Karen Vanderjagt - From Nurse to Novelist: Karen VanderJagt's Story

In this conversation, Karen VanderJagt shares her journey as a writer, discussing her early experiences, the importance of character development, and how personal experiences shape her storytelling. She emphasizes the value of writing groups in providing constructive feedback and fostering growth. Karen also navigates the challenges of traditional publishing and explores the self-publishing route, offering advice for aspiring writers. The discussion highlights the significance of reader perspectives and the emotional investment in characters, concluding with reflections on the writing process and life.

Quote:

“Sometimes the writer's job is to make your reader think, not to tell them the answer, but to find their own answer.”

Takeaways: 

• Self-publishing offers new opportunities for authors.
• Readers' perspectives can vary widely, enriching the storytelling experience.
• Writers should aim to evoke thought rather than dictate beliefs.

Chapters

• 0:00 WWW Intro
• 0:29 Karen's Journey to Writing
• 8:55 The Emotional Depth of Characters
• 18:18 The Role of Critique in Writing
• 28:00 Navigating Difficult Themes in Literature
• 28:31 Navigating the Publishing Landscape
• 30:22 Self-Publishing: A New Frontier
• 35:07 Advice for Aspiring Writers
• 38:42 The Importance of Community in Writing
• 39:49 Exploring Themes and Reader Engagement
• 46:58 Understanding Perspectives in Writing
• 49:08 WWW Outro

Transcript

Jane Jones (00:29)

Hello everyone, and this is Jane. And today we have with us Karen Vanderjack, she was married in 1975, and she moved to Lake Havasu City after her honeymoon. Her husband had to return there to work at his family business. She had four children. The eldest son lost to an accident when he was seven years old. She graduated from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in 1972, worked in ICU, CCU, labor and delivery at the Lake Havasu City Hospital. She taught Lamaze classes and then transitioned to a private practice office and worked as a sexual assault examiner for a local assault center. After retiring in 2010, she attended a presentation at the community college given by three local writers for the Lake Havasu City Writers Group. She joined, and the rest is history. She has eight finished fiction novels, but has found traditional publishing difficult to break into and is now trying her hand at Ebook publishing on Amazon. Welcome, Karen. Lovely to see you and to meet you. I really am looking forward to our conversation today.

Karen VanderJagt (01:45)

Thank you. I am also.

Jane Jones (01:53)

Excellent. Okay, so we'll start. Please tell us about your writing journey.

Karen VanderJagt (02:00)

Well, the first time I went to a meeting at the writers group, I was a little overwhelmed because it was a rather large and very active group, and I had no clue what I was doing. So, I looked back at my first little prompt that I wrote, and I wanna cringe. 

Let's just say my education in English and writing was minimal at best. I was always an avid reader. So, I had a lot of stories in my head, and I really wanted to give this a shot. So, over the years through this group, it is a critique group. So, they really helped me develop, learn writing skills, develop my writing skills, how to put together a story. So, it was a process. But you know, when you have stories in your head, they just have to come out. So, I wrote my first novel probably within a couple of years of starting in with the group and it’s to the to date my husband says that’s my first one is still his favorite.

Jane Jones (03:10)

Excellent. What’s the name of that book, by the way?

Karen VanderJagt (03:12)

It’s called “The Piano Man.”

Jane Jones (03:14)

Okay, perfect. Okay. What was special about that to your husband? Why is that his favorite? Would you

Karen VanderJagt (03:24)

The relationships between the characters.

Jane Jones (03:30)

They are particularly poignant or...

Karen VanderJagt (03:37)

I would say there's there I had quite a few characters in this because it takes place in a New York City neighborhood that's kind of one of those borderline neighborhoods that it was nice solidly middle class but it's now a slippery slope going down and my one of my main characters buys an empty old bar and turn wants to turn it into a family pub, someplace where the community can gather. And it's kind of about all the people in the neighborhood and how they come together and build their relationships between them.

Jane Jones (04:15)

There may be echoes of his family, his family, and the history of his family there. No?

Karen VanderJagt (04:23)

No, not really. really.

Jane Jones (04:40)

Not, really? Okay. Okay, perfect. Then you talked a little bit about these stories in your head. Have you always had stories like that in your head, or just picked up when you...

Tell us about that. Which of the stories in your head? 

