1023. I felt like I could write anything after this discussion with Anne Lamott about painful first drafts, beating perfectionism, and the one thing she'd change in "Bird by Bird."
1023. I felt like I could write anything after this discussion with Anne Lamott about painful first drafts, beating perfectionism, and the one thing she'd change in "Bird by Bird."
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LIGHTLY EDITED TRANSCRIPT
MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I'm here today with a very special guest, Anne Lamott, author of 10 New York Times bestselling books, California Hall of Fame inductee, and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. She wrote both the beloved writing book, "Bird by Bird," and the influential book about motherhood called "Operating Instructions," along with, obviously other books.
She's known for her wisdom that makes a real difference in people's lives with respect to writing. And beyond. I mean, I asked on social media what people wanted to know about her. And Anne, people just gushed with praise. One person said, “Tell her I swim in public carefree and content and thankful because of her.”
Another one said, “Does she know how many women often whisper to ourselves? No, is a complete sentence.” And the third person said, “Tell her I think about her every time I make toast.” So, Anne, you have obviously made quite an impression on the world. Welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
ANNE: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
MIGNON: Well, your son, Sam, listens to the podcast and he got in touch with me and said you're doing this really interesting writing retreat called Writers Rising, and it's in late October. And what intrigued me most is he said that it's based on sort of the concepts of recovery. And I wanted to hear … tell me how your writing retreat works.
ANNE: Well, we've done two before. They're both online and in person. This one's in LA. So I can speak from the in person ones that I've done, but they work because it's a very weird and lonely thing to spend your time doing writing. We probably know that as well as anyone. And you get so many bad voices in your head that say, “Well, do you have an agent?”
Or, “How many times have you been rejected?” or “This isn't going anywhere,” or in my case with this new book, boy, I talk about beating a dead horse. But when you get together with several hundred people, they're all hearing those same voices too. And they're still getting their work done. There's a famous line in recovery that the whole system works because we're not all nuts on the same day.
And so if five or six hundred people, they each get like a few numbers, five or ten numbers of people that they really bonded with, and they call around, somebody's going to have confidence that day, and somebody else, like, you might say to me, “Oh, I know exactly how you feel. I was there on Monday. And this is what I did. And I tried this first. It never works. And, but what I did instead was I went to it, A Writing Room, and I just did the prompt. I just let myself get away with just doing the prompt. And then I was off and running again.” So that's really a major reason why these collectives work.
And also it's so, they're happy to be in community, you know. But also laughter. People laughing about their predicaments in writing, and I've always said laughter is carbonated holiness. And you go from gripping your pencil too tightly and putting stuff aside and thinking it's no good and whatever to getting your sense of humor back.
And when you get your sense of humor back, you're home free, and then you just start writing again. Also when I teach at these writing, these three, this two we've done and third coming up, I just basically rehash "Bird by Bird" because everything springs from shitty first drafts, and people don't quite believe it.
They believe that writers they love write well. And that's just not true of any writer I've ever known, or who I'd ever want to sit next to at the dinner table. And the other thing is that every writer I know is writing bird by bird, or whatever they might call it, like one passage at a time, or one scene at a time, one segment of dialogue, one memory, one whatever.
So it's kind of like the liturgy. It's good to just be reminded that if you do a few simple things, you're going to be able to get that day's work done.
MIGNON: Can you tell the background story of "Bird by Bird" for people who don't know it?
ANNE: Oh, sure. Well, my older brother, John, who's two years older, was a terrible student. And in the fourth grade curriculum in Northern California, where are you, by the way, right now?
MIGNON: Oh, I'm in the central California coast.
ANNE: Oh, okay. Well, in our area, Northern California, fourth grade, you wrote a research paper, because third grade, remember, they give you the paper, and there'd still be a space for your illustration, and then there'd be the lines below for your story.
Well, in fourth grade, you learned to do a research paper, and in our area, this batch of Northern California, it was … the first one was on our capital, Sacramento. And the second one was on birds. And you had the whole semester to research and then write about birds. And my older brother hadn't started on the weekend before it was due.
