The Learning Curve

[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right. Welcome to Secrets and Lies, a storyteller's podcast. I'm Carolyn. [00:00:07] Speaker B: And I'm Vicki. [00:00:09] Speaker A: All right, Vicki. This week. I'm calling this the learning curve. [00:00:15] Speaker B: Why you ask? [00:00:16] Speaker A: Well, because we met in an MFA program. [00:00:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I wasn't going to ask, but yeah, we did did because we met. [00:00:25] Speaker A: In an MFA program. Did you? [00:00:28] Speaker B: The learning. [00:00:29] Speaker A: It was and I'm a bit of a school nerd. Anyway, like, I really liked college. I didn't like high school, let's get that straight at all. But when I went to college and you get to pick what it is that you want to study, for the most part, I really got into it. And then I went right into grad school, and I loved that. And then I went back to grad school again because giant school nerd. [00:00:57] Speaker B: Well, I didn't go back to finish my degree until it took me 14 years to get an Associate degree and then another 14 years to get my bachelor's degree. And that's not because I spent all that time working on it. It's just because I didn't focus on it. But that means I went back to school to get my bachelor's in my forty s. And I loved it. [00:01:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I took a long time to get my I never got my Associate's degree, but to get my Bachelor's degree, I was working during the day and going to school at night or doing whatever. And I really enjoyed it, too. And even much later when I was teaching college, teaching college students, I much preferred teaching adult learners, people with some life experience who had context for things. [00:01:51] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. [00:01:52] Speaker A: So, yeah, I liked that a lot. I enjoyed that a lot. But anyway, back to the MFA, or Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, for those of you out there, I get a lot of questions, even when I was teaching undergrads, teaching creative writing, to undergrads or even composition classes about the MFA and whether that's a good thing to do. Like if you want to be a writer, do you have to get an MFA? [00:02:22] Speaker B: It depends on the writer. That's my take is not everybody wants to go to school and spend all the money because it's a lot of money. [00:02:33] Speaker A: It is a lot. [00:02:35] Speaker B: And not everybody actually needs to there's some very talented writers out there that just need a little bit of craft guidance. [00:02:43] Speaker A: And then there are people like you who will help them do that. As an I like to help people do that. [00:02:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I got the MFA, so you. [00:02:51] Speaker A: Don'T have to oh my God. [00:02:52] Speaker B: How about that? [00:02:56] Speaker A: Whereas I am not about I don't know. I loved teaching creative writing. I don't want people to send me their projects. I do not want to help them with their projects. Do not send me your manuscript, please, because that's not what I do. [00:03:12] Speaker B: I have been a coach in some form for a very long time. Even before. Even when I was working at a bank, even when I was working in restaurants, they always ended up being the trainer, training somebody, the new person or whatever. And I always liked it. [00:03:32] Speaker A: That's great. I came to the MFA not only because I loved going to school and whatever, but I came to the MFA for kind of two reasons. One, I wanted to actually finish the book I had started and I wanted to do a good job on it. And I had written a previous novel which will never see the light of day. I call it my learning book. And I thought, you know, I should probably work with some people who actually know what they're doing writing wise and see if I can really kind of harness this creative whatever thing it is and come up with something that's really good. So I figured if I'm in an MFA program, I'm going to have to generate pages or I'm going to fail. [00:04:32] Speaker B: That's right. [00:04:33] Speaker A: So it was kind of about accountability. [00:04:35] Speaker B: You have to generate pages, you have to learn, read all the craft books and you have to read all of the inspiration. I call them inspiration books. I was studying memoirs, so the other memoirs that are really good and see how well they did it and you have to annotate. [00:04:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Big part of the MFA program that Vicki and I attended involved, it was a low residency program. So we would go to residency, we would work with our workshop group and our mentor for that semester. And by the end of that residency, you