Karen VanderJagt (04:44)

I don’t know. I've read as long as I can remember. I always had a book going. And I'm not from a reading family. So, this is something that was more irritating to my parents than anything else. But I always had my nose in a book. I always got involved with the characters. I really like strong characters. I like strong female characters. But I also like good male characters.

For me, writing is about how you identify with the people that are in the book. Yes, having a good plot is important, but character is equally so; let's put it that way. You always wanna have somebody to root for and someone to really get irritated at and root against. So, you wanna be emotionally invested in whatever you're reading. So that's kind of what I shoot for. I want my people to be emotionally invested in what's happening with my characters, what they're experiencing, what they're thinking. So, to me, that's pretty much it.

Jane Jones (05:49)

So, it sounds like, and make your comment is that the stories you have in your head, you have these novels that you have ready, that you've written, those came out of your experience of reading and learning about your connection with the writers, characters, and the content of the book, and just the familiarity with the flow of the writer's book.

Karen VanderJagt (06:20)

Every writer brings their own life experiences into it. Now, one of my books deals with someone with PTSD. And that's very important to me because I pretty much lost my brother compliments of PTSD from his Vietnam years. And the story is not my brother's story, but I wanted to write a story about people, someone facing PTSD. I cannot be in the... the head of a man to know what PTSD does to him. I saw what it did to my brother. I did it from the point of view of a woman, and she was a medical personnel. She wasn't a soldier. She was trying to save lives, you know, where my brother was a soldier, and he had to take life, which was part of his problem. 

Jane Jones (07:12)

Okay, very different.

Karen VanderJagt (07:16)

So, you know, I've done a series, it's a murder mystery series. And I've tackled topics that were sometimes medical, sometimes things I had to deal with. My very first murder mystery was about a mercy killer, okay? Because euthanasia, and mercy murders, and stuff were prevalent during some of my nursing career. The idea of putting somebody out of their misery, I've had to deal with a lot of times with my intensive care nursing where patients had to make a decision, families had to make a decision to let somebody go. And there's a lot of states now that have euthanasia laws. And so I kind of tackle that. And that's probably because of my medical background. One of my books deals with sexual abuse of minors. One of my books deals with, my daughter is an art conservationist. She has her master's, and she fixes art, she says. Well, one of my books deals with art forgery and that world, okay? So, she was a wonderful source of information.

Jane Jones (08:23)

Nice, nice.

Karen VanderJagt (08:26)

And my last deals with domestic violence and with men as the victim. We always we have read lots of stories about women being the victims of domestic violence where there's a pretty significant chunk of men who are victims as well, and they don't get any attention because most men do not want to admit they're being beaten up by their partners, whether the partners are male or female.

Jane Jones (08:55)

Right. So, your focus on people identifying with the characters and having an emotional investment to the characters with the subject matter that you approach in your books is a challenge. They're challenges to people but just the being able to write something that approaches and, and handles these difficult situations in order to communicate something, perspective or an experience or to help somebody through something, or to understand somebody that they know that's going through something. There's lots of different ways of looking at that. Did you get this way of looking at things? And it sounds from what you said earlier that when you were reading things, your nose was always in a book, and you got engrossed in the books, and you... have an experience of those writers. And so, is that what helps you, or is that one of the things that helps you in writing these stories that you are looking at approaching these difficult situations?

Karen VanderJagt (10:14)

I would think that the books that I've read in the past, the authors that I like in the past, everything that you are and that you've learned over the years, has to affect your writing. I mean, I don't know how you could accept it, how you could isolate that and have it not. But I'm not aware of saying, well, how would this author handle this, etcetera, I don't, because when I get to writing, I lose track of time. Sometimes I'll sit down, I'm just gonna write for a few minutes, and all of a sudden I look up and it's three hours has gone by. But sometimes I feel like my characters take over and they're writing their own story, and I'm just a conduit.

Jane Jones (10:57)

Yeah, this is a theme that keeps popping up, and a lot of times is that I can ask a question like that. And there is no mental yes, I think about that, and that happens. But there's this thing that just happens. 

Karen VanderJagt (11:20)

Yeah, it's like my husband laughs because I'll be trying to work out a scene, or I'll try to be thinking about something I want to write. And I do a lot of times thinking, thinking, thinking. And when I wake up the next morning, it's there. So, it's like some of this stuff just comes into my head while I'm sleeping. I know I want to how I want to handle that. Right now, I know what's what happens next. So sometimes I think my subconscious is pretty active.

