We Women Writers
Inspiring and encouraging women to write, to develop a personal writing practice through exploring the real-life writing stories of other women
We Women Writers
Joyce Camara - Write, The Rest Will Come
Joyce Camara began writing in journals at eight but paused when she became a mother, focusing on sewing, crocheting, and raising her daughters. She resumed her writing career when she and her husband took to traveling the United States in their travel home. She published her first book, PIP—Private Investigator Phyllis, at 81. The sequel to the first PIP book will be published soon. Joyce has also contributed to Offerings from the Oasis, a collection of short stories by Lake Havasu Writers Group members, and The Oasis Journal 2018, a journal featuring short stories by writers over fifty.
Joyce’s love of writing and reading is complemented by her love of her husband, Dave (they have been married for 58 years), her daughters, and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Quote:
“I never intended to write a book. In my first book, PIP, I call it the book I was never going to write.”
Takeaways:
It is often surprising what stories emerge when people engage in the creative process of life by listening and writing something daily.
The How Matters. Create a time and place for you to write.
Build success by not being in a hurry, overcoming obstacles, and staying at it.
Resources:
PIP: Private Investigator Phyllis: https://www.amazon.com/PIP-Private-Investigator-Joyce-Camara/dp/B0BZ6STZ95
Offerings from the Oasis - 2017: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Lake-Havasu-City-Writers-Group/dp/197627561X
Oasis Journal – 2018 https://www.amazon.com/Oasis-Journal-2018-Leila-Joiner/dp/0998179167#
SLO Night Writers: https://slonightwriters.org/
Lake Havasu Writers Group: http://www.lhcwriters.com
Teri Bayus: https://teribayus.com/
Jane Jones (00:00)
Hi there, I'm Jane and this podcast is designed for you. Five minutes of daily writing can change your world. Come with me as we explore the stories of women who transformed their lives through writing. Welcome to the We Women Writers Podcast.
Hello and welcome to We Women Writers podcast. Today we're going to be talking with Joyce Camara and she is an 82 year old who published her first book and it's called PIP, Private Investigator Phyllis. It's got a little bit of a cliffhanger at the end and she's now working on the sequel to that. She tells us that her first attempt at writing was when she received a diary when she was 10 years old and she wrote in it every night. And we're going to learn some more about that as we go. she had a really amazing, idyllic childhood. She was raised in the 50s, a stay-at-home mom, and her father was a World War II veteran, and she had one older brother. She's been married for 54 years, and she's got three daughters and six grandchildren and four great grandchildren. So, she's kept pretty, pretty busy, and has just really decided that a few years ago that she wanted to pursue the writing and so we're going to learn a little bit about her writing and her writing journey. So, hello Joyce, welcome.
Joyce Camara (01:34)
Hello Jane, thank you very much for having me.
Jane Jones (01:37)
Thank you. Joyce, don't you tell us about your writing journey. Start wherever you like.
Joyce Camara (01:45)
Well, like you told everybody, I started at 10 when I got my first diary, and I wrote about things that happened to me at school. I was like in what, fourth, fifth grade and I'd write about all the boys that I chased or chased me and about my girlfriends and who wore what. And I was a very social child. I did more socialization than I don't know than normal, but I was very social as I still am today. I didn't concentrate on studies, and I wasn't encouraged to. So, I decided that I really liked writing, and I wrote every single day and I wrote essays in class and I got all A's on all my essays and my,
I can't remember what teacher it was in junior high school. She admired my handwriting of all things and gave me an A in handwriting and encouraged me to write. All my teachers did except for my math teacher. But so, I have been very blessed and very lucky that I've been encouraged all my life to write even when after we raised the children and they moved on with their lives, we moved on with ours, and we traveled. And my oldest daughter, Terry Bayes, who is also an author, wrote to me and said, “You better be writing, Mom”. And so, I wrote volumes of journals along the way of our travels.
Jane Jones (03:21)
Mm-hmm. Do you still have those?
Joyce Camara (03:24)
I do. Oh yes, I've saved them. I even have my first diary, I found it.
Jane Jones (03:30)
Whoa.
Joyce Camara (03:32)
Yeah, and it is so silly, but it's silliness in a 10-year old's way of thinking and of talking of what was important to her during the day. And it was mostly about my friends, a little bit about my family.
Joyce Camara (03:53)
My brother was a jokester. He was older than I was, and he loved to play jokes on me. So, I talked about that quite a bit. And I don't think I said much about my parents. My mother, my father worked all the time. Mother was home and she was not, she was a great housekeeper. Dust bunnies weren't allowed, but she was a terrible cook.
And there just wasn't anything to write about her because she didn't do anything. The home was her domain, which took me years and years and years to understand, that was her thing. That was her… Bailiwick.
Jane Jones (04:35)
Yep.
Jane Jones (04:40)
In America, that's women almost all stayed home after the Second World War.