He'd had five months. And my brother was a tough guy, but he was in tears. And my dad, who is a writer, sat down with him and said, just take it bird by bird, you know, read — we had Audubon and Roger Troy Peterson, just read a little bit about chickadees, and then tell me about them in your own voice. Okay, and then you have a picture here you can either cut out or provide.
And let me know when that's done, and then we're going to move on to herons and to great blue herons. And all you're going to do is sort of immerse yourself in them and then write about them in your own voice. You know, and I'm 70 now, and that's still all I'm doing. You know, I'm immersing myself in topics and ideas.
And I'm telling them in my own voice. So I always just thought, well, it's bird by bird. Can I just add another quote that I love that I know you're familiar with, but it's that great line of E.L. Doctorow who happens to be one of my favorite novelists. And he said, about 30 years ago, he said, “Writing is like driving at night with the headlights on. You can only see a little ways in front of you, but you can make the whole journey that way.”
And that is probably about writing and life, the truest thing I've ever heard. But we think we should know what we're doing. We should think we know, we should know what we're going to pass along the way, what we're going to accomplish, what our feelings are going to be as we, you know, it's not, you can see a few feet in front of you.
And you can make the whole journey that way. You just keep capturing what you can see.
MIGNON: It's so powerful. I wanted to talk to you about that, about the first drafts, because I know you say, like, everyone, all their first drafts are bad and no matter how many times I hear it, I never believe it. I think that everyone else must be at least better on their first drafts than mine. You know, why are they always so bad?
ANNE: I don’t know. I think it’s just the nature of writing. I think a very few people like the great, you're too young to know probably Muriel Spark, but she wrote "The Prime of Miss Jean Brody," and she wrote "Momentum War," and she's very big English writer during World War II, and all of us early feminists were reading her.
She was so religiously plugged in that she said, like, she was just taking dictation with headphones on. But that always struck me as being just really angry, you know? And I never heard anyone else reiterate that, but it just seems to be the way that we come to have our creative visions captured.
You know, it's kind of ephemeral. It's in our head. It doesn't exist. Maybe we have memories, maybe we're writing fiction, and we don't, and we just have to trust that. Well, I can trust and especially when I'm in retreats and groups of writers, if you ask around, everyone will say, yeah, me too. And there's also that very critical voice, you know, there's a whole chapter in "Bird by Bird" about perfectionism, and that it's the voice of the oppressor, and it'll keep you crazy your whole life.
And a lot of us were raised by very high-achieving parents. I certainly was. And you were supposed to know what you were doing, and you're supposed to do it really, really well. Like I was 35 when somebody told me that a B+ was a good grade. I'd never heard that in my life. Like if we brought home an A-, we had to have little discussions about it, like was there time to raise it to an A.
And so whatever the equivalent of that was in your family, you don't make mistakes, you don't make messes, and you do very, very well with everything you try, but writing won't collaborate with that approach.
And so for me, it's required a lot of therapy and years and years in recovery. I've been sober for 38 years, and the encouragement to just break down the perfectionism and make more mistakes and more failures. But you know, I published my 20th book in April, and I've been writing these essays for the Washington Post on being a little bit older. Well, actually quite a lot older, but they are only 1,200 words. That's, I don't know, five manuscript pages, right? And they're terrible. They start off terrible. And they're some of the best writing I've ever done. And they start off at seven and eight pages. And way too many details. And then all the desperation in me to get you to like me.
To get you to think I'm extremely smart and insightful. And then I have to put in extra humor so that you won't think I'm a buzzkill. And then I have an incredibly shitty first draft. And I have to get it down to 11 or 1,200 words. And I go through, I take out several things. I take out all the boring parts, which is often the descriptions.
I take out the lies. And I take off all the show offy overkill, where I'm just trying too hard to be literary. If it looks literary to me, I take it out.
MIGNON: How long have you been teaching writing? When did you start?
ANNE: Wow, let's see. I started when Sam was a baby. So he's 35, so it was probably 33 years ago. I just started teaching when he was an infant, I taught for a semester at UC Davis. I taught a graduate writing course, but there's a huge independent bookstore you may be aware of called Book Passage and they had, they're still a great resource for writers, for anyone listening, just go to BookPassage.com.
