How to stay creatively engaged
Oh, hi friends!
I always find it amusing and strange how quickly we can forget what we actually like to do.
We get wrapped up in the infinite scroll or watch the days tick by or double down on what keeps us busy, but not necessarily engaged.
You like so many things.
Remember?
They’re waiting for you.
“I remember when I was making Lady Bird and I wanted to change something, you essentially said, you have to trust the person you were when you wrote it.”
Loved this interview with Greta Gerwig and Tracy Letts. We had tickets to his new play The Minutes tomorrow night — sad to miss it but getting this writing advice is a nice consolation prize.
If you're feeling reluctant to turn back to an old project...
Trust the person you were when you wrote it.
And now for something new and different in this newsletter — an interview!
We’ve got talented novelist and travel writer Andrea Bartz, whose second book The Herd, a thriller set in an all-female co-working space, is out…dun dun dun…today! Happy publication day! (You can order the book right here.)
I wanted to know more about her writing process and habits, what she considers her “brass ring” — that thing for which she's always striving — and how she keeps putting down words. Read on.
KARA: Um, how do you write a book? Just kidding. But what was your high point during the daily process of writing The Herd?
ANDI: You jest, but there are two books I direct every would-be author toward: The Anatomy of Story by Jonathan Truby and Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. The latter helps you sketch out a plot and understand structure, while the former is key for nailing character development, pacing, and more. As a pair, they're worth their weight in gold!
Writing a novel isn't very glamorous in the day-to-day—for weeks I was slogging along, adding to the total wordcount but not really sure where the story was going. I write without an outline, so for the first half of the manuscript I was cackling maniacally at all the bad things I was throwing in my characters' paths, but at about the midway point, I started to go, "Crap, how will this mess come together?" It was scary, realizing I somehow needed to land all these planes. But having sudden revelations about how things could fit together—the answers to the smaller mysteries, plus how they fit into the central one—was the best dang feeling. It's like an intellectual orgasm! And most of the time, I've set all the pieces in place and seeded the surprise without even realizing it! Thanks, subconscious!!!
When it comes to writing, what is your "brass ring"? What are you always reaching for?
This is a tough question because I hope I'll continue moving into new careers within the writing world—exploring new terrain and finding new definitions of success. I worked as a magazine editor before this, and I thought my brass ring was becoming an editor-in-chief, and now I can't even imagine going back into an office job (...not just because every office is closed right now). I want to push into new genres (I'm dying to write horror!) and sell screenplays and write for TV.
For now, though, the goal is to publish achingly honest books that let me bare my fear and shame and humanity so that a few readers out there will connect with the story and see themselves reflected in the prose. Some readers loathed the protagonist of my first book and called her all sorts of awful things, and it was tempting in light of that to pull back and make my characters more perfect and pulled-together and closed-off and cool and, ultimately, likable. But with my fiction, I'm always challenging myself to be brave.
I loved watching your writing progress through Twitter. What are some tips that help you take such a long process day by day?
At the start of every big writing or revising project, I use pacemaker.press to calculate how much I need to accomplish every day; it lets you block off days when you'll do less or no work (for me, that's when I'm traveling), and you can keep track of your progress on the site. When it comes to actually drafting, I'm a huge fan of the Pomodoro method: I toss my phone out of sight and use tomato-timer.com to do 20 minutes of work followed by a 5-minute break for as many reps as I need to hit my wordcount goal. I'll also meet with a friend to do "writing sprints," with chitchat in-between—something you could probably do on Zoom or even over text!
Do you have a favorite line from one of your books?
Favorite might be too high a bar, but this line from one of the first pages of The Herd still makes me laugh: I heard Hana before I saw her, her heels clacking along the parquet floor. Hana enters any room like Lily Tomlin in an '80s office comedy. I like for my narrators to be funny, because they're intelligent and I find smart women, on the whole, pretty hilarious. Who says dark and twisty thrillers can't also make you laugh?
Where can people find you online?
I'm on Twitter and Instagram at @andibartz, and my Facebook author page is /andreabartzauthor. My website is andreabartz.com, and there's a contact me form there. I'd love to hear from your readers!
Thank you, Andi!
You can order The Herd right here and also her first book, The Lost Night.
PS — If you’re looking for a literary agent, Andrea wrote a great piece with lots of advice.
Do you like these daily emails? Please share with a friend!
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara