I ask the rigidity in me, “Why are you here, and what are you blocking from my vision?” If I am slipping down the wrong rabbit hole, it’s usually because I’m seeking validation rather than truth.

Creative Spark

Amanda: When you get an idea for a new essay or project, what does your first instinct look, sound or feel like?

Swarna: The new idea is usually not a “spark” or scintillation for me; it feels more subtle, like whispers or nudges here and there. It's like a looming shadow in my subconscious, akin to a spectre passing through wind-blown curtains—barely visible through the corners of my eyes but enough to awaken curiosity. It is a slow awareness that something is awaiting manifestation. To me, the muse is always elusive, mercurial, and proud. It's like a cat, closely observing me; lose focus for even a second and it disappears as if it never existed.

My muse demands attention—complete, dedicated, and persistent attention. Sometimes it nudges me into scribbling notes, verses, sketches, or taking photographs—it seems to want a thread to hold onto the inspiration, in order to harness it later. Sometimes, an idea repeatedly arises synchronously in multiple places. For instance, I might be thinking of nostalgia for colonial architecture, and then throughout the day, get hints of it in various ways—like someone mentioning it, or stumbling into it on YouTube or in a book.

All these signals urge me to chase after a specific idea. The more I delve into it, the more avenues of exploration open up, like discovering endless rabbit holes to dive into. A new idea usually feels like venturing into a strange mind-scape with writing as the only way to truly comprehend the unravelings. It's like riding a wave that builds up until it crashes into an essay or a project. 

Writing Process

Amanda: Were there any habits or beliefs that you had to let go of in order to more deeply trust your writing process?

Swarna: The first thing that I had to let go of is approval or validation from others. I now know what I did not know when I started: that your authentic truth might make some people really uncomfortable, and you have to voice it anyway. Even if you might feel a little queasy about certain things, those are the things that you need to embrace the most. They are the unresolved pieces of yourself that perfectly fit into the places your writing demands. Essentially, you have to write your truth into power.

I’ve learned I can't concern myself too much with impressing or offending anyone who may not want to connect with my truth, either by choice or circumstance. Because I know that I’m writing not to belittle others but to exalt my own truth—and this has helped me tremendously in deeply trusting my writing process.

The second most important thing that I unlearned is reacting to every stimulus around me. Cultivating a nuanced perspective of the mundane requires undeterred commitment to the act of observing without reacting. The structure of the world, as we know it, is designed for reactions—social media and digital presence all nudge us to react fast or risk missing the train of intellectual discourse. What I am essentially suggesting here is quite the opposite.

We need to harness the rising waves of emotions so we can channel them through and into our creative pursuits. In the context of writing, our process then becomes a response to our triggers. In order to understand what we observe, we need to create. Contrary to what the modern world would have us believe, I think our immediate, mindless reactions to our circumstances stifle our creativity.

The third and final thing that I had to unlearn in order to completely fall in place with self-trust, is the idea of “negative emotions.” Every emotion has its purpose — anger exists as a catalyst for the most urgent changes; melancholy fosters within us a profound connection to existence; grief, on the other hand, is the catharsis needed to cleanse our vision, like the atmosphere after the passing of a storm.

This has helped me see that there is nothing wrong with brokenness. The world is a difficult place to be a human, and growing up unintentionally comes at a cost, a price that we all learn to pay as we traverse our individual paths. The ways of the world would break us. Some of us are battered by life circumstances, by people who want to clip our wings, by geopolitics, by our own family, by strangers. 

Our job is to confront these monsters lurking in the shadows, to slip from their tight grasp, and not let them overpower our existence. The only way I’ve found to do that is by fully accepting our collective brokenness, our humanity, to admit that our hearts hurt and we break down more often than not. To hold despair tenderly and say to it, “I am here, and I know you are too, but I want you to know that you will not reign over me.”

Resources

Amanda: What one book, poem, piece of art or chapter of writing would you give to your younger self, and why?

Swarna: This timeless piece of advice by Arundhati Roy because it encapsulates all the wisdom of human existence in one beautiful prose. It resounds deeply with who I was, am and yet to become.

“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”

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From famous actors to childhood trees (yes, trees), I asked these writers about who (or what) most influenced who they are today. Their answers are surprising, varied, and delightful. Chosen from my Cave of the Heart interview series, I hope you enjoy these bits of inspiration from your favorite Substackers.

1. Harry Dean Stanton —

I am going to take the phrase “who you are today” very literally and go with Harry Dean Stanton — specifically, Harry Dean Stanton in conversation with David Lynch; that famous interaction where David Lynch says “How would you describe yourself?” and Harry Dean Stanton says, “As nothing. There is no self,” and they laugh. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of the self today for an article I’m writing on beauty as so-called “self-care” and “self-expression.” I bristle when people use these terms because in order for beauty products to be a tool for self-expression, you first must have a self to express, and I get the overwhelming sense that most people don’t know who they are outside of what they buy and apply.

» Read more about Flirté Jesus and how Instagram broke her brain in Jessica’s Cave of the Heart Interview.

2. Ina Garten —

Ina Garten! I vividly remember discovering the Food Network and her cooking show, Barefoot Contessa, when I was a junior in college. I’d seen it in passing before, but when I finally had my own TV and my own ability to record shows (oh, the days before streaming), I found myself rapt with Ina Garten. Her fabulous friends! Her dinner parties! Her gorgeous, but approachable food!

I started cooking her recipes, hosting dinner parties, and finding the joy in cooking for the people you love. 

» Read more about her recipe development and writing process in Caroline’s Cave of the Heart interview.

3. Larry David —

I could probably write a book about all the people who have inspired me because I draw inspiration from many sources. But for readers, I think the most obvious person is Larry David, who co-created Seinfeld and created Curb Your Enthusiasm. I think Larry David’s writing really helped me see the appeal of slice of life humor.

For the most part, storytelling is about big themes and big narrative arcs. People fall in love, go on epic quests, solve unsolvable crimes, etc. It’s real hero’s journey stuff. I love those kinds of stories, but that’s not where my mind lives. I’m much more interested in the stuff of everyday life. For me, the small things in life are a humor goldmine. Larry David’s work is where I first saw a writer mine gold from the experiences most people overlook. 

» Read more about what he considers a “humor goldmine” in Michael’s Cave of the Heart interview. 

4. My mother —

I took a long time to answer this one because I really wanted to pick a cool, esoteric indie someone or other to point to and impress everyone with the obscurity of it all. But even after I left it for a week, there is only one undeniable answer: my mother.

My mother is a force to be reckoned with. I know that’s a cliché but I can’t think of a better way to describe her. She is an incredibly strong, incredibly principled, incredibly disciplined woman. She grew up in Egypt, completed med school there, and then moved to Canada with my dad in the early 70s.

I always say that there were so few people wearing hijab when she moved to Ottawa that she was taken for a nun. But the truth is that when she first wore the hijab in Egypt, she was one of the first to put it on after generations of Western influence on the country. She endured ridicule and insults from everyone around her. Relatives and neighbours would taunt her and ask her if she thought she was “more Muslim” than them.

My mom is also a natural leader. She sees the people in front of her as they are. Really sees them. She has no time for small talk — always goes straight for the deep stuff. In terms of her influence on me, I think I learned the value of community, hard work, and pride in my identity.

» Read more about her incredible mother in Noha’s Cave of the Heart interview.

5. A birch tree —

There was a birch tree in our yard that my parents had planted a few years before I was born, and we grew up together. I remember touching fingertips to branches when I was very small and peeling the tissue-paper-thin white bark. And I enjoyed being outside on summer days. Sometimes as a teenager I would sit on the grass beneath the tree and read and write in a journal.