would have a reading list for the upcoming semester. That was usually pretty long. [00:05:20] Speaker B: Yeah, it was a good ten to. [00:05:22] Speaker A: 14 books or something. And the mentors would choose some pretty interesting material for us to read. Not necessarily ten additional books that were very much like the kind of project we were doing. They were a little bit all over in order to give you to kind of expand approaches you could take or something. My mentors picked some books I never would have thought of and some of them were cool enough to let me. [00:06:01] Speaker B: Pick a couple of books yeah. [00:06:02] Speaker A: And throw them in there. [00:06:04] Speaker B: Mine too. I appreciate all the books that I read. It was very you know, sometimes other people in your group would suggest books too and those would be good. It I came into the MFA with a project too, but I was working on my bachelor's degree. USF. Go south Florida. Woo. Go Bulls. And it was working my way up to I was in my last semester, basically getting ready to graduate when my mom passed away and when she did and I had been studying fiction. I had been working like in a special collections area in the library, which was really fascinating. I was holding scripts from a playwright who had written them like over 150 years ago. And that was like, he held this and I held this. That got me into the whole archiving thing. But I digress. So my mom left behind all those letters and pictures and things that led to her childhood secrets and abandonment and all that. So that fell in my lap. And in the meantime, University of Tampa kept calling and calling and calling, hey, you want to go to an MFA program? Come join our so I just I had to do that's. [00:07:37] Speaker A: That's really interesting. I had a project too. UT wasn't calling me out of the blue exactly, but I had met the head of continuing education and Donald Morrell at a conference for lifelong learning in Washington, DC. That I was attending for work. And I met in the snack room where all the good things happen. And we were chatting about writing. He was telling me was from the University of Tampa and I was saying I used to live in and anyway, he at that time, I guess, had just started the MFA program. And I remembered it like a year later. And just on almost a whim, I put together some stuff and sent it, knowing that I had the beginnings of this book and I'd done nothing with it. It wasn't getting past like, chapter three, and I thought that there was really something there and whatever. So I sent my stuff off to UT and went on vacation. And while I was on vacation, I got a notice that they wanted me to come in. And then they did call me when I got back. Anyway, I found that experience to be at first terrifying because I got accepted in late May and the first residency was mid June and I had to have an additional three chapters or something of my book for us to workshop. And so I was like, my gosh, I had to come up with something and then send it to strangers. How did you find the process of workshopping with your group? [00:09:51] Speaker B: I liked the workshopping. There were times when I was sharing my mom's story, so I had, I guess you could say, a chapter. It was the vomit draft. It was the very, very beginnings of whatever this was going to be. And the people I worked with were good. We all gave pretty good feedback. I mean, I've heard more horror stories, I think, from other groups. [00:10:21] Speaker A: I was just wondering if it's different in the nonfiction realm than it is in the fiction realm. But yeah, in the fiction realm, it can get pretty brutal. [00:10:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I've seen that. Yes, I've seen that in undergrad. [00:10:35] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that there's a whole learning curve in understanding both how to give good feedback that's helpful and useful and I mean honest, but not necessarily brutally honest, and also how to receive it. And I don't know how your workshop group worked, but when we were getting feedback from the others, we weren't allowed to speak. [00:11:04] Speaker B: Yes. To me, that's the best way. Let them all get it out. [00:11:08] Speaker A: And you can use it or not use it. [00:11:11] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. Because I think when I used to hear, if I was in a group that they did speak, they felt the desire to just defend their weding, and that's not really the purpose of even being there. [00:11:25] Speaker A: Well, I had somebody tell me that my main character was a cry baby. [00:11:30] Speaker B: I know. Defend yourself. [00:11:33] Speaker A: I wasn't allowed to I wasn't allowed to speak. But inside, yeah, inside, I was like, you don't understand. [00:11:41] Speaker