How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Introducing How To Write a Book: Episode 1 - The Idea (Part 1)

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

In this first episode of How to Write a Book, Elizabeth Day’s new podclass series, hosts Sara Collins, Sharmaine Lovegrove and Nelle Andrew discuss coming up with ideas. Just where do ideas for books come from? How do you know if they’re any good, or even if they’re right for you to pursue? Our expert podclass provides answers to all of this - and even a lesson in how to know when your idea might be ready to send to an agent. And we could not have a more experienced bunch to guide you on this journey. Sara Collins is the bestselling novelist and screenwriter currently serving as a judge for the 2024 Booker Prize. Her debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, won the Costa book awards in 2019 and she later wrote the TV screenplay. Nelle Andrew is a literary agent and former Agent of the Year at the British Book Awards, and Sharmaine Lovegrove is the co-founder and managing director of Dialogue Books, an inclusive imprint at a major publishing house. Each of them is an expert in one stage of the publishing journey…. and all are literary nerds (in the best possible way). Together, Sara, Sharmaine and Nelle are your on-hand writing community giving you the push you need to get started on that novel, memoir, or piece of non fiction you've always dreamed of writing. We hope you enjoy our part 1 & part 2 on IDEA. If you don’t want to wait for next week’s episode, you can subscribe now and binge them all at once by tapping ‘subscribe’. You’ll get to listen to all episodes ad-free and get exclusive subscriber access to How To Fail and Failing With Friends. Books discussed in these episodes include: •The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins •The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett •Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden •Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth •The Color Purple by Alice Walker •Scissors, Paper, Stone by Elizabeth Day •Paradise City by Elizabeth Day •Magpie by Elizabeth Day We also talk about Christopher Booker, Kit de Waal, The Seven Basic Plots and Michael Crichton’ Executive produced by Elizabeth Day for Daylight Productions and Carly Maile for Sony Music Entertainment. Produced by Imogen Serwotka. Please do get in touch with us, your writing community, with thoughts, feedback and more at: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by LEGO Fortnite. LEGO Fortnite is the ultimate survival crafting game found within Fortnite. It's not just Fortnite Battle Royale with minifigures. It's an entirely new experience that combines the best of LEGO Play and Fortnite, created to give players of all ages, including kids and families, a safe, digital space to play in. Download Fortnite on consoles, PC, cloud services or Android, and play LEGO Fortnite for free. Rated ESRB E10+. Hello, everyone. As you might know, I started my very own production company earlier this year called Daylight Productions. And the idea behind it was to platform and elevate

diverse and female voices in the podcasting space. I'm so proud to present to you our first ever podcast, How to Write a Book. How to Write a Book is a 12-week podcast that guides you through the writing process. You'll learn how to develop ideas, experiment with your voice, and get your finished manuscript out there. It's also the place to come if you just love reading and want a glimpse behind the scenes of how great books, films, and TV dramas get written.

It's a masterclass in podcast form, a pod class in fact. Packed full of frank, funny, and practical insights, as well as listener exercises to help your creative juices flow, we offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of books. Hosted by bestselling author, Sara Collins, powerhouse publisher, Charmaine Lovegrove,

and super agent, Nell Andrew, with additional reflections from, well, me. This is the podcast for anyone who wants to write a book or simply wants to know how great books get written. It's the first in a series of how-to pod classes hosted by experts accessible to everyone. Here's an exclusive listen to the first episode. If you like what you hear, episodes will drop weekly on Mondays, but if you're a subscriber, you'll get all episodes at once. Just search How to Write a Book wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, I'm Elizabeth Day, author and podcaster and executive producer of How to Write a Book. You might know me from my other podcasts, How to Fail, or from reading one of my books, but this podcast isn't actually about me. It's about you. How to Write a Book is a podcast masterclass, a pod class in fact, and over the next 12 weeks, we'll take you from developing characters to experimenting with your voice and getting your finished manuscript ready a pod class, in fact, and over the next 12 weeks, we'll take you from developing characters to experimenting with your voice and getting your finished manuscript ready for publication. We want you to think of us

as your on-hand writing community, giving you the push you need to get started on that novel, memoir, or piece of non-fiction you've always dreamed of writing. And even if you've no intention of writing anything, this is also a podcast that allows you to draw the curtain back on the world of books. Every week, you'll get an exclusive insight

into how and why our most celebrated writers wrote the books they did, and what it really means to create unforgettable stories. Because we all have a story in us. But how do we get it out there? To guide you through the process, I've brought together three amazing women. You'll hear from bestselling novelist, screenwriter,