They have a ton of online classes, mystery writers, conferences, travel writers, novels, romance, everything, how to help you get published. I mean, it's basically all the same stuff AWritingRoom.com is doing, but it's over time, you know, you might sign up for six weeks instead of three days. So they offered me a gig teaching writing once a week, and I had about 50 students and a baby.
MIGNON: That's a lot.
ANNE: I know, right? So the bookstore owner, Elaine Petrucelli, was taking care of the baby. Well, 40 of them would have paid to be there, and then 10 would be kind of the riffraff, you know, i. e. my really good friend, so I'd let in for free. And so I taught all the stuff that would end up being "Bird by Bird," but what I really noticed, and was probably most important thing of all those years, I did it till Sam was eight or till probably was nine, and that was my main source of income until "Bird by Bird" came out.
But the main thing was that people were forming writing groups, and they would like see somebody they liked or whose work they really liked or who had said something very insightful about their own work, and they would have a cup of coffee or glass of wine with them, and then they would agree to meet next Thursday, an hour before class and have finished work done.
And that's how any writing collective works, whether you go to call your local community college. And there's writing, there'll be writing groups there. You go to the local independent bookstore, you put up a sign, I'm going to start a writing group. There's 600 people at awritingroom.com. There's somebody that you put it online. Is anybody writing? Is anyone starting a novel? Does anyone want to meet with me every single Tuesday?
And we would keep each other accountable and we would read each other's work. You would have to produce, you know, it's a very benevolent kind of kick in the butt. You have to give me five pages every week, you know, no excuses. And I'm going to go over them, and I'm not going to say, “Oh my God, I don't think you're getting anywhere.” I would imagine I've already accepted it, and I'm going to help you burn it. I'm going to help you bring your writing up to the very highest level I can help you get to by doing all the obvious things. You delete…the beginning is never quite right. It's always kind of just clearing your throat, you know, trying to get into the material, and the ending is always way past the point where it should end organically.
I'm always too …. I always go two pages longer. And you go through, and you're saying you just, you know, look at all these adjectives, all these adverbs, you need to find stronger verbs or, I'm going to circle just on one page, your adverbs, take them out, write from your verb.
And so that, I have a group. I have two groups, but one in particular that have been meeting for over 30 years, every Thursday, and two of them have gotten published and really well published by big houses, and they still just keep showing up in every swap, and they take someone else in, but that is the most important thing I think I have to teach, besides shitty first drafts in "Bird by Bird," is get help. You deserve support. No one writes with, I have my husband, and I have another friend, and I send them. I would never send anything to an editor without having them have a go at it. Because they love my work, and they will criticize it where it needs to be criticized.
MIGNON: Yeah. How do you, I would wonder, how do you know when you get feedback, especially when you're new in a writing group, whether it's good feedback, you know, sometimes, I mean, I've gotten feedback that was contradictory on something I've written from two different people. How do you, how do you discern what's the feedback that's useful to you?
Mm hmm.
ANNE: But I think if it's harsh, it's not good feedback, right off the bat. Because there's no call for that, right? But it's ultimately your book. And there's a chapter in "Bird by Bird" called "Broccoli," and it's about a great line that Mel Brooks said, you know, 50 years ago on "The 2,000 Year Old Man." He said, “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.”
And so there's a whole chapter on listening to your gut and your heart. And so Neil, my husband, will say, “I don't think the lead works here, and I think it really gets going into the second paragraph.” And I have to decide if he's right. And sometimes I think he's half right. And that half of my first paragraph is good, but I did this throat clearing instead of just going to it and saying, this is, you know, the topic sentence for nonfiction that you learn in high school and college.
This is kind of what I'm going to be writing about. Got a minute? That's what you're saying to your reader. Got a minute? And so I really listen to my broccoli. My writing students at Book Passage used to always give me broccoli stuff, like broccoli refrigerator magnets, and in one case a silver, a sterling silver broccoli brooch.
Bu you just have to learn to trust your own instincts. The thing is, if you give me your work, if you give me a thousand words to read, and I'm not comfortable with your first page. I think it really starts in the third sentence at the top of the second page, and you give it to Sam, and he feels the same way.
Then you’ve got to really consider it. Then there was a great advice of Jessica Midford who wrote "The American Way of Death," brilliant, brilliant woman from England. Yeah. She said, famously, “you have to kill your little darlings.” And you have to go through the work and everything that you think is just so precious and literary and erudite and pyrotechnic, you just have to lose because it's interfering with you telling me a story.
You're going to tell me a story, right? And you're going to make me care. And those are your only two directives. Tell me a story, make me care. And you have somebody who suggests something. And you think about it. You don't cut them off. I mean, I hate criticism. And when somebody, even if Neil says, “Oh,” or my other friend, "I really don't think the lead works."
My feelings are always hurt and I kind of turn on them. And then I'm just so deeply relieved they told me the truth. But it's their truth. And this is my material. And I get to decide what stays and what goes. So for a beginner writer, beginning writer, I mean, over and over and over again, you just keep sitting at the feet of the masters.
You read and you read and you read. You read stuff that might be similar in some way to yours. It might be autobiographical fiction. It might be historical fiction. It might be, but you read how other people did it, and you study it and you write it, like my dad said, in your own voice, but you see how people get it to work.
There's only five plots. You're not going to come up with a plot that hasn't been done, you know, 15 million times since we started writing on papyrus. But yeah, you need to study how classically, this is kind of dumb and probably beneath our listeners, but how do you get time to pass, right?
Well, in the '40s and '50s movies, which worked for me, the hands of the clock spin, right? Or there's an open window and the pages of the daily calendar fly out the window, right? You can't do that, and so how do people that you love, how does Barbara Kingsolver do it, how did Yates do it, how did Hemingway do it, how did Muriel Spark do it? Well, you know, the old dog's hair grew, fur grew gray, or the writer's hair grew gray, or you lose an inch in height at around 60, or you somehow figure out that there are many, many ways that other people have done it, and something will come to you.
So, you know, it's partly about trying things that don't work, and then that all, every time you have a false start, it gets you a little bit closer to what might just work.
MIGNON: And getting back to that perfectionism, how do you know when it's time to stop editing? How do you know when you're done?
ANNE: I think there's a point at which, and this again goes back to listening to your broccoli and trusting your intuition, but there's a point at which the perfectionism begins to hurt the work. You know, it's not positive in any way at all anymore. That's, I mean, that's when I give it to someone to read and then I get the edit back.
I usually don't give it to people a second time because, you know, it's my problem. And I do have this perfectionism, and I really work it. And then I do it when I'm exhausted. I feel it's time to send it to my editor. You know what? I go over it one more time. And I get very quiet. I really love to edit on paper.
That's kind of a final draft for me, is on paper, because there's just something so spiritual and so physical about that sound of paper and the graphite pencil scritch scritch scritching across it. You know, I was teaching my grandson's writing classes, his little ones, like kindergarten starting, and sometimes I just give them pencils and blank paper, and I'd have them pretend to be scribbling across the page, so they could understand that this is a sound that unites us for thousands of years, you know, in the motion that you're moving across the page with an object that is capturing what's going from your head through your neck down your shoulder through your arms and out your fingers.
And so for my last draft, I often print it out, and I'm alone with a cat, and the door is closed and I go over it really word by word at that point. And then I take a long, quavering, deep breath and I send it off. And then I just feel sick to my stomach with anxiety that it's not any good, and that it's just dog shit.
And that my editor is going to feel like, “Oh no, she's had a stroke or something. She can't write anymore. How are we going to get out of the contract” every single time? And then I do what we do in recovery. I could pick up the 200 pound phone, or I go for a walk, or read poetry, or I do what we do.
MIGNON: Thinking "Bird by Bird" is just such an amazing book. It's just a gem. Is there anything about it that you would add to or revise a little bit now, all these years later?
ANNE: That's a good question. Well, you know, I wrote it when we were all writing on typewriters. So, I think that probably I could, you know, one thing with the computer, I used to talk about this 30 years ago, when people started using computers is that you could really easily make it look like it was good and that it was a really presentable manuscript, and that was hurting people because what they needed to do was to go when I was coming up 50 years ago, it was there was a thing called putting it through the typewriter again.