B: The workshopping is like, you learn how to take that defensive note and twist it into, how do I make this so they get it. [00:11:56] Speaker A: It's an interesting thing. I found this to be true in my day job as well. When you're working on a collaborative effort with other people that multiple people are contributing to, to learn how to sort of remove yourself from the equation, and it becomes about making whatever, the thing, the product, the end result, the best thing that it can be. And when you start, if you can get everybody on the same page with that idea, and it stops being your darlings, as they say, that goes a long way to being able to receive other perspectives and be thankful for those other perspectives. That helps make that thing, whatever it is, richer and more effective so that it does get the emotional response that you're hoping for, and that not being oh, my God. What a baby. [00:13:01] Speaker B: Yeah. If you can look at it as a project, this is a story project or whatever project instead of this is me. Yeah. When the feedback a lot of people can take the feedback very personal. And I found in memoir writing, the line is a lot skinnier and more blurry. When you're looking at someone's memoir, their own story, it's very easy for them to take feedback as personal. [00:13:39] Speaker A: I guess it was a workshop. I thought it was a workshop. I thought it was a workshop on writing. It turned out it was really a workshop to give us writers practice in pitching, but it involves staying in cabins in the woods in Virginia. [00:14:00] Speaker B: Okay. [00:14:02] Speaker A: Yeah. And for, I don't know, four days or something. [00:14:07] Speaker B: Sounds kind of fun, but scary creepy. [00:14:10] Speaker A: Yeah. With cabins in the woods. And I remember on the very first day, the first evening, like the check in evening, there was a group dinner, and I missed the dinner because I had to drive from my day job down to Virginia, and they were off having dinner or whatever when I got there. When they came back, one of the writers was already crying and packed up and left. [00:14:39] Speaker B: Oh, my. [00:14:40] Speaker A: We technically hadn't even started yet. And she had written something inspired by her own personal history that apparently was a story of abuse she had suffered or something. And the facilitator of this workshop had said something like, that's not going to sell. You're going to have to write another book. [00:15:03] Speaker B: Oh, helpful. [00:15:05] Speaker A: Yeah. So we lost her, like, right off the bat. She packed up and left that first night and we didn't see her again. And that kind of dynamic continued. There was a lot of drama over the course of the four days. [00:15:25] Speaker B: I mean, there's a little bit of brutal truth to the fact that a story may not be the kind of story that will sell, but if you're in it just for the money, then I don't know if that's the path you should take. That's okay. [00:15:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:15:42] Speaker B: But then there's also the idea that you may want to put that story out there on your own, that it doesn't have to be picked up by a major publisher. And some people and I've met these people, they just want to get their story down and they want to get it out there in the world. They have a message whether the big publishers want it or not. [00:16:06] Speaker A: That workshop, by the way, I got in trouble on day one, the actual first day, not the night before because I didn't have a title yet, really? For my book in progress. And the facilitator sent me back to my cabin until I came up with ten potential book title names I wasn't allowed to return. [00:16:34] Speaker B: That doesn't sound helpful at all because isn't that like one of the last things you do? [00:16:38] Speaker A: I don't know. I hadn't thought of it being like the anyway. But I did come up with a title. I did get to come back to the group, but I was banished, like day one while I did so very hardcore. This workshop definitely meaner. [00:16:55] Speaker B: I feel like I want to sign up under an anonymous name and go back and give them a hard time or something. [00:17:03] Speaker A: But what they did do that was really great is they gave us practice time pitching to agents, literary agents, without and they had literary agents come. This was a novel workshop, so they had literary agent come that was nonfiction because there was no chance they were going to pick any of us up for practice. So you still got the feedback on your pitch, but you weren't like life or death on the next 45 seconds. So they got to tell you. They got to help you hone your pitch when you know that they're not going to be the audience for you. Which was super helpful much later when I