Joyce Camara (04:45)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jane Jones (04:47)
So, do you recall what it was like for you? Any thoughts or feelings or ideas that come up from putting yourself back when you were writing? Do you remember anything that comes forward? About that time? Anything about the writing or who you shared?
Joyce Camara (05:08)
Not that young, but later on in high school, I wrote some things that I probably shouldn't have. And I wrote a letter to a friend, I thought it was a friend, and he wrote back a very nasty letter that I tried to destroy, but my mother found it and I got in a humongous amount of trouble. And so, from then on, I was very careful who saw what I wrote.
Jane Jones (05:40)
That's an interesting experience you had, not observation, but experience. That's one of the reasons a lot of women won't write is for the fear of being found out. That they want to put something in writing. There is a very real therapeutic effect of putting something in writing and working it through your pen. But people won't put it in writing because now if somebody finds it, then you can be in trouble.
Joyce Camara (06:06)
Well, I didn't think that I would have gotten in trouble, I didn't think I did anything wrong. I was just curious. My husband says I'm nosy. I said, “I’m curious”. I just want to, I like to learn and find out about new things. And I trusted this person that I wrote this letter to. And I had a quandary about a kid that I was dating, you know, how far we should go and da da da da. And it didn't turn out well. And so, it's not that I was afraid. I had no idea my mother would find it nor read it. But I didn't think I had done anything wrong. But yeah, it slowed me down a little bit. I didn't. I was very careful when I wrote letters from then on and to whom I wrote.
Jane Jones (06:55)
Gotcha. So that's slightly different. That's writing a letter with the intention of giving it to someone. Then there's this journaling where you're just writing for your own self. And did you have any experiences where people read it, and you had a negative experience from that or a positive experience from it? Was it just personal?
Joyce Camara (07:21)
Not that I can remember. Yeah, it was mostly all family and all pretty personal. I can't remember that far back to be honest with you.
Jane Jones (07:32)
So, it became something that's useful to you, just being in the habit of writing down lots of things about yourself and about your friends and your environment. And it became something that was something you did pretty much every day? Was it every day you did it? Or pretty consistently?
Joyce Camara (07:52)
Every day was pretty consistent. Something traumatic happened that made me cry. Every day was, you know, wasn't anything traumatic. And as I went back and looked at my diary that I had when I was 10, I also wrote in high school. Some days were nothing, but I was determined to write every single day.
Jane Jones (08:19)
Gotcha. Yeah.
Joyce Camara (08:21)
I'd write someday, one day I wrote, nothing happened today.
Jane Jones (08:26)
But you wrote it.
Joyce Camara (08:26)
But I wrote it and then, you know, it rained all day today. So, we didn't do anything. My brother and I had a water fight in the house and got in a lot of trouble, you know, and just, you know, yeah, stuff like that. But nothing, nothing. And I wrote about my grandmother, and I wrote about my aunts and uncles and…
Jane Jones (08:48)
So, a lot of people will think that they don't have anything really important to write down. And it sounds like that really wasn't anything that you were considering. You were just writing down what you thought or what you had experienced. And there was a freedom that you had to just to decide what to write. It didn't have to be something really important and something really valuable to anybody else.
Joyce Camara (09:17)
Anybody else. It was important to me. And I remember thinking, if I don't write this down, I'll forget it. Even at an early age, you forget things because they're not, they're not that important. Some things stood out. know, other things didn't.
Jane Jones (09:33)
Yeah, yeah, so it doesn't have to be anything really important. It just has to be something that you feel like you want to write down. It'll hold you along some lines and some days it was just important just to write. So, nothing happened today and it was the act of writing that was really important on that day for sure, right?
Joyce Camara (09:41)
Right, and some days I was bored out of my mind. And so, I thought, well, I'm going to write. I'm bored. I don't have anything to do. And then I think about something, and I write about that, whatever happened. I never, ever wrote fiction until probably high school. I think we had to write a little bit of fiction in… Is it social? Wasn't social studies? can't remember what.
Jane Jones (10:22)
It might have been social studies because that's what it was called when I was a kid too.
Joyce Camara (10:25)
Yeah, think that's it. junior high school and high school, high school, I really, really wanted to get involved in writing and I wanted to be part of the yearbook staff. But that was more reporting work, and I wasn't interested in that.
Jane Jones (10:44)
Gotcha. Okay, so that was going to be one of my next questions was you talked about writing essays and so were these essays about factual things or were they essays, about creative essays?
Joyce Camara (10:58)
They're little bit of both. I remember writing about my brother and his fish. He had aquariums on one whole wall in his bedroom. And I remember writing about that. And he had a terrarium that had a tarantula in it.
Jane Jones (11:20)
Oohh.