Jane Jones (11:48)

Okay. And so did you ever do any writing at school, any creative writing or anything like that?

Karen VanderJagt (11:59)

You know, like I said, we had very, in my high school had very poor English teaching skills. So, I think I had, I didn't even know parts of grammar when I got to nursing school, and I hit my English professor with her, her looking down her nose through her bifocals. She was the perfect New England school mom. And she looked at you like her first statement is this is where we weed out the dead wood.

Jane Jones (12:29)

Oh no.

Karen VanderJagt (12:30)

She’d look at you, and you knew she thought you were dead wood.

Jane Jones (12:34)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for the up to the chipper pot.

Karen VanderJagt (12:38)

My papers came back masses of red marks everywhere. It was terrible. And then finally, she would assign you what format you had to use and how you had to write it, blah, blah. The last, I had a solid CD grade. I mean, I was terrible. And then the last paper, she said, OK, now you can, this paper, you can write whatever you want. You can use whatever style you want, just write something. Well, I wrote a very sarcastic paper about the difficulties of writing. And when she was handing them back to me, she looked at me, she goes, Well, what happened to you, Miss Shar, you know, which was my maiden name. And I thought, I flunked, I flunked. And she handed me this paper. And it only had three red commas on it. And underneath it, she wrote, this paper has style and writing. Now I cut that out, and I had that on my wall the rest of my nursing school time. And she told me if I could get a B on either my term paper or my final exam, she would give me a B for the whole class just because of that one paper. Unfortunately, I got a C on both, so I still got a C.

That probably meant as much to me as anything in my school things because she was a tough teacher.

Jane Jones (14:11)

So, when she puts her glasses down on her nose and says, What happened to you? It wasn't about what happened to you and your grouchy person, but you have improved so much. What happened? How did you manage to do so well? Is that?

Karen VanderJagt (14:29)

It was, if you had seen some of my previous papers and the amount of red marks all over it, you would understand. And I thought she was probably gonna be just really angry at me because I thought I was really, I was in that paper, and I was sarcastic as all get out. And I had some really good turn of phrases there. I wish I had kept the paper.

Jane Jones (14:52)

Yeah, it may show up somewhere. Is it on a computer or is it handwritten? Well. Back in the day. 

Karen VanderJagt (14:57)

No, it's all handwritten. 1970. We're lucky if we had typewriters.

Jane Jones (15:09)

Yeah, yeah. How do you, right now, do you write by hand and then put in the computer? Yeah, do you ever write by hand?

Karen VanderJagt (15:13)

I'm on the computer. You know, I have some notebooks here with some little stories that I wrote, like I tried to write back when I was probably in my 30s. And they're all handwritten, but they're so faded out, I can hardly read them. That's how old they are. So yes, at one point in time, I did write a few stories by hand, but nothing that I ever completed. You know, I took a couple creative, in early in my marriage, I took a couple of English classes, creative writing classes, but I can't say that I really learned a great deal. I learned more from our writers group than I ever learned from any writing class. I remember back when, again, I was in my 30s, I had a girlfriend ask me to write this chapter for her because she was a writer. I wrote the chapter, and she was going to NAU, Northern Arizona University. And the college professor asked her if I had graduated high school. That's the level of my writing. And she brought me that little 60-page Elements of Style book by Strunk. And I rewrote the chapter because I thought, this is what grammar is. I rewrote the chapter, and he would not believe her when she said the same person wrote it. That's when I started learning English was from that little 60-page book.

Jane Jones (16:47)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's really, it underscores the experience that people have and their, perhaps their perception of writing because of people that have been vested with the privilege and responsibility of teaching writing, teaching grammar or teaching English, that if you have people that if it's not received well, if a person is, it can really impact you. Yeah, yeah. And you happen to have the good luck of going to that class, that presentation, and hearing three pretty good writers talk about their group, and you decided you would join. And as we said earlier in the introduction, the rest is history that you found a home there in the same place where your home is, and you've been writing. How long ago was that that you went to that presentation? You retired in say 2010, right?

Karen VanderJagt (18:03)

I say within, I would say right about the same time, because I've been in the group a long time now. I'd say probably about the same time.