But it was what that tree did when I was in my early thirties that set me on the road to becoming the person I am today. I was living in Oakland, CA, by then, and one day the tree came to visit me in spirit. It just became very real and present in my mind’s eye for several minutes, and then it faded away. I wondered what that was about—until my brother called later from our hometown and said the tree was not doing well and would have to be cut down. So the tree had come to spend a few more moments together and say goodbye. I’d never experienced anything like that before, and it began to change me.

» Read more about her winding, neurodivergent path to writing in Priscilla’s Cave of the Heart interview.

After many years as an editor and writer, I find that I’m most drawn to voices that help renew a sense of trust in my own inner direction. So, thanks for joining me on this tour of self-trust!

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• How a quiet life can be both a blessing and a curse

• 3 steps Susan takes to begin writing: ground, path, and fruition

• How to pass on teachings in a way that honors those standing behind you

• Containment as the first rule of magic

• The cross section of “nothing to do with me” and “couldn't happen without me”

… and so much more. You will love it, I’m sure. Watch or read below:

Amanda Hinton

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Cave of the Heart, an interview series where writers trust fall into the depths of inner knowing, creativity, and the craft of writing. Today, I have the honor, truly an honor and gift to be speaking with Susan Piver.

Susan is the Buddhist teacher and New York Times bestselling author of many books. And if you were to visit my home, you would see them on my bookshelf back here with my other treasures. Susan is the founder of the Open Heart Project, which is an online meditation community of about more than 20,000 members. It's grown so much since we first connected. I first heard Susan speak rather auspiciously at a marketing conference. You spoke about mindfulness and communication. And as they say, the Dharma found me that day.

It was a very good day for me. There are so many things about the gifts that have come to my life from Susan's teachings and writing. But I want to share briefly before we start our conversation that Susan is quite an innovative and imaginative person whom I enjoy learning from on the sidelines of the gifts that she brings to the world. So I'm hopeful today that our conversation gives everyone watching or who might read the transcript alternatively a glimpse into that imagination. So welcome, Susan. I'm so glad to have you here.

Susan Piver

I am so happy to be here, it's nice to see you again. And what a lovely introduction and everything about it. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Amanda

Well, the way the Cave of the Heart is kind of structured is we've got different themes we like to explore, and a lot of it typically resonates with writers, but I find that the more that we open the invitation, also a lot about creativity. And so I want to open that door to you because—yes, you're a very wonderful writer—but you have this expansive creativeness and creativity as well. So one of the places I love to hear from people and typically have such a lovely time hearing from writers is, I love to find out a little bit about you as a child. Were you a chatterbox, as it were? Were you quiet? Did you keep to yourself? What was that like,  sort of those first inklings of expression? And how did those show up for you?

Susan

It's such a sweet question. I was not a chatterbox. I was like a stone. I was like, what the hell is going on here? I don't know what anyone wants from me. I dunno what you people are talking about. Yeah, I was very, very shy. And very reluctant to say anything. At the same time, I guess I thought I had things to say because I started writing very young. And I remember I was in first grade, but that's really, that’s really little—six, I guess. Maybe seven.

But anyway, we had an assignment to write about something. I cannot remember what it was. And our regular teacher was gone. We had a substitute teacher. And she pulled me aside and said, “This is really good.”

That changed my life. Thank you, Miss Mayon. Oh, that turned out to me. That changed everything. I was like, what? Because I had no sense of being reflected, having anything reflected back to me. And that was great. And then I just wrote things for myself, wrote stories for myself. And I continued to be very, very quiet.

Amanda

Otherwise, do you feel like that helps shape some different way of observing in the world—that quietness or did it feel good to be quiet?

Susan

When you're a kid, you don't know that there's anything different. So to me, it just was like: “This is what life is like.” And in terms of my future creative output, that falling back into being quiet has been a blessing and a curse. So the blessing part is no one's paying attention to you anyway. So I just say whatever I want. No one's gonna listen. So look, I have a whole big open free space for me. No one else is in here with me.

And the curse is no one else is in here with me. Yeah, no, one is really paying attention. So it doesn't really matter. And no matter how much evidence I get to the contrary, including your lovely, thoughtful words. And I believe you, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. There's still a part of me that goes, “I don't know who she's talking about.” So it leaves me in a kind of perpetually unformed state, which has its positives and its negatives. Does that make sense?

Amanda

Yes, I feel it's very resonant. That sometimes it seems there's a voice that says, “It's still just me inside. It's just still me.” And I think that even was part of what planted the seed for this series is I can write and I can give and try to express a self. But where do I find what it is? There's a luminous emptiness that I'm not quite sure I've made friends with yet. I think I am still trying.

Susan

What do you think it would look like if you had made friends?

Amanda

I feel I might write differently. I mean, my writing might become a different kind of tool, perhaps, rather than self-shaping, trying to shape a self that I feel I can offer.

Susan

Well, if I understand correctly, in the Buddhist view, the only thing that's doing the writing is the luminous emptiness. Something to think about anyway.

Amanda

Oh, that really touched me. Sorry guys, I'm already crying.  It's OK ... our readers are great, they'll understand...

Was there a point in your childhood where you felt a sense of audience, where all of a sudden it wasn't just "my writing" inside? Do you have a sense if that happened in your childhood or if it was much later into your adulthood?

Susan

It never happened. As far as I can tell. No, as far that I can tell. It happens for a moment. If I give a talk... I was lucky enough to write a book once that was very successful. All these accolades, you know, not even accolades, but just money and well, this is clearly a conventional success. And I still felt like I don't know what that is. I don't. Yeah… you know conventional success is better than conventional failure, though. Right?

Amanda

Yes. Well, I think holding that, you know, what is it that comes from within, it kind of leads into one of the next questions, which is how do you recognize when something or someone is a positive influence in that process? I feel like sometimes that the word "positive" gets people stuck. And I like to think of it as when a barrier is just removed, and you just feel that openness. What changes inside you? Does that luminous emptiness have a different quality for you?

Susan

That's a great question. I'm thinking, and I have the questions right behind me. So for whatever reason, what comes to mind, as you were asking... is that I write self-helpy books or books about Buddhism, relationships and so on. And so one would think, “Well, these are meant to be helpful to other human beings.” And sure, I really hope they are. But that's not why I do it. And I care, but I don't really care. I mean, I totally care but what I really care about are the people who taught me these things. And now I'm gonna cry.

And how can I honor them?

Because I have been given the most extraordinary gifts of teachings. And I don't know how or why I got to be taught by such great people. But my whole work life as a teacher and a writer is: How do I offer what I've been given? How do I give that to others in a way that honors the people who are standing behind me? And that's the whole gig.

So it's easy to recognize the positive moments and that is a good word for it because certain teachings you get and—you've had this experience too, I'm sure—where you're like, "Wait a minute ... nobody ever said that! Now this whole thing makes sense!” Or “I do not understand at all, but I know it's true.” That's what we look for: this quality of, "I knew that, but I didn't know I knew it." And when you hear the teachings for you, that’s the sense you get. “I already knew it. I didn’t know I knew it. I just didn’t know I knew it.” And then we have something extremely valuable to go from.

Amanda

Do you have any sense that that's happened with the books you've been able to write? That there was just a moment for you of resonance, of knowing that this is what I should set my talents to next? Or is it a little different for teachings?

Susan

Each book is different. And I mean, they have a different personality and a different process and different set of irritations and discoveries. But if I understand the question, the books themselves arise in their own way. And somehow, and I'm sure you and people who are listening or watching know what this means. “OK, that's it. That's the right thing.” I didn't know I was going to say that because you never know what you're going say. And I don't understand how people outline things, and I don’t understand that whole thing. Some people it really serves them for whatever reason and that’s great.

And it's not a chaos thing either. But something starts to form when you write on good days. And the only thing you have to do is start. And that's the hardest part. But sometimes you start, and it goes. And then the next day you may come back and go, “That is really great.” Or you might come back and go, "That's horrible." Next day, you come and think the opposite, but that it is OK. Something living has been generated. It's good.