did go to talk to agents who were looking for fiction. But yeah, so I found that experience to be way meaner than any of the workshops in the MFA program. [00:18:00] Speaker B: Wow. [00:18:04] Speaker A: The other thing I wanted to ask you, you came into the MFA program because of this project that you wanted to work on, this family history project and this memoir project, though you had written fiction before that. Did you mix up your mentors or your semesters and kind of dabble across genre. [00:18:29] Speaker B: I did my first term was nonfiction, so I worked on my memoir and I started getting that and I thought, well, you know what? Sadly, I was like, I just want to get my money's worth out of this. [00:18:45] Speaker A: No, it's a lot of money. [00:18:47] Speaker B: My second term was fiction and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that a lot. And then the last two were back. [00:18:56] Speaker A: To my memoir again, I stayed in fiction the whole time, but I did my first two semesters with novelists and I did my last two semesters with the same mentor focusing on short story. And before then I hadn't really written short story at all. I was all about getting my novel done, but I had actually seen this Jason Ockert. I don't know why I'm dancing around it. He had come up to Baltimore and he had done a talk at the Pratt Library up there along with some other people and had done a reading. And I decided I was going to spend some time studying with him so that I could hone my sentence level. Like I thought, I can broadstroke this. I have the beginning, middle and end and the plot. But I really wanted to get down to sentence and paragraph level and really make that a richer experience. I was glossing over that kind of stuff. So he was all about short stories where you have to make the words count. And so I didn't expect to spend more than one semester working with a short story writer, but I spent my last two and I think that that made a huge difference in my writing. Do you get students or have you had people that you've worked with ask you about the MFA before? [00:20:43] Speaker B: No, actually they haven't. [00:20:47] Speaker A: I find that I sometimes have to remind other people that I actually do have a degree in writing and that I can help with some things I've done. Some sort of, I don't know, workshops. Not for creative writers or people who wanted to write stories or even memoirs or essays, but saying, let me share some tips with you that will help you when you are writing these emails or these executive summaries or whatever. And all of those tips I picked up in the MFA, those are good. [00:21:30] Speaker B: Mean. A lot of times when you're doing developmental editing, it's more the project than the writing. So you have to figure out what percentage of it is helping them get the story in the structure they want and what percentage of it is helping them write better. So I'm finding that lately I'm more on the wanting to help them write better side, which is more coaching and just I guess I've liked that a lot more. So I don't even know if I've told you this, working on a mentorship oh, cool program to add to my editing work stuff. So yeah, it would be kind of modeled after the MFA low res thing. [00:22:24] Speaker A: That's cool. [00:22:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:22:27] Speaker A: I find that even after the MFA, learning from other people things that they have found particularly useful or helpful or that make me look at things a different way has been kind of a fallback thing for me. I'm pretty sure I'm addicted to buying writing craft books. I don't know how many I have, but a lot. [00:22:59] Speaker B: I bet you have Stephen King's on writing. [00:23:01] Speaker A: That is one of my favorites and maybe my most recommended craft book. We'll put a link to it of all of them because it's so accessible and not pretend. In fact, it's like half memoir, really, and half writing advice. [00:23:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. It's a good one. I've read it twice because I like it. I like I've seen I've talked to fun. That was fun and a little bit intimidating. [00:23:37] Speaker A: I have never met him, but yeah. And I find that I like older Stephen King more than I mean, I read Stephen King, as we all did. [00:23:47] Speaker B: You're reading Stephen King right now? [00:23:49] Speaker A: I am reading Stephen King right now. I'm in the middle of Holly. But yeah, I find his later books to be so incredibly well done. In a way. Maybe I just didn't appreciate the earlier Stephen King. [00:24:07] Speaker B: Meaning now that he's older as opposed to his older works. [00:24:11] Speaker A: Yes. [00:24:11] Speaker B: Okay. [00:24:12] Speaker A: I like his later his more recent