Jane Jones (18:13)

Okay, so 20, 15 years.

Karen VanderJagt (18:17)

For about 15, yeah.

Jane Jones (18:18)

Yep. And what would you say was the most, if you could say, say maybe three of the most valuable benefits to being in a writer's group like that one?

Karen VanderJagt (18:34)

Yeah, our group is a critique group. So, number one, you have to develop a thick skin because everybody in the group criticizes or gives you a critique on your work. And we try to keep everything constructive, you know, no mean tweets like this, this story is manure. So, you have to develop a thick skin.

Number two, they showed me different ways of saying things. How to make the most of every word that you write. One of the things I find, I've learned as I read books now, and when they spend five pages explaining about what describing what a room looks like, I'm only bored. Okay? Sometimes they're beautiful, flowery sentences that grammatically are just, oh, that's such a pretty image. But there's only so long I want to read that. I just read a book, and my daughter said, Wonderful book. I read this book, and it seemed like every five pages I was getting these long, lengthy descriptions of a town, a room, a building, an item, and I thought I just got really tired of it. And one of the things that the writers group said that we do a writing exercise called writing to a prompt. They give you what the issue is, and you have 250 words to tell a story about that. So, you may write a story and it's 500 words, but you have to pare it down to 250 words. So, every word has to count and be important to the story and not just filler. So, it taught me how to keep the action going. And yes, I do want some description, but it shouldn't go on for pages and pages unless it is critical to the plot of the story.

Jane Jones (20:44)

Yeah, that is an often overlooked experience of writing something and then having to bring it, pare it down. It's different from writing and being aware of your word count and keeping it within 250. But write what you want to write, put it out there, and look, go, I got 500 words, I need 250, and then to bring it down. So, I appreciate that particular method of

Karen VanderJagt (21:22)

It is a very valuable exercise.

Jane Jones (21:25)

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's often overlooked. It's the economy of words, which I verbally have a difficult time with. I'm sorry everybody, I do—my poor mother. Yeah, so she'd be busting the gut right now. So yeah, it's to do it. So, it sounds like what I heard you say was that is it this thick skin? And I'd like to look at thick skin a little bit. Is it really the thick skin, or is it from the person who's giving the critique, learning how to do it in a way that is kind but clear and concise?

Karen VanderJagt (22:09)

It's a little bit of both, both. Because we have had some issues where somebody said something very insensitive, and someone has dropped out of the group because their feelings are really hurt. So, you can't always stop that in human interaction. So, we just try to minimize it. Yeah, you have to learn how to give. But I also had to learn within the group; I had to learn how to critique.

What was I looking for? You know, what was the hook? Where's the arc? Where's the plot? How many plot changes are there? What is the character development? How about the descriptions? How about the narrative? How about the balance between your narrative and your dialogue? Okay. So I had to learn all that within the group. So, listening to the critiques, listening to the critiques of others working on somebody else's was all part of the learning process.

Jane Jones (23:07)

So originally, earlier, you said that you were overwhelmed when you first went. So, for the listeners, that's a lot to learn, and that's like 15 years of learning of all of those things. But to start, you come in and you don't know, but you kind of swim along with everybody, and it's something that you learn and that you don't... It's not useful to expect yourself to know all those things right away, but to show up.

Karen VanderJagt (23:41)

I've tried to tell, we've tried to tell new members, you know, everybody, not everybody's gonna like your work. You know, I may love what you said, somebody else will hate it. I may like this character; somebody else doesn't, but you are the author. The buck stops with you, and you listen to what everybody has to say, and then you decide, you know, what is a valid, what's valid, what works, what would make this better?

So, you're the king of your world. But you know, if five people are telling you that this doesn't work, you should look at it more closely than if one person says, You know what, I just don't like that.

Jane Jones (24:24)

Right, but for other people, like it, sort of has something to do with, to bring it down really, really simple, is if you're gonna have your grocery list and you want to buy flour, then you better write flour. Because you give it to your husband or your son or your daughter, and they're gonna go to the store and they're gonna buy what's on the list. But if... If you want rice, they're going to bring back with rice, and you're going, what do you mean? I meant flour, but that's not what you said. What do I really mean to say, which is a valuable experience in writing, whether you have an intention to publish or not? It's that, am I saying what I mean to say? And one of the gauges of that is what do people get when I said that, when I wrote that? And everybody looks at if everybody looks at me and says I don't know what you're talking about.

