Dear Writer, You're NOT Screwing This Up with Author Rachael Herron

Learn more about Group Coaching with Write It Scared.

Ready for a dive-deep conversation about the emotional rollercoaster of writing? 

In this episode, I’m chatting with Rachael Herron—a trad and indie author who knows her way around multiple genres and isn’t shy about sharing less-than-stellar moments of her writing journey. 

We dig into story structure, the ups and downs of writing and revising, and the emotional twists that come with the territory of trying to write your first novel.

Rachael opens up about her move to New Zealand, her battles with creative burnout, and how she handles imposter syndrome. Plus, we’ll unpack some practical advice for handling self-doubt, writing shitty drafts, and learning to believe in yourself and your voice. 

Join us for insights that will help you navigate the emotional challenges of writing and remind you that you’re not alone and that you are not doing it wrong!

00:18 Introduction 

01:22 Meet Rachel Heron

04:08 Rachel's Writing Journey

11:31 The Importance of Story Structure

17:27 Rachel's Writing Process Today

18:42 Refining the Draft: From Messy to Polished

19:08 The Third Draft: Adding the Final Touches

19:56 Reading and Reviewing: The Final Steps

20:31 Teaching and Sharing the Process

20:53 Creating 'Unstuck': A Unique Journey

25:06 The Challenges of Writing and Creativity

30:42 Overcoming Self-Doubt and Imposter Syndrome

32:24 Final Thoughts and Advice for Writers

34:26 Current Projects and Closing Remarks

 
Guest Bio and Links
Rachael Herron is the internationally bestselling author of more than two dozen books, including thrillers (under R.H. Herron), mainstream fiction, feminist romance, memoir, and nonfiction about writing. She received her MFA in writing from Mills College, Oakland, and she’s taught writing extension workshops at both UC Berkeley and Stanford. A dual New Zealand and American citizen, she lives in Wellington, New Zealand with her banjo-playing wife and brick-eating dog.

Books: Unstuck and Fast-Draft Your Memoir, both here

Rachael Herron: Website | Newsletter | Bio | Patreon

Unstuck: An Audacious Hunt for Home and Happiness, available here now! 

The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland, Coming Spring 2025, Hachette

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Story structure is literary gravity, right? It is what readers expect in an emotional journey and how to not let them down. You can have tragic endings. You can have you can do whatever you want, but no matter what, readers will come to your story needing a beginning, middle end. So how do you make that so it is emotionally satisfying for readers?

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Welcome to the Write It Scared podcast. I'm your host, Stacey Fraser, a formally repressed creative soul, turned fiction writer, story editor, and author accelerator certified fiction book coach. At Write It Scared, we tell the truth about why writing a novel is so hard by acknowledging that most writers grapple with two stories: the one they want to put on the page to the best of their ability, and the often subconscious internal story that prevents them from doing it. This show is designed to help you identify and rewrite the internal narrative holding you back while you discover and write the story you want to tell and learn all the tools to help you do that successfully. Join me each week for a new episode where we'll talk about writing to deepen our understanding of the craft and of ourselves as writers. Writing a novel is an inside job that we do not do alone. Welcome to Red It Scared. I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in. Hi, writer. Welcome back to episode 38 of the Write It Scared Podcast. I'm Stacy. So thrilled to have you here with me today, and I can't wait for you to beat our next guest. And you might know this guest through her amazing podcast, Ink in Your Veins, or through many of her wonderful books. Rachel Heron has been a mentor to me and many other writers. And I will give you her full bio in just a moment. But what I love about Rachel is that she is not afraid to be completely transparent about her writing journey. And what I hope you take away from our conversation is that you can do this too. Rachel is a wealth of knowledge and inspiration. And I am so excited to have her as a guest. She is a person that proves there are many different versions of success out there, and you just need to figure out what works for you and not be afraid to jump lanes and do your own thing. Before I give you her bio, I did want to say I had some technical difficulties on my side of the audio in this episode, so I sound a bit like a garbled squirrel, but Rachel sounds great, and that's who you really need to listen to. So without further ado, here is her bio. Rachel Heron is the internationally best-selling author of more than two dozen books, including her thrillers under R. H. Heron, mainstream fiction, feminist romance, and nonfiction about writing. She received her MFA in writing from Mills College, Oakland, and she has taught extension workshops at both UC Berkeley and Stanford. A dual New Zealand and American citizen, she is currently living in Wellington, New Zealand with her banjo-playing wife and her brick-eating dog. Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I am just thrilled to have you here.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Honored to be here. I'm so excited about doing this. So thank you for asking me.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Yes, and um a huge fan of your podcast, Ink in Your Veins. Before that, you had the Writers Well with Jay Thorne, and you've always been a person in the writing world who is a staunch advocate for emerging writers. And not only that, but you're a freaking powerhouse. You've got a series of romance, you've written mainstream fiction, thrillers, memoir, and nonfiction. And by the way, just plug the book letters to new authors. If you're a new writer, please read that. Please read that because it will give your heart a nice squeeze when you need it. You've been everywhere and you're indie and you're traditionally published. So this podcast is really about encouragement and inspiration and education. And I can't think of anybody who does that so beautifully or so authentically. So where I'd really love to start our conversation is by having you talk about your journey, where it began, what it looked like, and how you became the writer and mentor that you are today.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