work. [00:24:15] Speaker B: Okay. [00:24:16] Speaker A: I find it really great. Yeah. So I'm in the middle of reading Holly right now, which is based on a sort of side character that he introduced in a trilogy that starts with Mr. Mercedes. I don't know if you've read that. And she just quickly became a favorite. He brought her back in another book and then now she's getting her own book. So I'm super excited to finish that. [00:24:41] Speaker B: I would love one day to be in a place where I can just pick out one of my characters and make another book. [00:24:47] Speaker A: Right? [00:24:48] Speaker B: Wouldn't that be yeah. So, well, I have a couple of craft books that I love. One is left over from the MFA program. Heather Sellers, the Craft of the Practice of Creative Writing. I love that book because she gets into the sentence not the sentence structure, but making the craft so much better and flow better and have meaning and have images and all of that. She's just a really good I teach that book. I do teach that. And the other is Seven Drafts by Alison K. Williams, which is kind of a newer book. [00:25:27] Speaker A: I don't think I've read that one. [00:25:28] Speaker B: That one is it's kind of so. [00:25:30] Speaker A: I'll put it on my Christmas wish list. [00:25:32] Speaker B: Okay. And she's the one that talks about the vomit draft, which is the first draft. And it's more structure. That's more of a structure book. [00:25:42] Speaker A: I probably have a dozen books that are along the lines of, like, write your novel. Stop reading this book. And write this novel. Quit procrastinating and get your book finished. Okay, so at least a dozen of those, and then I have at least a dozen, which I call them craft books, but they're really reference books for the mystery crime writer that are on poisons or on what private eyes do or all kinds of random things. And I have a T shirt, actually that says, don't judge me for my search history. I'm a mystery writer, not a serial killer. So true. Yeah, so true. I was talking to a fellow reader at the Brandy Bar that we went to a while back about my first book, and when I was researching that story that involved a house fire he was a firefighter who had written, I think, a couple of books. He was a poet. Former firefighter, now poet. [00:26:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I remember him. [00:26:58] Speaker A: And I was telling him that I had made an appointment and had gone in and had an informational interview with the head of the arson and bomb squad, whatever. When I was living in Orlando because of my book, had this fire in the beginning, and I got schooled because I had this fire burning, apparently for too long. And he's like, you're making us look bad. But when you ask questions like, how long should a house fire be burning before somebody, if they were trapped inside, could only be identified by dental records? And then they would say stuff like, what was your name again? So I have a whole shelf of reference books for the crime writer, which is truly terrifying. [00:27:53] Speaker B: That sounds like a fun library. [00:27:56] Speaker A: It is, actually. [00:27:57] Speaker B: Okay. [00:27:58] Speaker A: I enjoy it, but yeah, I love a good writing book. And whenever I go to a conference or something and somebody does a talk and they mention that they've written a. [00:28:08] Speaker B: Book so you have a lot of procrastination books. [00:28:11] Speaker A: I do. [00:28:13] Speaker B: I don't feel like working on my novel. I got to figure out why. And you go buy another procrastination book, which means you're procrastinating. [00:28:21] Speaker A: I really am. I can come up with hundreds and hundreds of reasons not to actually finish my novel. [00:28:29] Speaker B: Okay. [00:28:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a problem. [00:28:32] Speaker B: Maybe some of our listeners have some ideas to help the please share procrastination. [00:28:38] Speaker A: Want to play truth or fiction? Let's play truth or fiction. [00:28:41] Speaker B: Okay. I think it's okay. I got one. All right. So there's this guy and girl, and they have sex in a room because that's what people do. It's no big deal, right? Except they're on drugs, and well, I guess that's nothing new either. Drugs make people do all kinds of stuff. They make you happy, they make you sad, they make you horny and all that stuff. So they're doing their thing. But there is this guy watching. [00:29:18] Speaker A: There's a guy watching. [00:29:19] Speaker B: There's a guy watching them? Yes. In fact, he's the one that gave them the drugs. Oh, yeah. I guess these people and there's more than just these two. He's been given drugs to a whole group of people and watching them do. [00:29:39] Speaker A: Things, like sequentially or like, is everybody in? Oh, okay. So over time over time, he's giving people drugs and then yeah, I mean. [00:29:50] Speaker B: I guess he could be watching more than one thing going on. [00:29:54] Speaker A: This is getting weirder by the moment. [00:29:56] Speaker B: I know. Anyway, I guess they kind of know what's going on. They know he's there watching. So that's another weird part of it. But then he starts practicing dangerous drugs, like stuff that makes you angry or have you ever seen the movie The Happening by M. Night? Yes. Like the wind blows and people just all of a sudden start to kill themselves. [00:30:35] Speaker A: Yes. [00:30:35] Speaker B: That was a great movie. [00:30:36] Speaker A: I hated it. But okay. [00:30:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's kind of like that. You give them a drug, and then they all of a sudden get so depressed that they just go find a way to kill themselves. So he starts messing with them with that drug, and then he makes them choose. Which one do you want me to give them? [00:30:59] Speaker A: Knowing. Knowing what will happen. Like, they know it's a happy or a sad. [00:31:03] Speaker B: They know it's a very dangerous sad. [00:31:06] Speaker A: I'm going fiction. Fiction, fiction. [00:31:12] Speaker B: That's my guess. You're right. [00:31:15] Speaker A: Gosh. We're too good at this. [00:31:19] Speaker B: This is a hard game. So this is escape from Say. [00:31:27] Speaker A: Yeah. I want to say, didn't this get made into a I don't know if it was a movie, a miniseries. [00:31:33] Speaker B: It's a movie. So Escape from Spiderhead was written by George Saunders. Oh. [00:31:40] Speaker A: He came to speak at the art program. [00:31:42] Speaker B: He did. And the story can be found in his collection, the 10 December. It can also be found online in The New Yorker. [00:31:51] Speaker A: Awesome. [00:31:52] Speaker B: So you can read about that and. [00:31:54] Speaker A: Find out what happens because yikes. [00:31:56] Speaker B: And we watched the movie not long ago. The movie is just called Spiderhead, and Chris Hemsworth is in it. [00:32:03] Speaker A: Thor. Thor is in it. [00:32:06] Speaker B: So all these guys are prisoners. Have you read the story before? [00:32:09] Speaker A: I have not, or I would. [00:32:11] Speaker B: They're prisoners and they've all agreed to this testing thing. But Chris Hemsworth is like the warden guy. That it's good. It's good. You have to read it. Miles Teller is in it. And so is Journey Smollett. She's cute. [00:32:31] Speaker A: I, like. [00:32:33] Speaker B: Did a it's on Netflix. [00:32:35] Speaker A: He did a movie we watched, or maybe it was a series about the making of The Godfather, which was really interesting. [00:32:44] Speaker B: So we're going to have to figure out a way to make this harder, this truth or fiction. [00:32:50] Speaker A: We're going to have to hone our truth or fiction game because we're a little too good at it. All right, I wanted to ask you I mean, we talked a little bit about how you sort of moved from an early interest in fiction and then moved into your family history thing and then kind of that branched out into archiving. And I know we shared some information in an earlier episode about the heirloom what did you call it? Heirloom orphans. Orphan heirlooms orphan heirlooms. And kind of digging through archives and historical things and finding so we sort of know how you fell into that. Do you ever go back and write fiction? Do you dabble in that at all anymore? [00:33:37] Speaker B: I would love to. I have this block right now because I feel like I have to finish the memoir first, and that's just me being mean to myself. I'm sure I could easily go somewhere and write some fiction. And I have this one story that's been in my head for like, ten years, probably longer, that I really want to write. And I don't know if it's a short story or a novel, but yeah, I want to do it, and I haven't done it. [00:34:04] Speaker A: Do you read mostly nonfiction or where. [00:34:09] Speaker B: Does I read mostly nonfiction. I read some fiction, some short stories now and then. But I will say this, I did write fiction when I did this Letter Stories project that was fictional, and it also turned into, like, a fictional archive. [00:34:25] Speaker A: Too, which yeah, where we had all these artifacts from there. If you're not familiar with this format, maybe you can spend a second explaining. [00:34:38] Speaker B: So it was just a few years back, there was about, what, six or eight of us writers got together and did a project called Letter Stories. And we would write, like, handwrite letters to each other, and the first person would start off a story, and whoever was sent the letter next would continue the