And no matter where you were making copies with carbon paper, but you put it through the typewriter again, you took your manuscript, you'd marked it all up. You had ideas, you had cuts, you had additions, you had question marks, and you did it again. And it was a drag, and it might take another month, and you just did it because everybody did it.
So, you know, if there was a way for me to get people to print out a draft and edit on paper and write on paper, that's the only thing I would change. But, oh, wait, there was one more thing I was thinking of. I wrote a very short chapter on writer's block in "Bird by Bird," in which I mostly wrote about it from the point of view of it not being a block so much, but it being an emptiness inside that you just used up everything, and that you need to spend a week or so, a couple weeks filling back up.
And I always imagine there's this kind of ragbag guy in my center or my soul or my solar plexus, and I'm gathering the rags for the rag bag, little Dr. Seuss ragbag guy to put the quilt of my material together for me. And so I would just consciously be gathering, you know, bits of burlap or unbleached muslin, and satin, and velvet, and cotton, and you know weird strings, and ribbons, and dental floss, to stitch it all together. And I would just stop trying to force it. But I actually did a talk, I do a lot of talks at awritingroom.com, and I did one, I did a book, "Bird by Bird" book club there that was five weeks, and I got to really go in depth into a fifth of the book at a time for an hour and a half, and that was really luxurious, because you don't have that with writing, it's like, can you pick up the pace here?
But I wrote, I did a whole hour and a half on writer's block because I understood that it was just so demoralizing for people. It just is crippling for people's soul, and spirit, and writing writer's heart to get stuck like that. And so at this, I don't know what you would call it. It wasn't quite a seminar, but it was just an hour and a half on writer's block.
I talked about actions you can take, like figure it out. It's not a good slogan at that point, right? But what you can do, you can do simple things. I mean, I can't remember the whole hour and a half right now, but you can jump ahead. Right? You can jump ahead 20 pages because you're not stuck there.
Either it doesn't exist, or you haven't seen it for a while, and you're not bored by it. And you're not trashing yourself for that having been the best you could do. Or, I mean I had like six of them. I won't be able to think of them right now. You can add a character. Suddenly you just introduce a new person, and they come in like a new person in your life does, and they kind of whip things up a little, but I think I would have added everything I talked about at that workshop to "Bird by Bird" because it's just a devastating feeling to get there.
And we all do. And we all have. And we all will again. Yeah, yeah.
MIGNON: You talked about gathering things, and it reminded me, I heard you once say that you take notes, that you have your back pocket with an index card, I think, and you take notes, and I was wondering what are in all those notes and how do you organize them once you have them?
ANNE: Well, I know not very many people are looking at this, and they're mostly listening, but I can just hold up what they look like, and they're all over the place. Some of them are napkins. I write some on the back of envelopes that are at church to put your money in. And because if you're open for business, I'm a writer now.
"Are you writing?" "Yeah, I'm writing four days a week for an hour every." Okay, well then you're a writer, so you're open for business, and if you are, ideas are going to come to you, and they're going to float into your head like goldfish, and they're not going to be at convenient times when you're at your computer or your desk.
Now, all my students have all said, "Well, we have our phone," and I always say, look, thank you. Well, you can't get your phone out in certain circumstances, but you can get an index card or a bit of paper and a pen out. And it's what writers have always done, you know, and I say, if you want what we have, which is skills and a little toolbox for writing. Do what we've always done. We scribble, we carry small notebooks in our back pocket. You can use your phone. I don't know how that translates into what we've always done, which is gathering, gathering, gathering. And then people say, what do you do with your notes?
Well, you can see they're right here. In fact, I was looking for this one and because I'm giving a talk, and they're here, and if I write them down with pencil or pen, they're indelible. You write down so much on your phone with texting and notes and whatnot, it's not indelible to me, but if I write it, it's coming through my head, my shoulders, my arms, my heart, through, into my fingers.