I I always love this question because I am where I am because I was so much of a fuck up for so long. And and in a, you know, I'm saying that in a really loving way to my younger self, but this younger self from childhood just wanted to write and from childhood would go under the trees with my notebook and my pencil, and I would try to write, and it would just be vapid and ugly and bad. I was a vibes writer. I knew what vibes I wanted to catch, and I couldn't do it. I would try to write and they would be crappy words and I'd get discouraged. And I just continued with that for a long time. I almost failed out of college several, several times trying to get a business degree. Finally got a degree in English and graduated and went straight and got my Master of Fine Arts in um creative writing and English at Mills College. And then spent seven years trying to write the Great American novel, which was awful. I never had three unfinished books, three like three and a half unfinished books before in 2006 I discovered NanoRimo. NanoRimo has been screwing up a little bit this year, so we're not gonna talk about like, you know, they were awesome. And what Nano Rhymo taught so many writers, including myself, was you that most of us have to finish a book before we know what it's gonna be. And and I knew that intellectually, like I knew that people said that, but I always thought in my perfectionist mind that I should and would probably be the exception because I was gonna try so hard to get it right. And then I would write six chapters and go back and fix them, and then I'd write three more chapters and then go back and fix the first chapter. And and you've I'm sure you've heard me say this, but I've said it a million times, is that revising as you go while you're writing is only your process if you are completing good books that you then publish. If you are a revisor as you go, because you're a perfectionist and it has to be that way, and you're not completing books, then that's not your process. Just like 99% of the rest of us, there are a few people who revise us, they go and they finish books. And it's that is their way. And I'm so jealous of them. And I want to like inhale their souls and learn how to do that. But most of us can't do that. We have to write a crappy first draft. And then, and that's what Nano teaches so many of us is to write a crappy first draft to get out of our own way. And that book in 2006, I finished. It was terrible, I thought. And then I went back and read it a few months later. And I was like, whoa, this is actually the best thing I've ever written because I had gotten out of my editor's way and I hadn't been caring about quality. I was just trying to finish something crappy. But our our voice is our voice is our voice, and my voice was still there. So I was able to revise it. That's the book that got me my agent that went to auction in a three-book deal at HarperCollins, and it was like the whole fairy tale dream come true. And that's where I got started. And uh my first book came out in 2010. And since then, I'm up to, I think, almost 30 books out there, like you said, in six, almost seven genres, because I'm going into paranormal next year. So also not an ideal way to become a huge seller is to keep changing genres. But one thing that I that that I know that I do, and I don't do it on purpose, but I know that I do it, is that my voice is always the same. And it's the same voice that I have on my podcast, and it's the same voice that I have in my classes, which is always warm and encouraging. So it doesn't matter, like you know, we could talk about that too. Like our voice is our voice is our voice. No matter what I write, it will always be encouraging in some way. Just the same way you are, the same way you show up and encourage other writers. Like some some people that's just that is our that's the language we speak all the time. So so that's where I that's how I got to here.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

I'm gonna bake to zipper just one point here. Your thrillers are not like a hug.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

You know what I did is I wrote women's fiction novels. I wrote upmarket, you know, commercial novels. And then my agent and my editor at Penguin said literally, less feelings, more stabbing. Like and I just had to keep revising like emotions out, tension in. And you'll notice I've only written two of those. Like they are very hard, they're not my natural voice. And I had to go and say that I had to write it, you know, in my natural voice and then change it. No, and I don't know if I'll ever write any more thrillers. I love, I love reading them.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

I remember you telling a story about after you got your three book deal with HarperCollins, and it didn't go that well.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

That was total failure, total failure in the States. So the first book sold okay. So this is like a six-figure deal, like yay, amazing. And then once you break down a six-figure deal, it's like a hundred, I think it was a hundred and ten thousand dollars for the three books. And after you break that down with taxes and agent fees over the course of three years, it looks like you're taking home about almost sixteen thousand dollars a year. So it wasn't enough to quit the day job, but it was so exciting still. And my first book in that series almost felt almost earned out. Fantastic. Second book did not total, totally bombed. Nobody bought it. It came out the week that borders closed in the States. Third book did not earn out. And so what happens when you don't earn out your advance? It's basically some sometimes you will get picked up, but I didn't earn out my advance in a big way. Like I didn't even come close to earning out those advances. So what happens is that your publisher will look at you and say, ah, we made a, you know, an advance that they give you is a gamble to bet their plic on you. And I didn't, I wasn't worthy of the bet. Those books didn't make back what they bet they would. So they said no thanks to the next books. However, they became bestsellers in both New Zealand and Australia because they were bought by Penguin Australia. So Penguin Australia wanted more of those books. They wanted books four and five. But I couldn't sell books four and five in the States. HarperCollins didn't want them. And nobody else would take books four and five in a series. But I really they were offering me good money in Penguin, Penguin, Australia to write these. And that's when I first put a very nervous toe into the self-publishing waters because we accepted my agent and I accepted that offer, but they only had Australia and New Zealand write. And suddenly I'd written these, you know, these books that were too, you know, they were they're written for contract. So I was making money to write them. And then they were just sitting there, not being published anywhere else in the world. So I self-published them just to kind of try it out. I think this was about 2013. And I realized I loved self-publishing as well. So after that, I did a couple of self-published series and in a similar town. I did sell more books to Penguin Australia and did the exact same thing of distributing them everywhere else. But then I just kind of got the indie bug, and now I now it's always a deep philosophical debate with myself what I will do with a book. So the the memoir that just came out is a memoir about moving to New Zealand. It's called Unstuck. An audacious hunt for home and happiness. I never offered that to my agent. That was not a conversation. She never saw a chapter of it. But this other memoir that I'm just completing right now is called The Fix, and it is um a recovery memoir from uh quitting drinking in 2018. And she has been kind of working with me off and on. So when I finish this last revision next week, she's gonna get it. But she also knows that she needs to sell it for good enough money to prevent me from self-publishing it because I love the money we can make in indie. Year after year, I've made more from indie. I think a a couple of years I've made more from trad publishing, but usually it's indie.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

You're definitely somebody that defies the advice of pick a lane, you know? And I love that. I pick all the lanes all the time. All of the lanes all the time. I love that. Yeah. So how did you learn structure?