Joyce Camara (11:21)
And I remember writing about that. And I'll never forget, I named him Harry. And I came home from a date one night and I said, what are you doing up? And he said, “I can’t find Harry. Harry got out”. Therefore, I did not sleep in my bed that night. No. I still, whether I wrote it down or not, I remember those kind of things. But I have that kind of memory that things just occurred to me, and they seem important and they're embedded in my mind, whereas it wouldn't matter to anybody else. Does that make sense?
Jane Jones (11:40)
Yes it does make perfect sense. Because one of the primary reasons for writing, people think, if I write then I've got to write a novel, I've got to be, and I'm not good as good as all these big fancy writers. And everybody starts writing somewhere and nobody starts writing being a Pulitzer Prize winning. just, you know, no book awards, no. That's not how people start. And you don't, there's thousands and thousands of writers who are never published. They don't want to publish, they just want to write. It's something that they do for themselves. And then there's some who get published, you know, a little bit at a time. And it's really not a big splash in the ocean, but it is an important splash for the writer. Whatever it is they decide to do, they've got a book, they can decide whether they'll publish it or not. And when they do, it's important to them. So I...
Joyce Camara (12:55)
I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Jane Jones (12:56)
No, you go ahead. I'm happy to.
Joyce Camara (12:57)
I never intended to write a book. In my first book, PIP, I call it the book I was never going to write. Because I like to write short stories about things that I know, things that happened, and embellish them, make them a little more exciting.
Joyce Camara (13:19)
I remember writing a story that was true about my first camp away from home, a Girl Scout camp away from home. I hated every minute of it. And I made sure I wrote that down because they were not going to send me again. My parents were not going to send me again.
And it was a bad experience. And you need to, I feel, you need to write those things in case you can't remember them to make you, that makes you part of who you are.
Jane Jones (13:53)
And embeds it a little bit more, doesn't it? It makes it a little more real. Okay, so we'll get to PIP in a minute, but I'm interested in, you said that there's this teacher that really made comment about your handwriting. Would you tell us a little bit about that?
Joyce Camara (14:10)
About her or about?
Jane Jones (14:11)
Whatever you want to tell us whatever you want to tell us just about…
Joyce Camara (14:14)
She was a different kind of teacher. I can’t remember what she taught. But every kid in the school liked her. And they liked her so much. And she was not married. And she had no children. But she adored all of us girls and boys.
And she'd take us places with our parents permission. Her name was Miss Perry and she played with us and then she taught us things. And she said, what a nice handwriting I had. I said, but I didn't think I did. I didn't have a big self-esteem of myself when I was younger. But she encouraged us to do things that we normally probably wouldn't do. Nothing bad, nothing we shouldn't have done, but just a little bit on the edge of things. “Let's go for a hike. But you guys hike”. She couldn't hike. She said, “I’m too fat, I can't hike. But I'm gonna watch you. You go up the top and you come back down and whoever does it in the fastest time, I'm gonna buy you a soda”.
Well, she bought everybody sodas, but she encouraged us to use our abilities and try to find them, I think it is what she was trying to do.
Jane Jones (15:42)
Gotcha. Did you ever write any essays or anything that was fictional for her?
Joyce Camara (15:49)
I'm sure I did, I just don't remember.
Jane Jones (15:52)
Okay.
Joyce Camara (15:53)
I really don't remember, I was seventh grade.
Jane Jones (15:56)
But the fact that she remarked about your handwriting does stand out for you.
Joyce Camara (16:03)
Yeah, she told me I had a good handwriting and I didn't think I did. I said, well, thank you very much. That was the old-fashioned cursive. know, we didn't print anything.
Jane Jones (16:14)
Right, that comes out later, right? Fast forward, did you teach your girls to have a journal? Did you encourage them to have a journal? Or was it something that they did themselves or did they shy away from journaling?
Joyce Camara (16:31)
At that time that I was raising my girls, I was not writing. I didn't have time. had three girls and each one of them individually needed different, what's the word I want? Different things to do. One of them liked horseback riding. One of them liked to play baseball. One of them liked to just play outside, the youngest one, play with dolls and stuff.
And my middle one, my tomboy one, she played baseball and did that kind of stuff. And my oldest daughter was into horseback riding. So they all needed different individual personal time to encourage them and to spend time with them in what they wanted as a hobby.
I don't even remember talking to them about writing because I didn't do it. I just didn't. was sewing. I made most of their clothes and they had no interest in learning to sew.
Jane Jones (17:38)
That's interesting because another one of the people that I worked with, she went through this creative writing thing and we'll mention later, but the same program that you went through, only it was longer duration. And she's not interested in writing, but in the course of the writing, she started to, she's always interested in designing clothes and things. And through the process, she was designing clothes and having them made and sewing them herself and everything. And she wondered about whether the writing she did was for no reason. But where she wasn't sewing before, she's now sewing. So, the handwriting... In our reflections together was that the handwriting got her hands moving and got her confident and interested and started playing with the designing clothes again and sewing. So, it's interesting to me to see or to hear you finding that when while you weren't writing, you were actually sewing. your hands find motor skills.