Amanda

I really relate with the instinct to want to outline, and I've learned over time for me that's how I flush everything out that is not supposed to go in. Because the generative feeling is where something else is coming out, that isn't reliant on me to be the smartest or the most clever or luckiest to have gotten access to resources—it's something from within. I think I jumped a little bit to our next question with that. Is there any more shape you'd like to share around what kind of builds around you when you get an idea for a new essay or project? Or is it mainly that you feel this sort of energy, for lack of a better term, kind, of building on it itself?

Susan

The latter. I feel a kind of energy building it. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I am wrong. But when it comes to structure as a long-time student of Buddhism, Buddhism itself offers extraordinary structures in terms of learning and creating. For example, if I may, learning is considered to happen according to threefold logic—what it's called in Buddhism—threefold logic, some kinds of Buddhism, [though] not every kind. And threefold logic is ground, path, fruition.

Everything that you want to do: There's a ground. There's a foundation. Where do you start? Then there is a path. What's your next step, and what is the step after that? And then there’s a fruition that you can imagine or hope for or discover.

But when I sit down to write something, I often think, “Well, what is the ground?” Which for me may be, “What do I really want to say? Oh, this helped me with the relationship thing or this. I found this teaching so valuable. I wonder if I know any stories that could illustrate it?”

And then the path would be, “What are those stories? Let me write them down. And let me see: how does that retrofit?” And then the fruition is usually discovered. You know, of course, I want the fruition to be helpful. It's true, it's, you know, honest. But what is the fruition for me? What happened from writing this? And what is the fruition possibly for a reader?

And so ground, path and fruition are always very helpful tools. And anyway, Buddhism is sort of riddled with these lists and structures that can be—that's what I'm looking for—fitted into creative projects, according to me. So I'll take it with a grain of salt.

Amanda

I think I am smiling because I remember a moment—I think I'd been practicing for six or seven years. And I just went, “Oh, it's my mind. My mind is what I'm bringing fully to my writing. And the more that I can work with it and understand its qualities, that comes through.” And I remember feeling very silly, but it had taken, as you said earlier, that quality of “Oh I didn't know that I know. I knew, but I didn’t know. It was just finding its way to whoever could know it.”

Susan

That's great. And it's a great example of the ground, the path and fruition being the same thing. The ground is your mind. The path is your mind. The fruition is your mind. And there's something very harmonious and powerful about that, I posit.

Amanda

I'll join you in that!

Susan

Okay. We'll close it together. Co-positors. Thank you.

Amanda

So, one of the elements that really drove me to want to keep asking people questions about this potential place called the Cave of the Heart is, I feel I need reminders all the time of how to find trust back inside myself. And so I tried not to make every single question about trust and deep diving into trust, but I didn't grow up with that being planted inside me—this idea that you could trust the self.

And I'm smiling because I see where we're going next in our questions and I am wondering if there were any habits or beliefs that you had to let go of or adopt to more deeply trust your own writing process. Sometimes trust in writing feels very loaded to me. But I also feel like if I can't trust what comes on to the page to let it be, not that it's resplendent every time, then what am I doing? I can let it out. So I love to hear from people about what had to go. What took its place?

Susan

Yeah, also a great question. So, I have a two-part answer. One is: It's really helpful to get older. And you give up thinking that there's any other way to do it other than the way you do. I shouldn't have a writing schedule. I should have this. Over time I've been, “Well, I don't… maybe, but that's not gonna work. I can't do it that way.” So I've come to trust (because I don't have a choice) that the way I do it, is the way I'm going to do it. And I have thought countless times over the last 20 years or so: “What the hell am I doing?” I was going around in circles, like, I'm not doing anything. Every day kind of feels like, what? But then I look back and I've written 11 books.

Amanda

Yes, you have.

Susan

I started it in my community. If you said, “How did you do that?” I'd be like, “I don't know.” Hey, I mean, I'm not trying to be a genius or humble even—I just learned to trust that I am not going to go from step one to step two to step three, to get here. I want to go here, I have to go like this. It's going to be circular. So do I trust that? Well, there's nothing else, no other way. Sure. And I also trust, yeah, don't know why it is that way, but whatever. Whatever.

I also trust that feeling in writing when you think simultaneously, this has nothing to do with me. "Whatever I'm writing: I don't know where it came from, it has nothing to do with me, and could not happen without me." There's this little place, little cross section of “nothing to do with me” and “couldn't happen without me” that is so magical. As a teacher and a writer, that's my favorite feeling. This has nothing to do with with me, and I have to be here, it has to, it couldn't happen without me. I'll just say it for a third time. So I've really come to trust that that's kind of the best creative space to in. What do you think?

Amanda

Yes, as you're describing it, I feel that ping of recognition that, “Oh, yes,” and it usually ties back to something maybe I wish hadn't happened in my past, but I realize that it has transformed, too. And it's part of the vessel I create inside myself to let something come through, if something's going to come through. But it also doesn't require me to live and to be accessible to others. And now that you frame it that way, I realize that's how I know to trust it and just play with it some more. I don't think I quite have figured out. I'm building my sandbox every day to play in and so it's very refreshing when you reflect it against more rigid, even highly capitalistic sort of structures, where writers find themselves. Where like "This is now completely on you every day," just as for an example. That "this book must succeed because you are the only person in the whole world who must carry it forever now." And I think that was something that Buddhism gave to me as a gift was “It can be carried.” And when I can feel that “carriedness,” it's easier to play in this sandbox.

Well, as we're wrapping up our time together, I was wondering if there is any surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to, again and again, to bolster your writing life. I think it's nice to test it against what else is in my sandbox. What's in Susan's sandbox that she goes to to play with?

Susan

Well, I find that writing is obviously totally solitary, but other people are required, which is weird. So Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way and many other wonderful things, once said … I heard it in a talk. I never read it. But I was listening to a cassette. That's how long ago it was ... in my car. I pulled over and wrote it down. It was a cassette of a conversation between her and Natalie Goldberg who wrote Writing Down the Bones 25 years ago or something.

Anyway, she said the first rule of magic is containment.

And writing is a sort of magic because you start with nothing nothing and then hopefully you conjure something. And what did she mean by that? The first rule of magic is you need some kind of a container? So a deadline creates a container. So does sitting in a coffee shop for two hours by yourself writing; it creates a container. I'm gonna sit down, you're not gonna start playing word games on your computer, probably. You can do it. And then I teach meditation and writing retreats, and I have for probably 10 or 12 years. And I do it mostly for myself. Because if there's a container, we're gonna practice meditation from 9 to 10. We're going to have personal creativity time from 10 to 12:30, where you just sit in a room with everybody else, and you do your work, and then I'm going to make you lunch. And then we're going to repeat it.

And all I do, and I've done, like I say, for over a decade, at least so far, words come out. I am not teaching anybody how to write anything. I just say “Start. OK, now stop.” You need that container. So if any writer is like, “Why is it so hard? What do I need?” You know, it's very unlikely that it is a self-discipline problem only. Very likely you don't have the container and therefore you don't have magic.

Amanda

Find a container. That would make a very good essay about freedom to create the container you need, especially for people who maybe have been given that message of "I'm just lazy." Maybe not quite. But the concept of laziness is actually lazy — it's actually very lazy.

Susan

That is a great point. It's mathematically impossible for 90% of people who want to write to be too lazy to do so. But 90 percent of people claim that they are. So another little clue, and I'll keep this short, is once someone asked the great and controversial and amazing meditation master, now deceased, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, "What is our biggest fear?" And without hesitation, I wasn't there, but I heard the story. He said, “Here's a little illustration here: space. This is our big fear. It's space.” And when you sit down to write something, whether it's on the computer screen or notebook, this is what you see, and it sparks something primal in us. That is as likely to be fear as inspiration, let's say, because it opens a door, I don't know. I don’t know, opens the door to not knowing. And that scares us and it also is a great source of inspiration.