Karen VanderJagt (25:24)

Yeah, if you're confusing people, then you could look for clarification. That's an important thing too. The other thing I find that I've really enjoyed, I always liked going to school. So, I used to take a lot of classes here or there. I liked doing the research. One of my last stories was actually given to me by my son, who came home and he had a dream, and he told me the dream. And the next thing I knew, he says, You need to write this story. The next thing I knew, I was writing a book about Chinese, like about China. And the amount of research I had to do, because I know very little about China, it was fascinating. I got so immersed into it, and I used a lot of Chinese history and wove it into some of my characters. A lot of my characters are fictitious, but I used actual historical events. I just gave them a character name because, in my research, they didn't say who did what. And I did one story on like even the PTSD, I had to deal with, you know, counseling techniques and getting into that. Although I did do my psych training, I did work in a psychiatric unit for quite a while. So, I had a little bit more background for that.

And in my crime ones, I had to research legal procedures and what you can and cannot do. One of my stories is about this one kind of freaked me out a little bit, because I was writing about a virus that brings about kind of like the end of people. And while I was writing, that is when COVID. I'm thinking.

Jane Jones (27:12)

Wow.

Karen VanderJagt (27:15)

I’m thinking, I hadn't even finished the book, and we had the COVID epidemic, and I got a little weirded out. But my virus affected so, that people couldn't reproduce. It didn't kill people; it just kept us from being able to reproduce.

So, I had, I actually was able to get in contact with both the virologist who works for Moderna and with a biologist over in California because my son was their IT guy at their lab. So, I asked, would she be willing to talk to me and make sure that my medical facts were accurate? And I wasn't reassured to find out that what I said was possible. 

For some reason I was hoping this was more science fiction and they said, oh no, that's totally possible. And I thought that makes me even more nervous.

Jane Jones (28:07)

I’m a little nervous. Yes. Yeah, I could imagine. Right. Yeah, that would be disconcerting. I skip over that stuff. But I, yeah, I don't like to spend a lot of time with that. I mean, but I'll, yeah, I'll have to give it some pause. I will be thinking about that. The, the idea that moving on to you've got these eight books and you've tried going the regular traditional publishing route what's your just your personal experience of that doing that?

Karen VanderJagt (28:41)

I find that you know you have to write your query letter, you have to write your synopsis, you have to write your biography and then they ask you all these questions and then they only want the first three pages, the first five pages you know I thought all of the writing they're seeing is, you know, from my synopsis. And trying to write a synopsis, I don't know if I'm the best at writing a synopsis because my books are a little bit more involved than that. And trying to get all the details into the little frame that they want is, I may not be the best at that. Maybe that's why I get such lovely rejection letters.

Jane Jones (29:25)

Well, you know, for very successful writers, think you submit them is really important that you do that, you go through that work and you get the rejection letter. That's okay. That's what's going to happen there. But you're in good company.

Karen VanderJagt (29:41)

And I know there's a lot of well-known, very famous writers that had, I can't remember who it was, but they said they had something like 50 rejection letters. Now I don't have that many, but I have probably about two dozen. 

Jane Jones (29:55)

Yeah. And I think we now have, you know, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, it wasn't so usual, and depending on somebody's connectivity, the internet and things like that, we now have access to self-publishing and now this e-publishing through Amazon. And so you're in the process of putting one of your books up on Amazon as an Ebook, correct?

Karen VanderJagt (30:22)

Yes, the one I'm going to try first is the the Chinese the China one because that's one of my favorite stories and I have a lot of a lot of history in there. I have a lot of mythology there. There's good human relationships there. I had fun with a lot of characters. There's a lot of humor in it. So, it was one of my favorites. So

Jane Jones (30:42)

Gotcha. Okay. And when you do that, when you do an Ebook, do you have an author page on Amazon like the other books?

Karen VanderJagt (30:49)

I don't have anything there yet. Like I said, I just finished my final edit. I've got it formatted. My daughter's going to be coming here pretty soon, and she has an art program that I'm going to use to design my cover. I've just been, the last couple of days, I've been working on your jacket cover, your little description to get people to buy your book in the first place. So, and then she's going to help me upload it because I've never uploaded anything like that before. Like you just learned I just did this is my first zoom. So.