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Well, I think what happens for a lot of people, and this happened for me in NanoRimo. So, first of all, I went to grad school and we never talked about structure ever. I I know that there are schools now that do. Um, but back then, late 90s, early 2000s, we were not talking about structure. We were talking about beautiful lyrical language. We were talking about moving the reader, we were talking about literary fiction, never anything else, never commercial, never, never cheap in this conversation by talking about money kind of thing. So I never ever learned about structure. But I think what happens for a lot of people, especially people who love story, is their first novel that they complete and get out there in the world and go look for an agent or self-published or whatever they do, we land on structure naturally because we've been surrounded by it. We have been in Western civilization, we have been surrounded by the 3X structure or whatever we call it. I like talking about the 4X structure, but it's exactly the same thing as the 3X structure, beginning, middle, end, basically. But what happened for me was that I sold that book in a three-book deal. Great. The second book in that series was due six months after I sold that. So I'd spent a year and a half to two years writing that in nanormal and then revising it and then working with my agent and fixing it up and didn't know what I was doing. And I wrote this book in six months. I had never written a book in six months, and I sent it to my editor, and my editor called me and she said, I love your book. It's so good. Oh my gosh, the writing is so good and the language is so good and the dialogue's so good, and I love the characters. And then she said, and I heard it coming, you know, she said, but you have no plot. And I remember saying, Oh my God. And then I said, Can I fix it? And she said, I don't know. It'll be a lot of heavy lifting. And this was the the big red F on this term paper, which was actually a contract. And there was this intimation that they could even pull the contract because I'd done such a bad job because I didn't understand story structure. So I took myself away to a hostel on the coast for a weekend, and I spent the entire weekend crying and Googling how do you write a book. And I spent the next six months or so, maybe four months, crash course learning what structure, not only what structure was, but what it does. Story structure is literary gravity, right? It is what readers expect in an emotional journey and how to not let them down. You can have tragic endings, you can have you can do whatever you want, but no matter what, readers will come to your story needing a beginning, middle end, because that is the way they they read it. You have to read a book from the beginning page to the last page. So how do you make that so it is emotionally satisfying for readers? And I study that and study that and study that. And that is so wrong for that first book. And then that book, that second book, ended up being one that I'm still really proud of. And I loved, I loved that. And and from that, I just kept studying and kept trying to get better at understanding what I was doing and why I was doing it. And if I could articulate it, then I could share it with other people. Because there were a lot of other people saying, I my book doesn't work, but I don't know why. I can tell, I can feel that it doesn't work, but I can't fix it. How do I do that? And that's why, as you know, I love teaching revision the most. Because revision is not making sentences better. It's not making paragraphs or chapters sing. It is about ripping your book apart and then having the revelations that allow you to put it back together in an order that will serve the reader best.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Yeah. And I think that you are one of the first people that gave me that realization of what it actually was.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Like it's kind of a terrible realization. It's frightening when we think that's the is.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

And when you first walk into the world of writing, you know, because you've been surrounded by beautiful books. And and as a reader, you just there's so much that you just kind of assume that you would understand because you're a reader, and it is not that way at all.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

And we Yeah, and we never talk about it. No one talks about ripping it apart and losing all heart and hope and faith, and then the whole book changing and becoming so much better. Our books always become, if we stick with them, our books always become what they were supposed to be, but they never turn out what we thought they would be. They turn out so much better. That's so true. And nobody and nobody talks about that. That's not in the movies. You know, in Romancing the Stone, we see her crying, you know, at the beginning of the movie as she's putting the, you know, the end onto the page. And then she's gonna send it to her editor and they're gonna publish it.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Completely done. I mean, I seriously had this image that like authors were there were people I admired. I thought they were magical unicorns. I thought they just kind of like typed up a book and hit sin and walked away and flittered off to the next thing. I mean, that was like the impression I had in my head.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

And then the problem that happens is that people think that because they're not in community and they're not having these conversations, and then they struggle with their book and they struggle to finish it. And then if they get to the end, they think, well, this isn't a good book. And then they think the terrible thing, which is I must not be a writer, and they quit without anyone telling them, like, oh, that proves you're a writer, you're a masochist and you did this yourself. And only writers do that, and here's how you keep going, and and you end up with a book that you love. But yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

And the whole point here is to talk about that underbelly, right? Is to expose that underbelly, the pieces of it that are hard and disheartening, the dip, basically. Like if you're a Seth Godin fan, how to get through that dip? And I believe that one of the ways is through hearing other people's experiences. And that is hope for me, is hearing other people's experiences. The more people that can hear the real deal, the more we'll stay in it. And I want more stories in the world for more people. Okay, so just a quick recap. You wrote a book and then you had to go learn how to really write a book, and now you've written plus 20 sub-novels. So, what does your process look like today to go from, you know, an idea to a draft that is ready to send to your editor?