Joyce Camara (18:41)
Yeah, I was.
Yeah, I was still creating, but one of them was left-handed. And my grandmother, God love her, one of my grandmothers, taught me how to knit and crochet. And I really liked that. So, I thought, well, I'll teach the girls how to do that. Well, the only one that was interested in it was left-handed. And that was like, she damn near stabbed me with the knitting needles. I mean, it just didn't work. And the other two weren't interested.
Jane Jones (19:13)
Yeah. So, it's a very individual thing, isn't it?
Joyce Camara (19:19)
Yes, and I was, when I was younger, growing up, my father and mother, the only thing they wanted me to learn was how to be a housewife, because that's what my mother did, and I was supposed to be like that. I had, no, I wasn't… I did, I did want to grow up and have kids, but I wanted to be a nurse. And I was not encouraged to become a nurse. And part of it's my fault. didn't. I didn't push for it and I didn't get good enough grades and I have nobody to blame but myself for that. But I vowed that I would let my girls pursue their desire, their hobbies, whatever they wanted. I was going to let them do that.
Jane Jones (20:08)
Gotcha. so as not helpful being presented as though you had to be a housewife, so too it's not helpful to try to sew. Writing is what you like to do, sewing and crocheting and knitting. You can expose the girls to that if you want, but there's no pushing them, no pushing anybody. It's very personal thing that you're doing is your handwriting.
Joyce Camara (20:31)
Right. Even though the oldest one became a writer. And I found out just a couple of years ago that my grandmother, who I knew was a schoolteacher, she was a writer also. She wrote some, I don't think she ever, well, she got stuff published in the newspaper and various sort of things that I know there's more to it that I don't have. But she wrote. And so maybe that's...
I inherited part of that, I don't know.
Jane Jones (20:58)
Yeah, I think there's some interest somehow and we don't always know, but it is interesting. Terry is... We have did a session with Terry on We Women Writers and anybody listening can go back and look at that. And she's amazing. A woman as Joyce is here in terms of her life experience. Joyce, is it fair to say that you still feel...
Or how much do you still feel that your life is unremarkable?
Joyce Camara (21:35)
The What's remarkable?
Jane Jones (21:36)
That your life is unremarkable. It's very easy. It's very boring. It's idyllic.
Joyce Camara (21:42)
No, I do not feel that way at all. My life is so much fun. Except for health reasons and being over 80, I am excited about life. I am so excited about writing. I absolutely just fell in love with it all over again.
Jane Jones (22:02)
Tell us about that. When did that pick up?
Joyce Camara (22:05)
That picked up a little bit when we traveled. We were on the road for five years and I rode every day. And one day we did nothing today, we had hamburgers for dinner. Well, how boring is that? And how can you make a book out of that? I don't want to write a book. I'm going to write short stories. And so, I wrote about the people that we met on the road and we met some really fun and crazy people. And there's a lot I can do with that.
But when we settled down and we moved here to Havasu and I joined the writers’ group, the spark just lit. And I always said, everybody has a hidden talent. And I said, and my talent is so far hidden, they'll never find it. Well, I think I found my talent. I got so excited, and I got... encouraged and discouraged because that's part of it. And I've learned a lot, and I’ve come a long, long way. And I stopped for a while because of a... because of a family matter. To have a book in your hand or have a box delivered to your front door and you open up and there's 200 books that say PIP by Joyce Kamara, I went crazy. I mean, I'm surprised people didn't, all over the world didn't hear me hooping and hollering. No, I was just. I couldn't believe it. I absolutely could not believe that I could do that.
Jane Jones (23:54)
Yep. Yep.
Joyce Camara (23:55)
But I did it with a lot of help and a lot of encouragement from my friends and people like you with your group. And the writing group here that I belong to, they got me started again and encouraged me when I submitted different stories. And it just happened. There’s no feeling like it in the world.
A second to childbirth. Childbirth is the best thing I've ever done in my life.
Jane Jones (24:26)
Because of the whole experience of it for you and the creativity of birth, creating a child. So, the idea that you're writing, and you've gone through this process, you've published a book and have you, let's take you back to when you're writing the book and when you first started the PIP.
Did you have in mind already the editor and the publisher and how all that was going to happen?
Joyce Camara (25:01)
I did not.
Jane Jones (25:02)
Gotcha.
Joyce Camara (25:03)
I had no idea at all. I just wrote it. And where the idea came from, everybody asked me. I don't know. It just happened. I think back on it and I still can't answer that question. I don't know where it came from. It just came. It happened and it just flowed.