Amanda

I'm so grateful for our time and our chat today, Susan. It's occurring to me that I might include some information to the writing retreats you do. I feel like our readers might be interested in learning more about those. So if anybody's watching this, I'll put some links to how you create a meditation and writing retreat. That was great. Your description feels very resonant and reminds me of just some of the comments and discussion we have in our community around full acceptance and also I think I need a little nudge. How do I create that?

Susan

We all do and it's been a delight to talk with you too and your questions are so great. And I hope everyone who's listening, well I know everyone is listening benefits from the questions and hearing various people answer them.

Amanda

So I thank you too very much. All right. Thank you so much, Susan.

You can learn more about Susan’s writing and meditation retreats here. The next retreat will be held Oct. 16 - Oct. 20 in Austin, Texas.

is a Portland-based writer who focuses on psychedelics, music, and culture. His writing appears in The Guardian, DoubleBlind, Narratively (forthcoming), Portland Monthly, the San Francisco Chronicle and Portland Oregonian, as well as entries in anthologies by Hozac Books and Akashic Books and other publications. Seth's debut book—Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir—will be published in May, 2024 by Spiral Collective Press.

In today’s interview, Seth explores …

• learning self-trust from straightedge punk musician Ian MacKaye

• the condition of “genius”

• when to ignore your audience

• the role psychedelics has played in his writing life

… and more. Let’s get started!

Amanda: Before we start, can you describe the setting where you’re answering these questions?

Seth: A quiet Sunday. A bad back has me bedbound, but it’s not awful. The dog is at my feet, my daughter humming in the next room. My life could be far, far worse.

Beginnings

Amanda: Were you a chatterbox as a child, or were you quiet or something else entirely? When you spoke up or expressed a preference, what sort of response did you get?

Seth: I always saw myself as quiet, inward, contained. But there was also a sharp break in my childhood: My mother died suddenly when I was four and a half. And so I suspect I wasn’t one of the children you describe, but both.

A few years ago, a long-lost relative gifted me a DVD with the family 8mm film strips. What surprised me most was seeing myself before my mother’s death: I’m happy, exuberant, excitable. It was painful to witness, but also a gift: It reminded me that we are all mutable, that the story is never “over.”

Influences

Amanda: Who in your life has shown the most self-trust, authenticity, and inner-knowing? How did they embody it? 

Seth: I had the great fortune to grow up in the punk scene in Washington, D.C. in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And one of the key figures in that scene is a man named Ian MacKaye.

Many people find Ian divisive—he played a huge role in creating the straightedge movement, which eschews alcohol, drugs, and other intoxicants (and which many find harsh and puritanical)—but he was (and remains) a living exemplar of a person with an unshakeable moral compass and a commitment to ethical behavior. I doubt he’d say he’s endowed with any special musical talent, but he’s spent the last 45 or so years making indelible art with no regard whatsoever for commercial or critical potential. He knows what he wants to do, and then he does it. I really don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.

Creative Spark

Amanda: What do you think about the concept of a “creative spark”? Is it something we all have access to?

Seth: When I was just beginning to grasp that I might have a story to tell, my wife and I took a long drive, and she put on the audiobook version of ’s “Big Magic.”

The section that’s by far had the most impact on me is the one in which she talks about the concept of “genius” in its original (and most generous) sense. Not as something one owns (typically a “white male genius,” judging from the last few thousand years) but as a condition, a state of grace we neither possess nor control. It’s so beautifully democratic and so true to my own experience (see earlier: the punk scene, and artists who weren’t traditionally trained or considered “skilled” in the accepted sense).

Instead, Gilbert suggests that our real work is to invite this condition: To set the stage, ask for a mere few moments of inspiration, and make offerings to this fleeting fugue state. I’m hard put to quantify or describe it; the closest I can come is to say there are these moments when everything else drops away and I have a flicker of tunnel vision. Almost literally, like I’m looking down a long, dark corridor towards some distant end point. And that’s when what I really want to say drops into place.

The further I go into writing—and the better I understand that I possess no special talent of my own, other than committing to tell the truth—the deeper is my gratitude for this way of framing the phenomenon of inspiration.

Writing Process

Amanda: Were there any habits or beliefs that you had to let go of in order to more deeply trust your writing process?

Seth: I had to learn how to ignore the concept of “the audience.” That’s difficult: I want to be seen. I want reflections from the world. I want to know that I’m having some sort of impact. And yet every single time I think “THIS will get people talking!” or “THIS is the kind of post that will attract some attention!” I know I’m on the wrong track. 

I learned this long ago, though I sometimes forget it. Back—yet again—to the punk scene: When I was a musician, I grew intoxicated by the act of performing, by feeling the waves of energy and excitement coming back at me from an audience. But as soon as I tried to write “to” that audience, the art got weaker. It lost its spark. I demanded that it “do” something for me, instead of my serving it.

Stephen King is somewhat of a know-it-all, but I do love something he shares in “On Writing:” “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.” In other words: When you begin a draft, push any thought of a reader away. There’s plenty of time to consider their wants and needs later. It has to be for you first and foremost.

Resourcing

Amanda: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?

Seth: I’m going to provide an answer that will bother some readers: Psychedelics. 

My forthcoming book is subtitled “A Psychedelic Memoir” and that’s no lie. Psychedelics played a huge role in its creation, most of all by helping me poke my head above the clouds and glimpse that the stories I’d told about myself–who I was, what I was allowed to do or be in this world–were just that: stories. And that meant they could be changed.

In terms of writing, psychedelics have done much the same thing for me: Inserting a gentle (or sometimes not-so-gentle) prybar between me and the subtext, helping me see where I’m holding back or, worse, demanding a specific emotional response from readers. Because I’m so prone to getting stuck in the realm of the cerebral, they can have the effect of uncoupling me a bit, seeing what’s working and what’s not from a slightly different perspective. For what it’s worth, I generally find using psychedelics more useful in the editing rather than in the generative stage.

What does this look like in practice? Without any doubt, the most impactful thing is having these “big experiences” (I’m talking about a full-blown psychedelic journey, of any kind) and then bringing them back to my writing desk in the days that follow. We are meaning-makers, and I find that constructing a narrative—where did I go? What was I shown there, and how do I integrate it into my life?—is one of the most thrilling (and challenging) aspects of the journey.

On a micro level, I find that editing under the influence of a little cannabis is enormously helpful. I instantly see what isn’t working: what’s extraneous, misplaced, or otherwise needed (and yes: I keep a “safety copy” just in case!).

I have a feeling some readers will scoff at this, for good reason. There’s a danger embedded in here: The belief that an external input is necessary to gain “perspective” or “inspiration” or any other fill-in-the-blank. But I’d argue that anything that helps us shift our perspective and get a bit of distance—whether it’s psychedelics or meditation or exercise or prayer—is a gift, if used with caution and intent. It’s one I’m grateful for, and it hasn’t steered me wrong.

Bonus round: Neurodiversity 

Amanda: After being diagnosed neurodiverse (self-diagnosed counts!) did you have to rebuild trust in yourself in any way? What did that look like?

Seth: Ah, thanks for asking this. I’ve never received an “official” diagnosis, though several have been suggested by various therapists or healers. I appreciate your referencing “trust,” that’s an unusual framing but it hits home.

At times, I find it’s incredibly easy to get flooded—it’s like the circuit breakers all slip off and I don’t know what to do next. In these moments, I lose faith in myself. It’s like I don’t know the next right step. 

When this happens, I have to remind myself that I don’t have to believe my thoughts. So simple, startling, and true (and incidentally, another gift of psychedelics). That for whatever reason, I’m predisposed by wiring or experience or something unnameable towards this kind of paralysis. That I’ve felt it before, that it has passed in due course, and that I’ll feel it again. It’s a small adjustment, but it helps me ground and then move forward when the path is unclear.

Now you

Who modeled self-trust for you?

Do you ever feel drawn to write “to” your audience? Does it help or hurt your art?