SPEAKER_00 17:16

It is sm it's never easier. It never gets easier, I don't think, but it gets smoother. My process now is to I'm I'm still quite a discovery writer. I have this new, brand new idea that I'm just in love with. It's this novel that's landed on me out of knowers, part historical, part contemporary. But anyway, so I I have more of the turning points than I normally know. But usually I know just kind of some basics. I know the inciting incident, I know the midpoint, I know the dark moment sometimes. And I'm always writing my way in a direction there. But nowadays, because I am so comfortable with the suck of the first draft, I write a first draft quickly. The book that's coming out next year is called Seven Miracles for Beatri Beatrix Holland. And I think it only took like seven weeks to write. And I wasn't trying to go fast. It was just that while I was writing it, I was sitting down every day and getting 2,500 words, which is a nice solid pace for me of crap. And then generally it takes four to four to six, maybe sometimes four to eight weeks to revise that into so that's that's the biggest, that's the biggest heavy lift for me is that second draft. I call it the makes sense draft because the first draft did not make sense. This is the draft that makes sense. I'm still not concerned about making pretty sentences or beautiful paragraphs, although that is kind of happening because we're human beings and we are fussing as we're going. But I'm trying to make sure that this now that I know kind of what the book is about, what is it really about? I think about theme, I think about character development, I think about surprises and twists and intensifying emotion and ratcheting up, heightening any tension that I can. So that's the second draft, and it's it's also very hard, it's also very messy. But then I slip into the third draft, which is where I kind of finally know the book, and I'm I'm make now I'm making it better. I usually do something I call passes, I think a lot of people call them passes, where I have learned over the years that there are just some things I'm bad at, so I don't do them at all. I do not do them at all until a pass. I don't do settings, I don't do character descriptions. They're basically just heads in space for the first three drafts. Settings is a pass. I'll go into every single scene and I'll add setting. Of course, there's setting there if they had to like throw something against a wall. There was a wall. But otherwise, there's nothing in these books until I put it in. And that really saves me time and energy because I just have like a whole long afternoon or maybe two afternoons of adding setting. And then it's in the book as if it were always there. And it and it wasn't. So after three drafts and usually three passes or so, and a couple times through really reading it. Like I usually send it to my Kindle and I get in bed and I stay in bed for those five hours of reading the book, and that's where I'm catching like little typos and stuff. And then I will send it to my agent, or if it's a self-published book, I'll send it to that's when it goes to the developmental editor. And then of course the process starts all over again.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

But that's that answer the question. Oh, 100%. What 100%. Yeah. It's an illuminating process. And you've teach a really incredible class on I think it's 90 days to revision, right? Is that what you still what you still call it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It and I've taken it, and it was so eye-opening in so many ways. So you know, if if you if you're still teaching it, I highly recommend. Okay, so that was your process of kind of how you go from idea to polished draft. So tell us about your most recent book.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