Jane Jones (31:21)

Yep.

Karen VanderJagt (31:23)

A challenge. I did sign up for a computer class, a few classes at the community college to get my computer skills up, and I'm in the process of getting everything copyrighted. So, I have to learn how to do compress my file so I can get all the copyrights under one number because you can do up to 10 submissions on for one copy with one copyright.

Jane Jones (31:50)

Okay, perfect. So, once you've got this book written and you've got it ready and it's what you want to do, when you can continue to keep drawing the traditional, or you can do the self-publishing, which is a whole other learning curve. And then there's this other learning curve that you can try, and you've elected to do that one. And so, it's like another process. Are you writing at the same time?

Karen VanderJagt (32:23)

Yeah, my daughter has challenged me, and she said, You've never written a love story. She goes, so she says, I want you to write a love story and if you don't do it, you owe me a favor. And if you do do it, I owe you a favor.

Jane Jones (32:44)

What are the parameters of the favor? You could cash in pretty good.

Karen VanderJagt (32:57)

My daughter has done me many favors because she has two bachelor's and two master's degrees. She's traveled the world. She has one of these idetic memories. If she reads something, she remembers it. So sometimes when I can't find my research, I call her, and I can't tell you the number of times that she has the answers

Jane Jones (33:21)

Nice, excellent. What a wonderful benefit to have in that. Your daughter, that sounds like a lot of fun.

Karen VanderJagt (33:29)

Well, she read our encyclopedia Britannica. By the time she was in junior high, she was reading our encyclopedia Britannica. She said if there wasn't anything to read, she goes, just read the encyclopedia.

Jane Jones (33:44)

Wow, fun. Well, then if her mind has got that capability, it just is like a, it wants more information. Otherwise it, I can't imagine what it would be like to have that desire in your head then.

Karen VanderJagt (33:57)

Our family joke is, is I always wanted a girl. We had three boys, you know. After we lost my son, we about a year later, my husband came in and I was going to be teaching a Lamaze class and he's playing around with the book. And I thought, my gosh, he's going to ask me to have another baby. And he said, I want to try one more time for a girl. And I said, Okay. And I prayed I'd get a daughter who liked to read. Because my one boy does a little reading, my other boy really doesn't. I said, I'd like a daughter who reads. And by the time she was two years old, she would lie in bed. I'd have to put all of her books around her. And she would go to bed every night looking through books. And she said, the reason I read so much is because God answered prayer. You asked for a daughter who would read, and she's very much a reader.

Jane Jones (34:51)

In spades, yes. Excellent. So, if you had some advice to a writer who, a person who just was interested in writing, what would your piece of advice be?

Karen VanderJagt (35:07)

Just sit down and start doing it, and to understand that there's a learning curve. You have to be able to be thick-skinned enough to learn and listen to what people have to say that are trying to help you. And you just have to write. You can't have it in your head and not put it down on paper or on computer and work on it. And it's really hard. People don't want to practice. They think they're going to sit down and write the best seller the first time out. And it just doesn't work that way. Writing is work. But it's fun work to me. But it is still work. And I, I sometimes don't write every day, but I write most days. Even if it's just one scene.

Jane Jones (36:00)

Yep. Yeah, you're right. And you're also, you said that you're thinking about you think, think, think, think, and then you go to sleep, and you wake up in the morning or and then there's the answer that you're looking for. So, I've heard that from a lot of other writers as well.

Karen VanderJagt (36:14)

That works especially for me on the prompts because I'm not picking that topic. Somebody else has picked the topic. So, I have to think about it. And the thing that, another thing that amazes me is the group will have the same prompt, and we get totally different stories.

Jane Jones (36:34)

So do you, when you write your prompts, I'm interested, they give you the prompt, you take it home, and you write it?

Karen VanderJagt (36:40)

We have a meeting at the end of every year. Everybody turns in their suggestions. Our committee comes up with the 12 for the year with a couple of alternates, just in case you just can't think of anything. So, everybody has a list of, on this day, this is the prompt. For this meeting, this is the prompt.

Jane Jones (37:03)

So that's the prompt that you're going to, you got to come condensed down into 250 words. That's different from writing a prompt where you just sit and write for five minutes, in a group. So, okay, that's very different. So, there are, there are some of those programs out there that, that do just very for five minutes at 10 minutes a day, whatever; it's just a short little prompt and you get up and move away and just move along. It's continuing to write something every day.