And I put it down on paper. And I make indents on paper. It's indelible. And then I start to write something. And I remember, oh yeah, oh yeah. I found a way to describe that exact situation. Or that exact person. Or that sound. Or that smell. I wrote it down. And then I just go find it.
MIGNON: Yeah. One of my listeners wanted to know, your books, many of them are so personal, how do you find the courage to be so personal in your writing and, and are there things … are there boundaries? Do you hold some things back? How do you approach that kind of writing?
ANNE: Oh, well, I hold a lot back, you know, in anything that I write about anyone in my family, I run by them first. But one of the things I've always taught in my workshops and classes is, write what you'd like to come upon, so that if you love poetry, or if you love historical novels, or if you love journals, which I happen to love, if you love memoirs, if you love fantasy.
And when you read that, when I read, when I get into a book that I really like, I am not kidding, this little thing inside my soul goes, “ooh, ooh,” because it means I'm covered for a week. I've got a book I'm going to get to get in bed with every night. And it means I'm found. I get lost a lot during the day, and I get found, and so if you know that experience happens most often with thrillers or mysteries or cozies, Agatha Christie, try to write one because it's information from your soul.
But I don't write anything that would embarrass my family or that they would be upset about. And all through those years of Book Passage, people were always telling me or writing about parents who had made them go pick out a switch from the backyard with which they were going to be hit and punished.
And then they didn't want to write about it. "Oh, my dad's really old now. I think he feels bad." I was like, tough shit, you know? And I've always said, if people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better. But don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I had a young Asian student whose mother used to hold his hand over the burner to punish him.
And he had a scar there. And it was mostly for bad grades. And he said, "I love my mother, though, and she's old," and I'd say, "Well, maybe it happens to the family across the street. Maybe it's not in your Japanese family. Maybe it's the Catholics with the eight children instead of just the one."
And you use fiction, and there are really ways to use everything that ever happened to you. It's really yours.
MIGNON: And it sounds like you think it can help other people to have it out there.
ANNE: Well, I think it's medicine, you know, it's like Rumi, the Persian mystic said through love, all pain will turn to medicine. And read, as a lifelong reader who found literal and spiritual salvation in chapter books at about four, the stories people have told about their own struggles and challenges, their own terrible self esteem and grandiosity and wounds and told them in a way that captivated me or maybe illuminated the world for me, illuminated my own challenge, my own hero's journey or made me laugh out loud.
That was my medicine. And that is definitely something I do try to provide.
MIGNON: Yeah, I think you do. Of your books — let's set aside "Bird by Bird" for a minute because we all love that one — but, other than that, what is your favorite book of yours that you've written?
ANNE: Well, I love the last one “Somehow” because it's all about love, and it's funny, and I think it's really deep. I really wanted to write a book to leave for Sam and his son Jax, for when I'm gone. There was every single thing I knew about life and truth that would help them get whatever difficult future lies ahead of them.
So I love that. But Sam and I wrote a book, a follow up to "Operating Instructions" called "Some Assembly Required." And "Operating Instructions" was subtitled "The Journal of My Son's First Year." And "Some Assembly" was subtitled "A Journal of My Son's First Son." And so he wrote a lot. He didn't. I wrote most of it, but he wrote about a third of it.
And God, if I read it to you right now, you would burst out laughing, and it's just painful to you'd grip your stomach and you go, "Oh, I know exactly how he felt." And it's a lot about me learning that it was learning to let go of control and realizing that, that the parents are really not interested in what the nice old grandmother thinks about the child's nutrition, or sleep habits, or education and that the more often you share them, the less you see the grandchild.
So I love that book. I mean, I really love a lot of them but those two come to mind, “Somehow” and "Some Assembly Required," and they both have somehow, “some” in the title. I think if people feel really scared and desperate, or something really bad has happened, that "Stitches" is not a bad book to pick up.
It's on healing and restoration. And my whole spiritual journey, which is very funny, and dark, and deep, and kind of rotted out by my alcoholism, is all in "Traveling Mercies." So those are some books your listeners might be interested in.