I will tell uh how about I tell you about the one that did just come out because I am proud of that one. That's it, that's the Unstuck Memoir. And that one had kind of a different process because I also have a Patreon, which I really love. And on this Patreon, I've had it for years and years, and every month I send out an essay. And sometimes I am collecting essays into a book-shaped book, and sometimes I'm not. Sometimes we're like right now, I'm not really heading for any book. So every month you get in people on my Patreon get some kind of essay. And I don't know what I'm gonna do with those essays. But when my wife and I were moving to New Zealand, we had the idea, and then, you know, we had the panic attacks, and then we did it. This was three years ago, and we left everything we knew, loved everyone we knew. We sold our house, we left all of our things, we sold all of our things, and we moved around the world. And I was chronicling it as we went with the Patreon. Every month I would write an essay. So I was kind of I was doing this awesome thing where I was kind of giving myself my own advance as I went because Patreon would pay me every month for sending out these essays. And then once we had moved and bought our house, and it was about a year and a half after we finally like settled, I thought, okay, the book is now going to be a book because we've done it. It's we're not doing it anymore, we've done it. And I started to put it into a book and I did a Kickstarter for it then, which paid for my time in recording the audiobook for it. So that was another nice chunk of money that I gave myself as an advance for this book before it ever came out. And then I was able to put the book out and actually sell it. So it's not even like a normal advance. A normal advance, you don't see any extra money until your book is earned out. You you've sold all the books that that traditional publisher bet that you would sell. And if you sell an extra book over that, you start getting money again in the form of royalty. Yeah. And but for this, I'd already made money from it from people helping to support me do this. And they, of course, you know, with the Kickstarter, it's a sales platform, and they and they'd gotten what they'd purchased. And then I could put it out. And it's just been a really fun, really enjoyable process to have complete control over it from beginning to end. And it's a book I'm really, I'm really proud of. I'm passionate about memoir. I used to teach at Stanford and at Berkeley this class called Fast Draft Your Memoir, which also turned in into a book, which is out there. But it is this idea of fast drafting memoir all the way through. And I'm I'm super passionate about memoir being as good as a novel with the same kind of story structure. It needs to have the same emotional moments that a novel would. Or we're just, you know, telling an autobiography and nobody wants to hear my autobiography. But they may want to hear about moving to a country with your partner, leaving everybody behind and starting your life over again.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

100%. I'm reading it now. What I'm pushing about this book is the brain behind it. Like I I I just really identify with this with this just heavy driving compartmentalization.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

I just really, really anxiety and fear and yeah. And I like writing about the stuff that is hard because I think that, you know, you know, social media and even you know, even people who have taken my classes have read Unstuck. And and you know, they'll say, Rachel, you were teaching while you were moving and I did not know you were anxious. I'm like, well, that was my job. My job is not to teach you in a class on how to write a book or how to do a revision that I am anxious, but you know, but I love to write about in memoir, I love to write about the real stuff and the real places that were broken. And we for me, I'm always broken in the same ways, and I'm always trying to fix myself in the same ways. Accepting that I am not perfect, then I never will be, and I should just stop trying. That is my core story. And accepting and move, you know, moving into this moment right here, the one I'm having with you, having this incredible conversation. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

Yeah, I very much identify with that, but it's definitely the lesson that life slaps me in with in the face with, like all the time.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

Be here, be here, be here, you know, be present. I have a tattoo right here that says now and I never look at it. You know, it's now I never I never notice it.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

Okay. Well, so as we spoke about, a big part of this podcast is talking about the underbelly and when the writing has gotten hard or the process has gotten hard, depending on where you are, you know, on the spectrum. So would you share a time of when it has gotten hard and how you struggled and then what you've learned from it?