story by either responding to the letter or something else. And the writers got into it. They started creating maps and getting artifacts and sending them, and it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it, and that was fictional, and I wanted to keep doing that, so I want to do something similar again. But we'll see. [00:35:25] Speaker A: I've been living pretty much in the fiction realm, and most of my stories, if they're not full on mysteries, are at least twisty in some way. And that comes from the first Nancy Drew book you got at the school library and sort of falling in love with the intellectual exercise of trying to put the pieces together. But I've written some nonfiction. I've written some essays and some other things, and I think it's good to sort of stray outside the lines a little bit. But if I had to label myself or put myself in a box, if I had to assign that thing that I do, it would be I definitely am a mystery thriller or crime writer. Short fiction or long fiction, mostly. [00:36:30] Speaker B: I can see that. Did you read a lot of that? [00:36:33] Speaker A: I do, not exclusively, but most of my recreational reading is mystery or thriller related. I just love the idea that you can come up with the most ridiculously, implausible things and. Make somebody still turn the pages. [00:36:59] Speaker B: That's a challenge. [00:37:00] Speaker A: Yeah. Knowing that it's crazy and absurd and out there and divorced from reality and you still are invested in finding out what happens and getting an explanation of it. [00:37:14] Speaker B: Are you like a visual person or are you so a lot of times I will envision mostly it's comedy. And I can see a scenario going on on Saturday Night Live. And I say this a lot. You can ask David that should be a skit on Saturday Night Live, or this should be a skit on Saturday Night Live. And we make stuff up all the time, but I don't know if that means I should be a script writer. [00:37:43] Speaker A: That means you need to be cutting that stuff or like, writing that stuff down and putting it on your own. Crazy idea board. [00:37:49] Speaker B: I need a crazy idea board. [00:37:51] Speaker A: Everybody needs a crazy idea board. [00:37:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:37:53] Speaker A: Which leads us to our wrap up writing tip of the week. [00:38:00] Speaker B: I've got one. I have been co writing or so writing is such a lonely thing, right? [00:38:13] Speaker A: It is. [00:38:13] Speaker B: It is lonely sometimes by choice. [00:38:16] Speaker A: I like that I have a door. [00:38:17] Speaker B: And I procrastinate, too, actually. I don't have a door. I have to get a door. [00:38:22] Speaker A: You need a door. [00:38:23] Speaker B: But that makes it even lonelier. So what I found is a co writing group that is online and we will check in at the same time on Zoom and just kind of go through everybody and say hi and say, what are you working on? And then we go off and do our thing for an amount of time. [00:38:45] Speaker A: Is this an accountability thing? [00:38:48] Speaker B: It is an accountability thing. Even if you don't get, like if you're working on a specific blog post or something and you say, I'm going to work on a blog post, but it just doesn't come to you. You can do something else and nobody cares. You're not graded on it or anything. [00:39:06] Speaker A: They're not critiquing you. [00:39:08] Speaker B: They're not critiquing you. And that makes it a different kind of writing group. [00:39:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that is a different kind of I have not found critique groups or writing groups that are about sharing and feedback particularly helpful. I do have a reader who reads everything I write before I submit. [00:39:32] Speaker B: It awesome. [00:39:33] Speaker A: And she is amazing. And we may have her on the show at some point so that she can talk about what she does. She is yet another person who has randomly moved to North Carolina. [00:39:47] Speaker B: Hey. [00:39:49] Speaker A: But yeah. So that's a really good trip. So that works for you, this co writing group? [00:39:54] Speaker B: It does. And this one is also suggested by Alison Kay Williams. So if you want to see or join in something like that, you can Google Gorilla Memoir, which is her gorilla memoir, and co writing or links. [00:40:17] Speaker A: We'll put some links for you, listeners on our page so you can get this. [00:40:25] Speaker B: Well, thank you. Another good. [00:40:27] Speaker A: A good episode full of interesting resources for our learning curve. [00:40:35] Speaker B: Yes, learning curve. All right. Until next time. [00:40:38] Speaker A: Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening. [00:40:40] Speaker B: Thanks, everybody. Bye.