How do you get that necessary shift in perspective, “whether it’s psychedelics or meditation or exercise or prayer”?

Leave a comment

is the author of The Good Mother Myth, forthcoming with St. Martin’s in spring 2025. Her previous books include the poetry collections Pocket Universe and Double Jinx, a winner of the National Poetry Series. With Emily Pérez, she’s co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. She writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful.

Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.

I’m sitting in my favorite spot in the house: a turquoise loveseat in our front room with a cozy blanket over my lap. Our dog, an enormous rescue greyhound, is kind of sniffling and sighing in his crate, and one of my kids is watching TV in the other room. It’s quiet and relatively peaceful after a long-ish, jumbly day of picking my kids up from a half day and driving them various places, attending a couple meetings, and trying to do some of my own writing in the gaps in between.

Childhood

Q: Given a choice, were you the child who would run barefoot outside or were you inside reading?

Inside reading, for sure! Some of my most vivid memories from childhood are of reading–not necessarily the specifics of the books, but of being totally immersed in the world of a book. I had both a babysitter and a teacher tell my mom at different points that they thought I read “too much.” (In the case of my teacher, that’s probably because I was reading under the desk instead of paying attention in math, but oh well!) I definitely got the message that I was a little weird–but I was pretty undeterred by those comments!

Influences

Q: How do you recognize when someone or something is a positive influence on your writing process and self-trust? What changes inside you and on the page?

A: That’s such a good question, because I think I’ve gotten better at identifying the bad or just unhelpful influences (the world is full of wonderful writers! But we can’t find our way by just following in someone else’s path!) and it’s still harder for me to identify the really right direction. 

I can think of a few moments of clarity, though. My dissertation advisor was really good at asking the right question to get me to just keep going, and he was also always asking how my scholarly work was connected to my creative work. After the third or fourth time, I finally started to realize that it was! And my agent, Maggie, has been such an incredible resource in my writing life in the couple of years we’ve worked together. She was the one who saw what I was doing in my newsletter and encouraged me to bring that voice into my nonfiction book proposal, and, ultimately, the book. (I wrote a little about our work together on the proposal here.) Though I didn’t realize it, I’d assumed I had to draw a boundary between my poet-self and the prose writer I was trying to become–and she helped me realize I could bring the habits and architecture of poetry into my prose.  

Creative Spark

Q: When you get an idea for a new essay or project, what does your first instinct look, sound or feel like?

A: Spark is a good word, and so is buzz, I think. For me, there’s a sense that there are tendrils–there’s a key concept or image or question, but there are also branching ideas stretching out from that center. I’m always more interested in projects that start with questions than with answers.

For my next book (coming out next year), The Good Mother Myth, I experienced an unfolding series of questions. At first, it was like I just came up from the early motherhood haze and looked around and felt like, “What just happened to me?” I spent a good chunk of that first summer working on the book, just writing and writing to record everything I had of those early years while it was still fresh. At that point, my question evolved to be something like: “If motherhood is supposed to be natural, why is this all so hard?” And that question sent me down some really wild research pathways, like trying to unpack the history of our ideas about “natural” motherhood (I mean, dying in childbirth is natural, but of course that’s not what the attachment parenting folks meant when they said “natural”) to trying to figure out what “animal mothering” can tell us about humans and nature.

In its finished form (it still feels so wild to think of the book as “finished”!), my book is trying to unpack what we think it means to be a “good mom” and where those ideas came from. (Hint: it’s basically never about what moms and babies and families actually need!) 

Writing Process

Q: Were there any habits or beliefs that you had to let go of in order to more deeply trust your writing process?

That there’s a “right” way to do it, whether that “it” is related to process or publication. Self-judgment and fear of others’ judgment is so incredibly stifling to creativity. 

There are important genre differences–I’ve had to learn to be more direct in some ways in prose, while in poetry I think you can get away with leaving a lot of mystery and being like, “Reader, you figure it out.” (I think of that as the kind of “jazz hands” ending to a poem. The editors I’ve worked with in prose have not been impressed with that move, and I’ve had to learn to spell out my thinking a little more and make connections more explicit than in a poem I would have left more open.) 

But when I’m thinking about that kind of judgment and self-judgment, it’s really about the performance of writing and being a writer. Like, am I publishing fast enough and in the right places? Do I have a zippy takeaway to describe my project? Do the cool kids like me? All of that is so damaging to the actual work of writing, and it’s something I have to kind of continually, consciously put aside. 

Since moving from poetry into prose, I’ve had to make peace with the parts of my writing process that are just a little chaotic, no matter how much I try to plan and organize in advance. There’s always a part where I think I’ll never be able to finish, and there’s always a part where I have to print out a whole draft and literally cut it up and tape it back together. I end up feeling a bit like a mad scientist, but I always get to the other side. 

Resources

Q: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?

I don’t know if this is surprising or unlikely, but walking and just being in the material world is really essential to my writing life. If I’m feeling stuck in a writing project, a walk will almost always unstick me. And I just get such pleasure out of really noticing the world around me. I saw the first daffodils of the year as I was dropping my kids off at school this morning, and I felt so grateful to be attuned to that change of season. I like to walk and just kind of mentally note the things I see–a neighbor’s dog, a squirrel jumping out of the dumpster, crocuses blooming, and think, in the spirit of Ross Gay, delight, delight, delight. 

Join Nancy in the comments!

Nancy shares about shifting from poetic writing to prose and some of the differences in what readers expect. What experience do you have with crossing between genres of writing? 

What is a moment of “delight, delight, delight” you’ve experienced recently? 

Leave a comment

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Welcome to Cave of the Heart, an interview series where writers trust-fall into the depths of inner-knowing, creativity, and the craft of writing. Are you ready to get curious about the cultivation of self-trust, give a warm nod to our child selves, and celebrate inspiration in all forms? Come with us into the cave of the heart.

is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance® (CEPF®), author of YOU DON’T NEED A BUDGET (Little, Brown Spark, 2024) and creator of Healthy Rich, a newsletter about how capitalism impacts the ways we think, teach and talk about money.

Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.

I’m in my den, which is the everything room in my house. It’s supposed to be a bedroom and has a big closet carved out of one wall, so I turned that nook into my office space. I confess I’m not actually sitting at this desk to write this; that hurts my body too much. I’m on the couch right next to it, but that would be an ugly picture of just a plain brown couch. I love my office nook, because it’s the place in the house I share with my partner that is only mine, and I get to deck it out with my eclectic combination of business and finance books, organizational accessories and lots of rainbow-y, fluffy stuff that reminds me of my inner child.

Childhood

Q: Were you a chatterbox as a child, or were you quiet or something else entirely? When you spoke up or expressed a preference, what sort of response did you get?

A: I was a bit of both. I preferred being inside and reading or writing in my journal to being outside or moving a lot, and I was introspective. But I’ve always loved conversation, and my parents always have, too. We always talked over dinner — nothing deep or sociological or anything, but lightly psychoanalytical questions like what would you choose for your last meal? — and I liked sitting in on the conversations between my parents and grandparents at Sunday lunch after church.

I wasn’t encouraged to express preferences, though. My stepdad carried a belief from his childhood that “children should be seen and not heard” (I swear he’s not 100 years old). My mom appreciated my independent spirit but didn’t know what to do with it (she had me when she was 22, I can’t even imagine?). So my mom and I argued a lot, even when I was very young, and it took until my mid-20s before we developed a mutual understanding of each other.

Influences

Q: How do you recognize when someone or something is a positive influence on your writing process and self-trust? What changes inside you and on the page?

A: I always appreciate when an editor or a reader asks a question I hadn’t considered. The best people do it in a way that encourages deeper thought or a new perspective that builds on what I’ve said without suggesting my original thinking was wrong. I absolutely love someone who complicates my thinking and pushes me to learn something new through writing. Good questions turn the process of writing from a solitary brain dump into a mind-melding conversation between the reader and me. It enriches the experience I have as a writer and gives me new knowledge and skills to take with me.