Karen VanderJagt (37:33)

Now, within the prompt, essentially, you're telling your story, but you have to have your hook. You have to have your conclusion. You have to have the arc. Are you going to have dialogue? Are you going to have narrative? And man, it's really hard sometimes to that, pair those stories down. And there's been a few times where part of the critique is, this isn't a 250 story. This is a story like a thousand-word story.

You may have condensed it down to 250, but you shouldn't have. You should leave it as a bigger story.

Jane Jones (38:09)

Yeah, yeah. So, you take it back home and expand it again, but you did a good job breaking it down to 250, but that must have been a lot of work. Yeah, yeah. So is this something that when you, actually, back up a little bit, back to the group is that the value of meeting with other writers, how important do you... For you, you think that is, and do you think it is for other writers as well? 

Karen VanderJagt (38:42)

I think it's always important for people when they share an interest to be able to share that interest with some others that have the same interest. I don't care if it's writing, painting, a sports activity, a hobby. Sharing it with somebody is just plain fun. Okay? It builds good friendships. It enriches your own personal experience and what you could bring to your own writing, because I continue to learn. You know, I've been with the group, what, 15 years, and a lot of those people have been there the whole 15 years, and we still are learning. We still are growing. I don't think it, you don't stop growing till you're dead.

Jane Jones (39:20)

No, that's right. When you're on the other side of the dirt is when you can stop. It's whether you want to or not, you're still learning. So, you might as well engage in it. It's always a more a more helpful, a more exciting, more satisfying experience to be engaged in it. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. Is there anything else that you would just in writers in general, or just some advice or some. Something that you find particularly satisfying in writing?

Karen VanderJagt (39:53)

Well, like I said, some of my stories have, there are things that I was interested in or I take from my own personal experience, but I don't write really to tell people what to think or how to handle things. It's like I, and in a lot of my ways, try to, like, especially say in my Mercy Murders.

I get both sides of the argument. People have to make up their own mind. In my End Times book with the virus that sterilizes people, it's how do we handle that? How are we trying to, how do they try to save the human race? And at the end, what kind of decision do you make about who you want to be going forward?

And there's a big decision at the end of the book. And I don't tell people what the decision is. They have to be thinking about it themselves.

Jane Jones (40:50)

Yeah, by understanding and experiencing the characters and the dilemmas that they go through, that that develops, internally it develops something, a position or a perspective, an understanding.

Karen VanderJagt (41:04)

So sometimes the writer's job is to make your reader think, not to tell them the answer, but to find their own answer.

Jane Jones (41:13)

That's so important because so often I find with in my own journey in seeking to find something that like a program, something, writer's program, or something. And my personal experience of it is that do this, this, this, this, and this. And it just wouldn't fit. And then I feel depleted. I feel less than I feel I can't make it; I can't, everybody thinks it's so easy. But it's really not about looking at what somebody else does or says and saying I have to do that, I have to think that, I have to... So as a writer, you present the information, and so the person is left free to decide. And so, then the person is free to decide, whereas writing that is done intentionally to persuade somebody to one position or another is, can be a very frustrating experience for the reader.

Karen VanderJagt (42:22)

Well, every reader can tell you what your bias is when they're writing to try to persuade you. So, and there's, guess there's, if you believe in something strongly, there's something to be said. But as long as the reader knows, this is where I'm coming from. Okay. You don't want to make, you know, we see that in politics all the time. They decide what's right, and then they try to convince you that it's right. They don't use the evidence to get there; they try to fit the evidence for their argument. It's kind of a reverse logic.

Jane Jones (43:00)

Sure, and that's human nature because in terms of trying to get people sort of on to see things the way we see them. And then that's what happens all the time. But the freedom that a writer has to then recognize that and say, What I want to do is I want to present a story. So, along the lines of, say, the PTSD, there's a story that is presented where the person decides for themselves what they look, what they can see, what they decide. They can decide or come to some decision, but it's kind of awareness of like, so, I don't know everything. Let me just, you know, and cause some of those situations it's, I can't even imagine that there would be enough that one could know and understand to be able to say decisively, you know, I suppose that, and I'm talking about something I really know very little about, but I used to, with teaching little children, I used to put up a Starbucks mug in the middle of the table.