SPEAKER_00 25:15

The hardest time I ever had was in late 2017 when I realized I was burned out and I was, I felt creatively just depleted. I had been, I'd only been writing full-time. I'd left my full-time job in 2016. So I'd been writing for almost two years full-time. And I'd been treading water, and I I I just felt so incredibly burned out. I didn't have, I didn't have any creativity left. So I assigned myself this project of because I love a project, I love a memoir, I love a stunt memoir where somebody gives themselves a project and then writes about it. So I decided that I would try to refill my well. And every month for 12 months, I would try to do something that was a challenge to me that would hopefully help me refill the well. Like one month it was no social media, no TV, just reading. One month was, you know, swimming every day. One month was meditating every day, that kind of thing. And and I really thought that that was going to fill the creative well because I had let it run dry. And I was wrong. I was just an alcoholic and didn't know it, which is what I found out three months into the freaking project. And then the problem was is I wasn't ready to talk about it with anybody. So I kept having to do the project for the Patreon. So I'm still doing these beautiful creative filling the well things, but also doing them sober and trying to, you know, manage life sober for the first time ever. And hiding and and hiding that. So the reason that this book is coming out so much after Unstuck is that I've been working on putting together, like putting together what was actually going on with the creative project and marrying those two things. So to answer, so now the I think the book is really good and I can't wait to get it out there. Um, but that was just a funny moment where I really thought I knew the answer. Like I really, really thought for sure this will fix me, and I had no concept of what would fix me. Other times that it has been hard to write. The only other time I can remember that it was really hard to write is when I tried to plot out a book from beginning to end, just knowing that I was a discovery writer and I plotted this particular novel out. I knew every single beat of it, and I was just so bored writing it. Are you less of what I have high learner and I have high strategic and futuristic? And we're talking clift to the strengths now, people. But so for strategic and futuristic, if I already know how it's gonna go, I my brain says you've already done it. So why would you bother doing it now? Now if you're bored, we're on to the next thing. So that was really useful for me to know is that, and I'm it's useful for me to remember right now, too, as I'm trying to plot this next book. Don't overplot it. The more overplotted something is, the the more bored I will get doing it. I need to keep the freshness. And the other thing is when I am struggling to write, I allow myself to follow the shiny. If I get a new sparkly idea, maybe I need to go flirt with that idea for a while because the other one's not going anywhere. I might just need a little bit of a break. The danger is when we take breaks from work and then we never go back and finish them. But I know my process enough now that I know I will go back and finish it and I can go play with something else for a while to like re-energize. But you know, you and I both believe there's no such thing as writer's block. You can always sit down and make a sentence. If you're having trouble making the sentence though, we do need to look and see what is behind that. Because you could type some words, but why aren't you? What is the what's the what's the deeper feeling there? And I think for so many people, it always comes down, not always, but it often comes down to this feeling that when I write, it doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel good, therefore I'm doing it wrong, and I should stop and figure out what I'm doing wrong. And and for most of us, that's not the right answer. The right answer is to keep going and get used to the discomfort of it just feeling a little bit crappy while we're doing it. And take comfort enjoying the fact that we wrote a thousand words today. Quit trying to take comfort in the fact that they were good, because they're they're they're not good. Don't try to make them that way. And then that's how books get done, and then that's how books we you know, and then we can revise them. But the but where people get stuck is when they believe that editor's voice, that critic's voice that says, you suck, you're not doing it right, and they think that that means stop. And that's what that like I said earlier, that's what breaks my heart. That's that's when most writers quit. They do not continue.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

That's the worst. I find myself having to I have that conversation with myself like every damn time I sit down to write, you know? Yeah. And with every every book, it's like for some reason I believe that this one will be different. What I just think the more that you do it, the more you realize that it's it's not well for me, it's not gonna get easier, but I will get more efficient at my own process the more I lean into it.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

And I don't mind, yeah, exactly. And I don't mind the feeling anymore. Like it is just not a bad feeling. Like I will sit at my computer and go, my God, this sucks. And I'll then I'll write, and then I'm just so happy when my when my writing time is over. And and books just keep stacking up. They just get completed. And it's all it's a joy now when when I realize that that I'm feeling like I don't want to write. You know, that's because I'm a writer. That proves I'm a writer. I'll just go do some writing.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Did you used to struggle with a lot of self-doubt or imposter syndrome, like in the beginning? Because it doesn't sound like it holds you back now, but that perhaps that's my assumption. But no, it does it, I don't, I don't struggle with that too much.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

I definitely struggle with it when like I'm on stage or something like that. But I think that's that's really normal. The times that I struggle with that the the most are during, and this is gonna sound stupid, like I don't mean it, but I do during copy edits, because I've seen the book one million times now, and now it's finally in copy edits. And copy edits will just they make me feel like an idiot. Like I've never met a comma before. I do not know how an apostrophe works. And I'm also bored with the book. I'm bored with the idea, I'm bored with every sentence and every paragraph. And I really feel like I don't, I don't know how this sold. Like I don't know how how is this possibly supposed to hit a bookstore shelf. And then I'll read another book that somebody, a genius wrote that wasn't me. And it's so good. And that's when I really struggle with doubt, is later on in the process, I think.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

It gets us, I think, at some point.