When I have this kind of conversation with an editor especially, I can viscerally feel the shift in the writing. It’s like the information is on puzzle pieces floating in front of me, and answering their questions shuffles them around until they click into place — and then there’s a glowing light around the finished puzzle and a distant choir of angels for good measure.

Creative Spark

Q: What was the last creative spark that you were really excited about, but it ultimately fizzled out? What do you do when something doesn’t come to life like you’d imagined?

A: Oof! So many experiences with this! Most recently… I initially envisioned Healthy Rich as a consulting company for financial educators, coaches and advisors. I thrive in the scheming phase of a business, where I’m defining an audience and a value proposition, outlining service packages, and laying out a website. I get to develop this whole story about what the business will be and how it’ll help people. I used to feel like a failure whenever I wouldn’t follow through with a business idea, but I realized years ago that envisioning business models is a fine creative hobby that stimulates my strengths, and I don’t have to treat every idea like an actual plan for the future.

Going through the motions also helps me cull what’s not working and discover what I want to keep pursuing. With Healthy Rich, I realized I didn’t want to spend my days pounding the pavement to convince financial educators to add an anti-capitalist perspective to their curriculum. But people were responding to the content I was writing to market the business and I loved having space for self-expression within the personal finance niche, so I realized I needed to return to what has always made sense for me: writing. And I brought the content to Substack and made the newsletter the whole business.

Writing Process

Q: Were there any habits or beliefs that you had to let go of in order to more deeply trust your writing process?

A: To become someone who could trust myself, I had to let go of striving for guaranteed outcomes. I have a habit of being afraid to execute on great ideas (see aforementioned business scheming) because I want to plot out every step and know that my effort will yield the outcome I want. Obviously that’s not possible with anything, so I just haven’t executed on most things.

When I started building Healthy Rich, even before I knew the direction I’d take it, I committed to the idea in a way I hadn’t done before. I decided this was an important idea, and I needed to give it a chance to grow. It took about a year and a half to feel like that was happening at all, and I’m certain that it’s working now because I was willing to trust that my idea mattered and give it the space it needed to become what I needed it to be. When I decided all I needed to do was write about money in this newsletter every week, all the striving for an outcome stopped, and I was able to go with the flow. That makes it much simpler to get a post on the page, because I don’t put any expectations on it; I just make it because it feels like it needs to be made.

Resources

Q: What’s your favorite quote on writing?

A: Anais Nin: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” This touches every part of my experience as a writer with autism who often has a richer experience of a moment as I’m reflecting and writing about it than I could have ever had in the moment.

Neurodiversity 

Q: Did being diagnosed neurodivergent affect how you see or interact with your writing life?

A: I self-diagnosed with autism maybe two years ago, but I continued to struggle with the label because I don’t fit the picture of autism that’s popular in our culture. As an example: I didn’t think I had special interests the way they’re described — which is usually something like a young boy who’s obsessed with bugs or trains. Once I embraced the identity and started consuming more autistic culture media, I started to understand how special interests can look across more diverse experiences. I realized my special interest has always been rhetoric — writing, conversation, argument, how words are used. Naming that — very recently! — has helped me put a rhetorical lens on everything I take on. It helps me see my writing skill as a strength I can use in any situation, which makes me a lot more comfortable getting out of my comfort zone and gives me a way to always feel powerful and useful.

Join Dana in the comments

What experience do you have with “striving for an outcome” in your writing practice? Are there any practices or tools you use to help create more space around that striving?

When it came to the evolution of her newsletter, Healthy Rich, Dana says she had to be “willing to trust that my idea mattered” in order for it to become what it needed to be. How is your writing practice today? Is there an idea for your newsletter you’d like feedback or encouragement around?

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Last year, when I published a series about Writing Seasons, there was one season in particular that created a pit in my stomach.

The Season of Tending.

By the time I first put shape to Writing Seasons in 2023, I was in the throes of my own Season of Tending in a new-to-me way—this time as a diagnosed autistic woman who was diligently trying not to drag herself toward burnout. The entire Writing Seasons framework, in fact, was created because I needed a way to distinguish between my inner experiences and the environmental factors that seem to weigh me down more than others. When things change around me, sometimes it feels the same as something changing inside me.

But with Substack as my main home for writing, I was handling things differently than ever before. In a Season of Tending, we’re focused on a lot of outer work like marketing, branding, networking or learning a new platform. In between the delight of answering questions in discussion threads or comment sections of my personal writing, I was pausing often to touch base with all the signals of my body. Almost daily, I was asking questions like, “Was this too much? Do we need a break? Does this hurt?” 

Much to my surprise, the answer I got was, “Keep going.”

In this Season of Tending, I felt something coming back to me—in an online social setting, no less. As readers found me and their comments came in steadily every week, I received a fuel I’ve never known before. “Intoxicating” might be the best word to describe this connection with readers, but I think there’s also something regenerative for me, in particular. Especially as a person who has rarely felt heard or capable of capturing attention doing something she loved. Especially as the little girl who played contentedly by herself. Especially as the quiet teen who wrote pages and pages in notebooks and then shredded the paper so no one could find them. Especially as the cautious 20-something who tended to choose invisible roles like backup singer or proofreader or spreadsheet keeper. 

The sense of being heard whenever I publish a new post has been knitting me back together in the last year.

A Season of Tending planted more seeds than I imagined was possible

And it’s created a whole new reality for me that I never would have imagined. Lately I’ve noticed my days are filled with more tasks and a spark of ambition I haven’t felt since 2019. There’s no doubt that Cave of the Heart, my beloved interview series, was brought to life precisely because of the connection I felt with so many people on Substack. I also began to re-envision how I could work with writers one-on-one again. Soon I was feeling the groundswell of ideas and creative inspiration. While all this creative energy was bursting through the surface, I was also being pushed by the sense that something was escaping my grasp. 

I am the primary caretaker for my two-year-old daughter, Evagene, and the home I share with my partner, Lee, and our two dogs. In July we untethered from our quiet Colorado mountain life and moved back to suburban Dallas. Ever so slowly, I have been feeling the “boost” from my Season of Tending commingling with a growing weight of expectations pushing down on me. 

My daily Substack check-ins began to sometimes feel like my hands gripping a steering wheel too tightly. In October I started waking up at 4 and 5 a.m. with an urgent need to get to work—right away, this instant!—so that I wouldn’t lose track of my next tasks. I noticed a heaviness in my chest when I thought about opening my Substack dashboard or work email. And my writing rhythms began swirling a bit more sideways than usual. To my therapist a few weeks ago I described a picture in my mind: there are a dozen freight trains barrelling down disparate tracks toward me, and I have no way to know when, where or how they will collide.

I’ve also been hearing the language in my mind shift into darker, absolutist, even fatalistic, places. I was writing to my friend about this confusion. I posited that I have been answering too much to the weight of capitalism—where creation is often, inevitably, clobbered by toxic competition and comparison. And if there’s anything I loathe, it is these qualities. I especially loathe them when they push into my writer’s DNA or my spiritual compass. I told her, “I don’t know what this is. But I do know my magnum opus will not be created from the ashes of burnout.”1

Because of this inner upheaval the last few months, I have been feeling uncertain about what comes next for my newsletter. I’ve been fearful that the wonderful friendships and feeling of connection and warmth in The Editing Spectrum could disappear—that this inner disarray was conclusive proof that I will never sustain my mental health and my connection to a writing Voice. I feared this was the end of everything.

Of course, right as I felt I was reaching a breaking point and pushing on every resource I have at my disposal, a door opened.

This feels like grief, I thought. 

Something is ending so something else can begin. 