Jane Jones (25:22)
Yeah. Yeah, and you were writing though. You were writing. You were writing at a writers’ group and then the Monday night group that we have. But you were writing and you were open. You were there so that when the idea came, it came to you. Okay, so I think what I'm trying to get at is that you didn't feel you had to have all the answers about how to publish it, where to publish it, where to edit it, all that stuff. That you were engaged in the creative aspect of what you were doing first, and it was very personal, and you were sharing it, and it was a lot of fun, it, some stops and starts, but it got done.
Joyce Camara (26:06)
Right, and you're I had no idea. I just knew, I just wrote it. And my daughter was my nemesis, if you will, and I told her I was done and she said, no, you're not. And she said, you have to send that to beta readers. I said, well, what are beta readers? I knew nothing. I was such a novice. And I knew that she had published two books and working on her third one and she's just absolutely amazing. But I didn't know how she did it. I never asked. I didn’t care. I mean, my daughter wrote a book, my God, she's famous, I'm going to read it. And so, then I wrote mine and I thought, well, I'm done. And she goes, “No, no you’re not”. And so, then she told me all the other stuff that you have to do to get to get it published and the editor and dada, dada, dada. And so all that all that flowed, all that happened.
Jane Jones (26:50)
Right. So, what would you say to somebody who has this idea but gets on the internet and sees things about how to publish your book and how to get an ISBN and how to get an agent or how long the story has to be or tell me about plot and character development. What would be your response to somebody like that that's getting caught in the weeds and not getting the writing done?
Joyce Camara (27:32)
I would encourage them to buy some books on writing, on grammar. Grammar is very important. And maybe to join a writers’ group, it helped me. And then once I got on track, I had to drop out because I didn't have time. But you do what you have time for and what's important to you.
You need to reach out and there's a lot of information on the internet. You got to do a lot of research, which I did not. I didn't know anything about research. I knew none. I've done more on this second book than I've ever done.
Jane Jones (28:12)
Gocha, yeah, so I think I'm speaking or soI have in mind the writer who is really not published yet or not and they just have an idea and they think they might want to write but then they think they have to have all these answers first
Joyce Camara (28:29)
No, they don't. No, they don't. Write it. Write what you know. Go ahead and write it. And it'll fall into place. Even when you think it won't, even when you think I'm going to throw it out the window, just keep going.
Jane Jones (28:45)
Okay, all right. Because then when you're finished, I'd like, really appreciate your comment about writing, joining a writers’ group where you can go and you can actually see people and present your piece and read other people's pieces and you can get a, just a feel for writing because a lot of those things are, it's weekly or monthly. And so, you kind of have to work a little bit, like if it's monthly, you have to have a, do something every week to be able to be ready for the month.
So, it is a consistent writing practice.
Joyce Camara (29:18)
Right, and you need one that fits you. All writing groups don't fit everybody. Okay. And they're all, they all have different ideas and different ways of communicating. The one that I belong to, we only met twice a month. And one week we had to write a story, 250 words.
Well, that was a piece of cake for me. can talk 250 in five minutes or one minute and then you do a thousand the next two weeks and then they critique it and you have to have.
a hard shell. Because when these people that you don't know from Adam, you meet twice a month, you still don't know much about them. When they read your writing and they critique it, if they don't like it, they're going to tell you. And you need to have that hard shell to be able to take it. And you can't just say, OK, I give up. I'm not going to do it and throw it away. If you're serious about writing, you have to do that. And you have to have somebody to help you, to encourage you. I strongly encourage people to write that have a decent support system, be it in your home or a friend. A support system really helps your ego. It really does. I mean, you write something and they say, I don't like it. Well, that hurts because I like that. I really like that, well, too bad. But I rewrite it. Does that make sense?
Jane Jones (31:02)
Yeah, it does. And do you get the experience that you're writing first and then you want to make it better? Yes. And the feedback you get from somebody that they don't understand something like, for example, in one of the pieces in our group, you were talking about a quilt and we all kind of went to bat telling you the quilt doesn't belong in that room.
And you were like, no, you wanted the quilt, and we all had to say, yeah, you want the quilt, but you're to have to put it somewhere else because it doesn't work in that room. Then you went away and you thought about it. But we also have observations about things. And you come back and go, no, I really like that. I'm leaving it that way.
Joyce Camara (31:48)
Well, it's still your story, but you need somebody to kind of guide you along the way and kind of...
Jane Jones (31:58)
Right, then because sometimes we don't see things, we just get some help and we become better writers for it.
Joyce Camara (32:05)
We do, we do. And the more you write, the better you become. And I still, if somebody came to me and said, I want to write, but I don't know how I got a lot of ideas, said, well, write it and don't worry about it. Just write it, put it aside and then write some more. But write every day.
Not everybody believes that. I believe that because if you don't, you're going to forget about
Jane Jones (32:31)
Right, and there's these things, and you alluded earlier, there are things that happen in life like something, you you're traveling or some life family thing happens or you get sick and it's not, so you know, it's not militant, but it's the intention is there that you can write and you can get you right every single day because it makes you better.