SPEAKER_00 31:32

Or because we're it gets everyone. Yes. Yeah, and it also always gets me. About about halfway into a book, or maybe one third of the way into a book, I'm definitely convinced from the one-third point to the two-third point that this is a terrible idea and that this will be the book that I prove to my wife I am right in that I can't write this one. And because she's always says, you know, this is what you always say. And this is the one. And then I always just keep showing up and I get it done, and she always says she's right and she is.

SPEAKER_01 32:01

Yeah, it's almost like the the mock is part of the funny.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Yeah, it really is. And it's nice when somebody can point that out to you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

Yeah. So just you know, looking back over your career, is there any particular advice that you've hung on to that you keep with you that you've holding your heart?

SPEAKER_00 32:22

So I think that in a really beautiful way of saying it, I think it's your it's your tattoo, keep coming back. It literally doesn't matter what you do, as long as you keep coming back and put a few more sentences on the page, even if it's five minutes at a time. I know I know people, myself included, ha who have written full books in five to fifteen minute chunks because that's all they had either physically available to them in the day or mentally available to them in the day. And and if you keep showing up, it really, really, really, really adds up. So much quicker than we ever ever think.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

Yeah. Yeah. It's that's beautiful. So what is a wish that you'd like to communicate to I don't know, a fellow writer, maybe thinking back to even your younger self, right? To to the you that is not the you now, that doesn't have the knowledge that you have now, that's standing in those shoes and shaking. What wish would you like to impart or just comfort or verbal hugs? Would you like to impart to them?

SPEAKER_00 33:31

I I know exactly the feeling of what I would want to tell them. What are and what are the words? The words are you aren't doing anything wrong. You are exactly where you should be. You're not screwing it up, you're not doing too little, you're not a failure because you keep avoiding your writing. You're exactly normal and exactly where you where you should be keep showing up. There's nothing wrong with it. So yeah, apparently that took like 87 words to say. But yeah, there's nothing wrong with you. It's the wrong way to do it. I am an aura writer. We're either overriders or underwriters, and I am an overwriter.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

So I think that's a great place to wrap up. And so my final question is Is there anything you're currently working on that you would like to share? And where can we find you? Let's see.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

I am always working on too many books, so I won't even go into those, but my queer paranormal comes out next year from Grand Central. That'll be fun. Um the name of that again, sure. That one is The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland. And it's the story of a woman who is told that she is going to experience seven miracles and that she will die. And if people like anything that I have said, I would love to have them on my email newsletter list just for writers, which is at rachelheron.com/slash write. And in there, I think in like the fourth or fifth autoresponder email that goes out is like an hour and a half free class on revising that I get, which is basically all my tools and tips for revising that I teach in the 90-day revision class, but it's all in this little little package.

SPEAKER_01 35:04

So people get off. I'd love to that's amazing. I will make sure to put all those links in the show notes for you. Again, thank you so much. You're a lovely guest and an incredible human, and I'm so lucky to know you.

SPEAKER_00 35:15

I am so lucky to know you. It has been an honor and a delight.

SPEAKER_01 35:19

Hey writer, it's Stacey again. I hope you enjoyed the conversation I had with Rachel. She is such a delight, and I encourage you to follow her and listen to her podcast, Ink in Your Veins. There's a wealth of knowledge there, and she is such a kind and generous soul. Before I let you go, I wanted to remind you that another cohort of my small group book coaching for fiction writers will begin in January of 2025. This is a program for any commercial or genre fiction writer who wants to start developing their story idea and write their novel in the coming year. So this is a small, intimate, but mighty and very welcoming group of writers who would be working through the same story struggles as you. And it would include professional editorial guidance, novel writing know-how, plus individual support for each writer with one-on-one book coaching sessions from me each month. The space is limited to six writers, but you can secure a spot on the enrollment list right now. Just go to writeitscared.co forward slash group coaching to learn more and apply. Thank you for listening to the Write It Scared podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please make sure to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. And please leave a review. Reviews help other writers like you find the voices and messages they need to hear to continue to write their stories. Let's lift each other up. Remember, you can be scared and still be unstoppable. I'll see you next week.