MIGNON: I find after revisiting your work and now talking with you, I feel like if I could just move in with you, I'm pretty sure I could write whatever I wanted to write. But I think the writer's retreat is probably the next best thing, probably the most possible thing. Is there time for writing at the retreat?
Do students do a lot of writing there or is it just all talks?
ANNE: Well, they did at the two I've been to before. And one of the things of awritingroom.com is the daily prompts and the sharing it with other people. And the one we did at the Indian Valley campus, the one we did in Santa Fe, there was a lot of writing involved. And then they're all banding together afterwards, and going to coffee houses, or going to someone's room, and they're writing for a couple of hours, and then they're giving it to one another.
But, yeah it's pretty intensive, and it's pretty joyful, the retreat, and my editor is there this year, his name's, Jake Morrissey, and he's done my last ten books, and so the students get to talk with him, and share their work with him. And then he just tells them what to do, so then they go out, and they have meals together, and they write down what Jake said, and what they're supposed to do, and then they do it, because, you know, why? Because they have support. Because they're sitting in a little ring together, and they're all on the same page, and they're all sort of excited by what they've heard, and by meeting Cheryl Strayed will be there, and, you know, God, Marlon James, and Jake is also Marlon's editor. So, there's just an energy, because, you know, what I just want to reiterate, I know we have to go in a second, but you sit at your desk alone, you sit there alone with all the bad feelings that you might still have about yourself, all the stuff people told you about yourself that might be critical, all the inner critic stuff that tells you not to even bother, not to try that, it's never going to happen.
What's the point if you don't get published? Well, most people aren't going to get published and make a lot of money, but they could have really rich lives as writers their whole life, get their stories told, and get it published. Published somehow or other, and you sit there and it's just tough. It's a hard, hard choice to make to be a writer, and that's what any collective will give you is to help you just want it more, you know, like in the spiritual, the Christian mystical tradition, they say, don't pray for the food, pray for the hunger.
You know, and a collective can make you really hungry to get it's like being a monk, you're going to get a couple hours of work done every day, and you're going to join with the other monks once a week or once every two weeks or whatever. And so it's just like energy and movement and other people's friendly eyes and other people who think you're really good.
Maybe your mother is worried that you don't seem to have an agent, but the people at the table at dinner. They could care less. They just think that you're really entertaining, and they can't wait to see what you come up with.
MIGNON: Yeah, that sounds amazing. So it is October 25th through 27th in Hollywood, California, and one thing I really liked, too, is it looks like there's a really well-organized online component, too, so if you can't make it there in person, you can, it sounds like it's pretty … it's really thoughtfully designed so that you can feel like you're participating too.
ANNE: Yeah. Yeah. You can watch it online and listen online and participate and chat online. Are you coming?
MIGNON: I can't come in person. That's why I'm excited about the online part. Yeah.
ANNE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just tell everyone to go to awritingroom.com. It's not THE writing room who are our mortal enemies. It's awritingroom.com. And then they'll see you there, and they'll definitely see me there.
MIGNON: Yeah. And actually, and your people, they gave me an affiliate code, so people who are listening can get 10% too, too. So if you, when you sign up, if you use the code GRAMMARGIRL10, that's GRAMMARGIRL10, so go to awritingroom.com sign up and then use the code GRAMMARGIRL10, and we'll put that in the show notes.
So you don't have to write it down. Then you'll get 10% off too. So that'll be wonderful. And if you go to that page also, there's a place you can sign up to get freebies. So I signed up for your daily … your writing prompts.
ANNE: Yeah, the prompts. Yeah.
MIGNON: I watched your wonderful 30-minute writing prompt video.
It was great. So everyone should go there, and get the free stuff, and at least check out the conference. And then if you can go, use my code GRAMMARGIRL10 to get 10% off. And again, that's in late October, and it's awritingroom.com. Yeah. Anne, it's been just fabulous to talk.
ANNE: Thank you so much. I loved it. It actually makes me feel like writing.
MIGNON: Yeah. Me too.
ANNE: Having talked to you, right? So maybe we'll both write a little today.
MIGNON: This afternoon. Absolutely. Well, enjoy. Enjoy your writing time.
ANNE: Thank you so much for having me.
MIGNON: You bet.