I sat down slowly and let this sink in and eventually turned to my Writing Seasons essay to see if there’s anything about a Season of Tending that would help me understand what was happening. And the parting words in this essay jumped into my lap:

“...the moments of doubt, the unproductivity, the wandering, it’s all working together inside you to bring something new to the surface. We unnecessarily suffer as writers when we try to force or wish ourselves into a different season. I am here to tell you: whichever season you’re in is the season you’re supposed to be in. One day you may just find yourself ready for a Season of Tending or a Season of Craft, where you roll up your sleeves and feel the energy of your writing growing all around you. Or maybe you’ll find yourself in a Season of Musing, where the writing is finally coming to the surface, but messily and without a sense of self. The ebbs and flows are part of this packaged deal.”

I could burst into tears just reading those words. It doesn’t feel like I wrote them. It feels like someone wiser, more deeply compassionate and resilient wrote them for me right now, for today. With this renewed awareness in my heart and mind, I have begun to see that my Season of Tending has done its good work and laid a foundation for what’s next. And I feel pulled to a Season of Craft like never before. 

Of course, with a readership of more than 2,000 people, I also feel deeply conflicted about how to honor the needs inside myself to focus on my craft. I have been engaging with my deepest Listening skills and asking for guidance. I earnestly need both the wisdom of my heart and the wisdom of my mind to collaborate and show me what comes next.

In case you missed it, yesterday I sent paid readers a brief reflection on growth during my Season of Tending. Paid readers can access this post here, and I'll see all readers tomorrow with Part 2.

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Welcome to Cave of the Heart, an interview series where writers trust-fall into the depths of inner-knowing, creativity, and the craft of writing. Are you ready to get curious about the cultivation of self-trust, give a warm nod to our child selves, and celebrate inspiration in all forms? Come with us into the cave of the heart.

Russell Nohelty (www.russellnohelty.com) is a USA Today bestselling fantasy author who has written dozens of novels and graphic novels including The Godsverse Chronicles, The Obsidian Spindle Saga, and Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter. He is the publisher of Wannabe Press, co-host of the Kickstart Your Book Sales podcast, cofounder of the Writer MBA training academy, and cofounder of The Future of Publishing Mastermind. He also co-created the Author Ecosystem archetype system to help authors thrive. You can take the quiz to find your perfect ecosystem at www.authorecosystem.com or find most of his writing on his Substack at theauthorstack.com. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and dogs.

Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.

I’ve been working at the same desk for almost 10 years, since my last job moved to Dallas and kept me on as a remote sales manager. Over the years I’ve changed monitors, computers, and added a ton of stuffed animals, along with a lot of other baubles, but the desk has remained the same. 

No, that’s not true. I’ve added close to 100 stickers, so it resembles the old punk club bathrooms from my youth. It’s surprising how different the quality is between stickers. Some, I stuck on years ago and they still look almost brand new, while others I placed later have all but faded to nothing. 

My desk is in the corner of our second bedroom, in a nook surrounded on three sides by paintings, books, and posters I’ve worked on throughout my career. In fact, most of the knick-knacks around my desks are from places I’ve traveled for my work, conferences and research trips. There’s also a folder in my file cabinet that’s filled with letters from fans and gifts from friends I can pull out whenever I’m feeling a bit down. 

I go through phases of listening almost exclusively to audiobooks and listening almost exclusively to music, but when I’m writing, even filling out something like this interview, I’m almost always listening to music. 

I have a playlist I built for my series The Obsidian Spindle Saga which is filled with dark pop from Amy Shark, K. Flay, Sia, Halsey, Kesha, Meg Myers, and dozens of others that I usually default to, but it changes depending on the project. That’s what’s playing in my headphones right now as I do this work, decompressing from a class I taught earlier and negotiating a publishing deal, which is weirdly not an abnormal day for me recently. 

It’s what I normally listen to while writing The Author Stack, too, but I have two other playlists I work to as well. I have one that my wife calls angry girl rock mostly: Dead Sara, The Pretty Reckless, Haim, The Veronicas, Metric, etc., (that is for when I’m writing The Godsverse). It’s much faster paced and aggressive, and it’s easily my most aggressive series. 

Then, the opposite of that is my Whole Mood playlist, which is folk and country, from Taylor Swift to The Wreckers, Your Smith, Fiona Apple, Kacey Musgrave, and others that let me groove on things and take things slower. If I’m reading Substack, and I’m not listening to a podcast or audiobook, then I normally listen to that playlist. Substack is definitely a whole mood. I started that one for a series called Dragon Strife, which was much slower paced and the main character eschewed using violence of any kind. 

I also listen to the Whole Mood playlist when I’m editing, because I want to encourage myself to go slower and absorb it all. I tend to have a big problem with that, so anything I can do to trigger being more thoughtful when I’m editing is really helpful. 

Childhood

Q: Given a choice, were you the child who would run barefoot outside or were you inside reading?

A: I was an inside kid, but playing with Legos. I was a fat kid, and was bullied mercilessly for it, to the point where I thought having bruises all over my body was normal. This didn’t come from my parents, but from neighborhood kids, ones I idolized for the most part, and it led to a very unhealthy idea of how to go through the world. I generally thought existing was about being unnecessarily cruel or, in lieu of that, disconnecting from the world and not caring about what happened to anyone. Media didn’t help foster different attitudes about how boys were supposed to treat people, either.  

It led to a lot of driving around looking for parties, drugs, booze, and trying to keep up with the cool kids, even though really what I wanted to be doing was making movies and writing. I did make it to become the (co)-editor-in-chief of my yearbook and senior year we did write a play that made it to state, which was cool, but yeah, I didn’t run around barefoot. I was inside, trying to avoid people for the most part. 

It’s taken me far too long to shed that stuff and find ways to walk through the world in a more healthy manner. I recently found out about masking, and while I’m not autistic, I definitely think that I developed this different, confident, hard human to protect the gooey center inside. The last decade has been about finding ways to expose my gooey center and still walk through the world with kindness. 

Influences

Q: If you had to choose one person from your past that most influenced who you are today, who would that be and why? This can be a person from history, an animal, a fictitious character in a book, TV or movie.

A: I don’t really watch his movies anymore, and haven’t for decades now, but the person most responsible for what I became is director Kevin Smith. I used to watch all his movies, and I must have listened to hundreds of hours of him talking about his career. Clerks isn’t a great movie, but he didn’t care. He put it all on credit cards and figured the worst case scenario was that he would be broke, which he already was. So, he left school and just made it. 

I didn’t know you could just do that. I didn’t know you could just make things, and nobody will stop you. That’s for all the good and bad reasons, but “you can just do things” was a magical realization that I still can’t get over. It might blow up in your face, or you might get to Sundance and have a long, storied career. It doesn’t really matter, because at least you’ll know. If you don’t know it, you might never know, you know? I meet people all the time who regret not doing the thing and I am so thankful I have no regrets in that department. I did all the things and I know exactly where I flamed out, and where I stood out. That kind of thing is priceless. Not having that as a weight dragging you down every day of your life. 

Creative Spark

Q: When you get an idea for a new essay or project, what does your first instinct look, sound or feel like?

A: I have a very boring process for developing ideas. It involves opening a folder on my computer that is filled with all the things I’m developing, and making a new folder for it along with a document that just says “stuff.” Some things I build into epic worlds while others I never come back to, and how often I do that tells me everything I need to know about whether to sink time into it. 

What I learned in my career is that the things you make end up becoming part of your life, so you should be ready to talk about them for 10+ years. If you told me my first comic, Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, would become the seminal comic work of my life, I wouldn’t have believed you. Sure, some things have fallen off, but every project I’ve ever worked on through to a launch was at least two years of my life. I probably only talk about 10-20% of those things, but the creative spark is a burden as often as it is a sail. 