And the mug had a logo on one side. So, all the children sitting on this side could see the logo, and the other ones on this side couldn't. And so, they would discuss it and everything. And then I would say, you know, we could have a knock ‘em down, drag them out fight over whether there's a logo on that thing or not. And they're all like, yeah, yeah. I said, so now instead of turning the mug around, I had the children move.

Karen VanderJagt (44:33)

Yeah.

Jane Jones (44:40)

To other side, each of them to change places. And now they could see. And it's only when you change chairs could you see. And so, it's that idea of being able to be able to understand that, in a writer's mind and the ability to write, you can come to understand things in yourself, and then to be able to put it back on the page.

And have other people read it and see something new and different.

Karen VanderJagt (45:10)

There's always something that I didn't think of it that way. You know, I'm glad you said that because that didn't occur to me. And what's the old saying? You walk a mile in someone else's shoes, you know? Without sin, cast the first stone. I mean, we just have different points of view. We all have come to believe certain things are true. In our life, this is true.

Jane Jones (45:25)

Yep.

Karen VanderJagt (45:36)

There are certain things that I will not ever accept. I don't care what society says, but I am never going to accept that. That is a core belief for who I am and what I believe. I can still try and understand where you're coming from, but I'm still never gonna believe it's right. Everybody has their core. Okay, this is who I am. But there's a lot of flexibility around the outside.

Jane Jones (46:06)

Yes, and to make it sort of really, actually light, and I use this analogy a lot, is that its raining it's pouring rain outside, and somebody's inside going that's rain, that’s terrible rain. That's terrible and that you see somebody else walking along with a little kid with a raincoat and glosses and a little umbrella and they're having a great old time. And so, it just depends. Now then you have somebody else dashing from the car and there but they're happy and they're getting soaked in the skin they get inside but so it just it,  I have to say it depends, it depends, it depends right so but it's about not it's about it's about the person sitting inside going I don't like the rain and honoring themselves and that they don't like it and the little kid knowing they got to go outside and mom's got to put all the stuff. 

Karen VanderJagt (46:50)

We're just playing in the puddles.

Jane Jones (45:25)

Yes, and and the woman, dad, the man, or the woman dashing from the car, going next time I'm bringing my umbrella, that kind of.

Jane Jones (46:58)

Honoring who you are and where you are in the circumstances you're in is just really, and it's as easy as that, but then as difficult as that it can be really, really difficult.

Karen VanderJagt (47:09)

If we all liked the same thing. It would be a very boring world.

Jane Jones (47:13)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody would like the world that I would create because, you know, I'm making a mess of mine. I'm a challenge in my life.

Karen VanderJagt (47:23)

And one of our members always wants a happy ending.

Jane Jones (47:27)

Yeah, yeah, well. 

Karen VanderJagt (47:29)

I like a good cry, you know, so hey.

Jane Jones (47:32)

Yeah, understanding that some time that life is life, and it is true that the sun comes up every morning, but not always for everybody. No. And that's something I learned a long time ago. And I can write about that, and I can communicate that, and I can get my feelings out. And whether I share that or not is up to me. And then any of the listeners listening, you can write, you don't have to share anything if you don't want to. That's okay.

Karen VanderJagt (48:01)

There's some things I haven't written about and I probably will never write about because it's too close. It's too close to the vest. But, you know, I can imagine all kinds of things, and my imagination is not showing any signs of slowing down. So.

Jane Jones (48:19)

Good, good. Well, I'm looking forward to these books, these books that you've got coming out and the ones that are still, you know, in your fingers waiting to come. And maybe we'll catch up with you again a little later, and we'll keep an eye out on Amazon in the next, I don't know, however long it takes, we'll keep an eye out and look and

Karen VanderJagt (48:38)

My daughter doesn't get here for a couple of weeks yet.

Jane Jones (48:42)

That's okay. Well, we won't do it right away, but we'll keep an eye out because this video, this podcast, will be up for a while, and somebody will hear it later down the road. They're looking, they're looking, there it is. So, we'll look forward to that. And thank you very much, Karen, for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Karen VanderJagt (49:00)

Thank you. It was fun.

Jane Jones (49:02)

Yeah, good, good, I'm glad. All righty, well, everybody take care, and we'll see you again.