Joyce Camara (32:58)
Right. You don't have to write for three or four hours, even five minutes. I mean, there were days when I didn't feel good. I was sick and I came in here and I wrote garbage. But I wrote and then the next day I rewrote it into something that was decent. Maybe not for the book, but a story or just something you can write something for yourself. I write a lot of stuff to my husband. I write stuff to my kids and my friends.
Jane Jones (33:21)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Joyce Camara (33:29)
I learned from my, from our Zoom group, my support, one of my support groups, how to write poetry. I couldn't rhyme T and three, but I learned how, and I mean, I don't know how I learned. I just wrote some poems, and it worked.
Jane Jones (33:52)
Yeah, and was really, sometimes when you're showing up and you're in an environment, like we have one lady in the group who does limericks and she does like, my gosh, she's hilarious. you know, I don't even try, because I'm quite happy to sit and write my poetry or my stories and listen to hers because they're brilliant.
Now, could I learn how to do a limerick? Absolutely, I could. But, you know, do I have to? No, because that's kind of where she shines, and she shines so brightly it's crazy. So not, we don't sort of, we don't have to, I don't have to try to do anything like that. But you, when you're with a group and you're with a group of people that's like-minded, and so...
What's your feeling about when you find yourself in a writing group or writing a story, like as you were writing something a while ago, that it just wasn't going anywhere. And that was when PIP showed up. That when you were somewhere where you just don't want to be, it's not working. What's your response or your...recommendation to the listeners.
Joyce Camara (35:07)
That maybe that's not really what you're trying to convey, what you're trying to say. Start over and write. Here's something somebody taught me. Go ahead and write whatever you want and then get rid of 50% of it. Just tear it up, throw it away. Start over. And you'll catch on to your own consistency, the way you want to write, you'll find it. I did. Without knowing.
Jane Jones (35:43)
Right.
Joyce Camara (35:44)
I mean, I wrote some pretty crappy stories when I first joined the writers’ group here in Lake Havasu.
I just did. I mean, you I didn't know what I was doing. I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn't know what I was doing. But the more you write, the more you learn yourself.
Jane Jones (36:03)
Sure. Yeah. Do you still have those pieces that you wrote when you first joined the writers' group?
Joyce Camara (36:09)
Every one of them.
Jane Jones (36:11)
One of the things that is really interesting is that... Not interesting is not the word. You have a treasure trove of stuff there that as you go through you can find inspiration for different things. And if you hadn't written the stuff that...is, as you say, garbage, what you think is garbage at the time. In five years it might be like that's exactly what I need for this thing that I'm writing now. Oh, I'm glad I wrote it down because now I can pull it into another story, right? Yeah, so you have that, you have it all the way from year 10. That's pretty amazing. Where are you now with your second book? How is that going with the writing?
Joyce Camara (36:55)
I was afraid you're going to ask me that question. It's not going as well as I expected. My first book went so well, and everything just fell into place. I was just on cloud nine, but I ended it in a cliffhanger on purpose, leaving them wanting more.
And it worked. I didn't know if that would work, but it did because people called me and said, “I want more. What happened?” I said, “All right, I'll write another book”. Well, the second one, it started very slow. And I was having a really hard time getting over that hump. I finally got to the middle and I did okay until I got to the last two chapters.
Now I am stuck. I can't get out what I want to convey in this book. know what I want for the ending, but you got to set the pattern to get there. It's got to make sense. You can't just jump from this to that. It's got to flow. It's got to make sense. And it's not flowing. I've had several very important people to me, important to me and good writers tell me it's not you Joyce, it's not good, it's just not good.
Jane Jones (38:29)
And I love what you say, that is just not you.
Joyce Camara (38:32)
It's just not me. Well, it doesn't match the story. It's not right. And I know that. So, I was told by somebody else to just put it away. Just put it away for a while. Walk away. And she said, it will come to you about three o'clock in the morning. I said, yeah, like when you came home when you were a teenager at three o'clock in the morning, I was awake. I was waiting for you.
And that's only been a couple of weeks, and it hasn't happened yet, but it will. I do think about it. I go to sleep rewriting it and thinking about it, but nothing has popped yet. But I've got to end this story. I've got to write this book because I've got customers that have said to me, where's the book? You promised me. I have their emails. I've already sold 50 books.
Jane Jones (39:27)
Mm-hmm. Right. And I really appreciate that. I'm going to use the word sticktutives. That's not what I mean, though. The courage to stay with it. No matter what.
Joyce Camara (39:36)
Determined. I am a determined person. Don't tell me I can't do it because I will do it. Tell me I can't walk across those railroad tracks and beat that train. I will. And I will beat that train. I can do it. And I know I can do it. That's the thing that made me the writer that I am, is now that I got published, I know I can do it.
And that's very important to a writer, I think.