I don’t put much stock in the creative spark. It’s fleeting. Sparks flash for a second and disappear. Ideas have to suffer to prove they are worth working on, especially now that I’ve been at this for over two decades. For years, my rule was that something has to be better than what I’m working on now for me to spend time on it. It was easy to jump that bar for a while, but now everything I’m working on is such high quality that it takes a lot to make it over that bar. So, most things have to wait, and they languish there, festering, but sometimes they grow wings and fly. There’s probably 1-2 things a year that really capture my attention that way, because I know just how much it takes to bring that into the world now. Maybe that’s baggage weighing me down, but I think it sets me free more often than not.

Not to get down about it. I think you should spend time, a lot of time, capturing that spark and seeing what ignites, but I’ve been doing this a long time now. I know exactly what types of things capture that spark, and what resonate with me. It’s a luxury. 

That said, I think writers should write a broad range of topics when they’re learning the trade, and give themselves every chance to explore…as long as they finish things. It doesn’t matter if you love a piece, hate it, or are indifferent to it. If you take it on, you have to finish it. So often writers abandon projects halfway through, and while you sometimes have no choice but to do that, you don’t learn anything by abandoning something halfway through the process.

We are craftsmen. When we talk about our writing as “craft,” I think that craft comes from how you finish and mold something—not in how you begin it. How you get over hurdles and cover up imperfections is what becomes your style. Your voice comes as much from what you don’t like as from what you adore.

Lots of writers get into the habit of constantly abandoning things for years and nothing ever gets done. You learn almost nothing from writing a project. You learn everything from finishing it and crafting it into something cogent that makes sense as a complete work. The goal of writing is to move people in some way, and nobody is moved from a garbage draft. 

Additionally, part of being a writer is finding the joy in things you hate. Maybe it’s a story, or a character, or a scene, but as a writer you’ll likely, at some point, hate everything you ever do— at least until you find a voice. Making a career out of writing means finding ways to mold those stories into ones you’ll love anyway. 

Also, finishing things you hate teaches you never to do those things again, but more so it will teach you why you hate it. I’m not saying everything you want to abandon takes the same form as when you set out to write it, but you should work toward buttoning up everything you do so that it becomes a piece. Maybe that novel becomes a short story, or that movie becomes a one act play, but for goodness sake, finish the things you start. That is how you build a name for yourself. 

The craft of writing is almost all in the revision of a thing, not the writing of it. If you aren’t getting to the revision phase, you have really learned nothing about writing, except how to get words on a page. That is important, but the craft of writing is in revising something into a fine point to get your message across, even if you don’t love the vehicle. 

On top of that, even once you find your voice, you only grow it by working outside of your comfort zone. I’m mainly a fantasy writer, and I mainly write action-thrillers, but throughout my career I’ve forced myself to take on big projects in different genres, focused on different pacing and motivations outside my main series. 

All of that stuff is how you really grow beyond where you are now, and then you bring that all back to the bits you love, and it grows stronger, too. Plus, you learn what makes your work special. Yes, I can write anything, because I have, but I know exactly what makes a Russell Nohelty book special, and where I should focus my efforts, because I’ve done so many different types of projects. 

Year 23 Writer = 23% Off a Yearly Sub

Writing Process

Q: What one thing do writers most often do that erodes self-trust and they don’t even know it?

A: It’s a combination of thinking their work has to be good and trying to make their dream project first. Most people want to make something equal to or better than the thing they loved most growing up, but they just can’t do that without years of practice. I think writers should avoid writing in their favorite genre until they at least have a handle on their voice. There’s such an emphasis on “monetization” that people forget that we spend 12+ years in school learning craft, and then go on to specialize in a craft in college, trade school, or the workforce. All that time allows for us to suck at first. That’s the #1 thing school does, it gives us a safe space to fail, and then we go out and try to fail in public without a net. It breaks people.  

By the time you get to high school, you’re a year 15 human, but you might have never written anything very creative before. I know people who are 50 and have never written more than a book report. They are a year 50 human, but a year 1 writer. They compare themselves to their idol and they beat themselves up. That’s why when I talk about being a “young” writer, it has nothing to do with age and everything to do with how long they have been intentionally practicing their craft. 

I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’m still a year 41 human and only a year 23(ish) writer. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s, after doing this stuff for over a decade, that I felt like I had a good handle on it. And only in the last couple of years have I felt like I understood every aspect of it. 

Plus, after all that, they look at their first draft and beat themselves up that it isn’t as good as somebody else’s final product. There’s so much comparison that makes people feel unloved and unwanted, but really they should give themselves the chance to suck at first. It’s okay to suck really hard at first. It’s okay to be doing this for a decade and still make stuff that sucks. I read books by authors that I love that I think suck, and these are people who have made great things. That is a scary proposition: to be still be able to suck even after decades doing that, but who really cares if it sucks? I still buy their other books, and I just don’t think about that one. 

I just read all of Jane Austen. My business partner loves Jane Austen and talks about it often. And since I try to take interest in things people I care about take interest in, I decided to give it a go. 

I severely loved Pride and Prejudice and adored Emma. The others, except that really weird one written all in letters, I could give or take. They weren’t memorable, but they are some people’s everything. Even if I was the arbiter of taste and only two of her books rose to exceptional, how many memorable things do you need to make in your life? Even one makes you immortal. Isaac Asimov wrote something like 400 books and I can only name six of them, and yet, he is a legend. 

On top of that, most of my favorite things I’ve ever written have never sold more than a handful of copies. So, I know better than anyone that sales is rarely a good predictor of much more than the mass market appeal of a piece, not its true quality. 

Resources

Q: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?

A: I think business books are a great resource for writers, especially copywriting books that talk about things like psychological triggers and hooking readers. We’re trying to make something highly addictive in our writing, and copywriters have cracked the how and the why people resonate with words in a deep, meaningful way. If we’re trying to make something that resonates, I’m not saying it’s like selling shampoo, but I’m not not saying that either. I used to read Copyblogger a lot when I was learning this stuff. 

Then, there are foundational books that help writers understand how to run a business and survive in the capitalist dystopia we find ourselves in. I recommend The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan and Deep Work by Cal Newport all the time. I read just about anything from Russell Brunson because he’s got a brilliant marketing mind. Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow is probably the definitive book for creators to understand what they are up against right now and the headwinds working against them.

I find unlikely resources everywhere, though. I am generally fascinated by just about everything these days. Even if I hate it, I want to know why it works for people. Usually, it’s for a basic, banal reason that is easy to distinguish, but I’m very interested in why things resonate and how it works with people. I love that kind of thing.

Why does romance work on such a deep level for so many people, and how can I bring that into my own writing? Why do thrillers sell so well, and what base desires do the thrillers that sell well fulfill with people? Which books do people still find today that people connect with across generations and why? It’s all so interesting. We are really students of the human condition, and all a bit like psychologists in our way. We’re trying to incept this idea deep down into the core of a person and connect with the very essence of their soul, and I think we should spend more time looking at how that happens in any way we can.  

Neurodiversity 

Q: Did being diagnosed neurodivergent affect how you see or interact with your writing life?

A: It made things so much easier. Not just getting the diagnosis, but getting on medication for depression allowed me to stop fighting every day to get to neutral. I spent 30 years stuck in reverse struggling to just get to neutral where I didn’t want to kill myself constantly.

I still think everything is so easy compared to how it used to be for me. I remember when I finally got on meds and stopped hearing voices telling me to kill myself every minute of every day. Like…I had no idea people didn’t have to fight that all the time. It was revelatory. I still think about it all the time. 

I still find writing is more a compulsion than a joy, but at least I don’t feel the need to write in order to get the bad thoughts out of my brain every day, and that’s a real, real beautiful thing. 

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Russell uses music as a way to harness and focus his energy when he’s writing and editing—he even shifts the energy of music to reflect the types of books or stories he’s working on. Share your best writing/editing playlists in the comments below and also tell us what kind of music it helps you write.

Russell spoke in depth about how the craft of writing is found in the finishing of the work, not just writing the first draft. How did this land for you? Do you find “craft” is cultivated in additional places?

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