Jane Jones (40:07)
Yeah. Yeah. So, what would be your, would you have some, just like a couple of things, if a person, let's say you're talking to somebody who is, say a young person who may be listening to this or an older person who knows somebody who's a young person. any, you know, one or two pieces of observation or advice that you would have for that young person.
Joyce Camara (40:32)
Whoa, to a young person…
Jane Jones (40:34)
Yeah. Based on your experience of your writing and things that they might try or they might… approach it a certain way in order to benefit.
Joyce Camara (40:48)
Well, a younger person is going to be a whole different, in a whole different place than I am. Nine times out of 10, they're going to be working at another job. Or they have a family. They got three kids running amok. So they can only write from 10 o'clock in the night until you got to get some sleep.
You know, when the kids are asleep, then you can write. And you can't sleep all day because the kids are awake. You have to find, again, you have to find a support group. An older person to watch your children. Or if you're married and you only have a husband, get his support and lock yourself in a room.
Make a room for yourself and make it attractive and make it that you want to be there.
And one thing that helped me everybody so you can write in your jammies. Yeah, you can. But I have a job to do and I would not go to my job and my jammies. So, I try to look halfway decent when I write jeans and a sweater that works. know, but if you really, really want to do it, then you have to decide number one, how are you going to do it?
Where are you going to find the time? Is it important enough to you to find the time? And the rest will come. And do your research, get some books, find out, go on the internet, talk to people, go to a coffee shop, go to Starbucks, talk to people. Or if you're, well, you don't have to be a drinker, but go to a bar, go to the local bar and sit there and listen.
Boy, oh boy, the stuff you'll learn is so amazing. When we traveled, like I said, and we went to this one place, little tiny town, and we went in this one bar and we had a beer, and these people were talking and this one gal says, well, “I gotta go home”. I said, “Well, why?” Their friend said, “Why are you going?” She says, “I got a teenager, I gotta put out of her misery”.
I just left them there. Yeah, yep, you gotta put those teenagers out of their misery. But the way she said it was so... funny.
So, if you listen to people, you're going to learn a lot. And if you want to write, most people write what they know. That's what I do. But you can, you can embellish it. You can change it around. When people see my book, they say, “Are you a private investigator?” I said no, but I wrote about one. I'm thinking, boy, I would have loved to bend one. I never thought about that.
Jane Jones (43:48)
There you go, there's another thing for you to be doing when you finish this next book you can hang out your shingle.
Joyce Camara (43:55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, if that's really what you want to do and you have obstacles in the way, which number one is a job, whether it's a stay at home mom or a working mom, then you got two jobs. You you work outside the home and you've still got the home to take care of. You've got to find a place for you to do that.
And the rest will come.
Jane Jones (44:22)
rest will come. It's a piece of advice that's pretty for everybody and even for women that are in their late 70s and early 80s if they want to start doing, they want to write and they don't necessarily want to write a novel they just think it would be useful to write. That's good advice for all age groups. Just one more question I neglected to mention earlier you talked about your handwriting.
Do you write your stories in script or use a computer?
Joyce Camara (44:55)
Yeah, I use a computer. I don’t like writing. And as I get older, my handwriting is harder to read.
Even though I was told I had good handwriting. But it seems like I'm always in a hurry. And my handwriting is, I can read it. I know what it says. But if I send the mister to the grocery store with a list that I wrote, he doesn't know what half of it says.
Jane Jones (45:23)
Gotcha, yeah, yeah. So, while there may be some value to handwriting, it's expedient for you to do your…
Joyce Camara (45:34)
And you gave us that lesson to write 10 times your name with your right hand and then 10 times your name with your left hand. When I first started, you couldn't even read. You couldn't make a J out of Joyce with my left hand. By the time I was done, it said Joyce, clearly. I'm just using 10 as a... I think mythical number. It was more than that or so many minutes. I don't remember what it was, but it worked. So, like anything you have to practice, like bowling, you're not going to get a strike the first time you throw a bowling ball.
Jane Jones (46:16)
Right, yep.
Joyce Camara (46:17)
So, everything takes practice and everything is in a certain place. It will fall into place. I know people don't believe that. I used to hate when people say it'll happen. No, it won't and never happens. But I'm living proof that it happened.
Jane Jones (46:38)
Yep, and that’s one of the values that we try to do at We Women Writers is to inspire women to think, maybe, let me try. And if you're going to try it, you've got to give yourself enough time. You've got to, like you said, have to set aside a space for yourself and a time for yourself. You have to build in some success into what you're attempting to do. And you have to stick at it long enough to be able to get the reward. So like...
For example, when we were writing our first and last names with our right hand and left hand, if you'd have stopped after three days, then you would have stopped. But because you kept on going, you got to the place where now, you can write with your left hand. And that's really a useful exercise when you're writing, even using the computer, is to do that for...two minutes or do three lines of it. Two lines, one of each right or left hand. So those are useful exercises to do to help you, right?
Joyce Camara (47:41)
Right. That's why I say write every day. Didn't just, you know, I gotta, I can't write today. I gotta go make dinner. Okay. You've written a sentence. You're done. That's good. And tomorrow you can write the dinner turned out good or, what a crappy dinner. burnt it. know, it's there. If you really, really want it, it's there and it's going to happen.
Jane Jones (47:55)
Mm-hmm. That's right. Yeah, there's a value to it. Yeah. Yeah.
Joyce Camara (48:09)
there is a value to it.
Jane Jones (48:11)
So, I want to address the listeners Joyce has got this book out there and it's called PIP, Private Investigator Phyllis, and it's very, very cute, book cover and everything. But this is a woman who's, how old were you when it was published, Joyce?
Joyce Camara (48:32)
I was 80, what am I now, maybe 81. I was 81.
Jane Jones (48:37)
81 years old and she wrote this nice story and it's a really easy reading and it's lovely and you know pick it up and and then by you know by the time you finish it you know here's hoping Joyce's the nemesis that's in there blocking, somebody wants to do something else and but she'll get she'll get to it and then you'll have the sequel out there and then then you'll be on to whatever next comes down the road.
Joyce Camara (49:09)
I have ideas for three or four more.
Jane Jones (49:12)
Sweet.
Joyce Camara (49:13)
So, I will be writing into my grave.
Jane Jones (49:17)
Yeah, well you gotta start thinking about getting old when you're 130, okay?
Joyce Camara (49:21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to, can I tell you one more thing? Yeah, even though I said I'm stuck with these last two chapters, and I've been thinking about it. Well, and the people that are important to me were honest with me and said, “It’s not right”. Okay. And I've accepted that.
A friend of ours had a very sad thing happen to him. He lost his leg. And he spent eight months in the Veterans Hospital in California. He's now home with nothing to do. His wife is gone. She died a year ago. So, I said, “Do you like to read? He said, “I love to read”. I said, “You want my book?” said, “Yeah, you wrote a book?”. I said, “Yeah, I wrote a book”. So, I sent it to him.
Two days after I sent it to him, he called me up and he said, “This is the best book in the world”. He just went on and on and on and he said, “You know, you're right up there with John Grisham and James Patterson”. I said, “Well, then where's my millions?” But what a sweet, sweet compliment.
Jane Jones (50:35)
Well, you know.
Joyce Camara (50:36)
And what a boost for my ego. I mean
Jane Jones (50:38)
Absolutely.
Joyce Camara (50:38)
I’m doing it.
Jane Jones (50:40)
I'll wager that what you did was inspire him. And that is what all really good writers do, is they inspire people. And your writing was exactly what he needed.
Joyce Camara (50:55)
Apparently.
Jane Jones (50:56)
And as a writer, that's, of course the big bucks are helpful, the big bucks without the accolades, without people's honest... Pardon me, honest response. The big bucks don't matter.
Joyce Camara (51:09)
Yeah, no, I didn't write for the money. I didn't write it for the money. The first book was fun. I just had a lot of fun with that book.
Jane Jones (51:17)
Mm-hmm. Nice.
Joyce Camara (51:18)
This one, not so much, but it'll be all right.
Jane Jones (51:24)
I think it'll be golden, just like the others. Once you get your voice back there, whatever it is, in the way that's... Yeah, something got in between you, who you are as a writer and the story. And there's just that one little area. But when you get over it, the readers, whoever's listening to this now and reads the book, are not going to understand why there's ever a problem.
Joyce Camara (51:48)
Well, not everybody will know.
Jane Jones (51:50)
Correct, yeah, but if they did the podcast and then they're gonna go, I don't know what Joyce and Jane were on about because this flows pretty well. Well, because Joyce took the time and gave herself.
Joyce Camara (52:03)
And then my customers that say, “Where's my book?” I say, “Well, I'm having a little bit of trouble”. And say, “Well, get over it”. I say, “OK”.
Jane Jones (52:11)
Good, yeah, nice. All right, well, we'll run now and everybody, thank you very much for listening and we're gonna look forward to some more from Joyce and in the show notes, there'll be a link to Joyce's book on Amazon and yeah, we'll look forward to hearing some more for Joyce as the days go on here.
Joyce Camara (52:32)
Well, thank you so much for having me. I do appreciate it. And I hope I've inspired some of you young writers and the older ones too. You know, if you want to be a writer, you can be a writer.
Jane Jones (52:44)
Excellent. Yep. Thank you very much, Joyce. Appreciate it. Alrighty. And we'll just, we'll say goodbye. Thank you.
Thank you for joining the We Women Writers podcast today. I appreciate you taking your time to listen in. I do hope that you've been inspired by this conversation, and I'd like to encourage you to pick up your pen today and write for five minutes. I would love to hear from you.
Please subscribe and leave a review. Until next time, take good care and have a perfectly lovely day.