and 2024 Booker Prize judge, Sarah Collins. I think it's quite apt that we start with a moment of failure as well because for me accepting that failure is built into the whole process of writing a novel is step number one and we fail to start. But now we shall start to fail. Former Agent of the Year at the British Book Awards, Nell Andrew. We get to take our collective wisdom hopefully and a lot of our sass and translate it into something that I hope will be actually really practical and help people create better books

and have the confidence to tell their stories in the first place. And you'll hear from Charmaine Lovegrove, co-founder and MD of Dialogue, an inclusive division at major publisher Hachette. I really am just so excited to talk about the craft and art of how to write a book. Our three hosts are absolute powerhouses. These are the voices you need to hear if you want to know anything and everything about books. They're also really good friends with each other and with me. So the idea is, yes, we might be teaching you a new skillset, but you'll also get a seat at our friendship table. We hope very much you'll stay for the conversation

and the laughs along the way. So now, without further ado, let me hand over to Sarah, Nell and Charmaine. Right, go on. Sarah and Charmaine, please introduce yourselves and bring in your silky voices to this podcast episode. Go, go, go. I don't know if my voice can be as silky as yours, but I'm going to try it.

So I'm Sarah Collins. I'm the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton. I am very, very happy to be represented by Nell Andrew and friends with Charmaine Lovegrove and Elizabeth Day, two powerhouses of publishing. And really, really happy to be here to keep you company in the writing trenches because I've got personal experience, which I will keep banging on about,

about how terrible they can be. I'm Charmaine Lovegrove. I am the Managing Director of Dialogue. It's the 12th Division of Pachette. We focus on inspiration, inclusion, and innovation, bringing voices to the mainstream for readers across our society. I love talking about literature, how it's created. I'm absolutely obsessed with my job and how we get books to readers

and how we cheer on and support writers on their journey. Also, I'm really loving this idea of having that agent's perspective, having that author's perspective, and then having that publisher's perspective, because ultimately we're on different sides of this, but we're all coming together to make sure that the book is the very, very best that it can be. I'm Nell Andrew. I'm a literary agent at RML and I was agent of the year in 2021. And with me are an incredible array of these two brilliant women. I'm literally having a nerdgasm about how this is going to go. With the three of us.

Okay. Talking about this. A nerdgasm. Absolutely. We were the girls who were sat at the front of the bus with our notepads ready to go. Oh, yeah, the type As. Oh, come on, totally. And I never think of myself as a type A.

I'm sorry. I just think that managing director dialogue and you don't think of yourself as a type A. What the fuck? What, type A star? Come on now. No. I'm always teasing Elizabeth about our sort of collective head girl energy. I mean, we just have to own it.

Exactly. And actually, we're going to be owning it at Left, Right and Central on this episode. So how are we kicking this off? So today we're going to be discussing the very first part of this entire process, which is ideas, where they come from, how to have one, when is it good, when is it bad, what to do with it. The thing you need to do first, which is have an idea that's gonna work. So let's get down to it, girlies. Let's start with a round table question, which is, guys, where do you think the best ideas come from?

I like the fact that the agent is taking charge already. I love it. Sit back and relax. I've got you. I love it. I feel comfortable. I need to be guided by you now. You know this. As an agent, I'm always incredibly interested in the inspiration for an idea. And what I find really fascinating is that so many different authors describe that moment in very, very different ways. You've got the Elizabeth Gilbert School of Thought, who I think ages ago, she was describing how ideas and stories come to you like standing in a cornfield, and they're like muses on the wind, and that the muse either hits you because you happen to be in the right place at the right time, or it goes and hits someone else because they're like 20 feet

west or 30 feet south. And I thought that was quite a generous interpretation in the sense that not all ideas are going to come to you and not all ideas are meant for you. And on the other side, you've got Alice Walker, who I think once talked about writing The Color Purple. And she talked about how she was sitting in a house and she heard the voices of Celie and Mr. and Shug. And again, it was that notion that they came to her and she received it. And I think the notion of inspiration is that urge to act.

It's an animus, like, I have to do this. It can't just be catering for something, servicing something. You have to be in a space to receive it, which means you have to be able to ingest what's happening in your cultural moment and create something unique out of it for something. But at the same time, it has to come from within you. What all writers talk about is the sort of living with characters and how the voices come to them. And I find that so fascinating, how you not just have an idea, but the full formation and how you're almost

sort of seeing them in this like full space because they're not real, they're not in front of you, you can't go and have a conversation with them. They are entirely from your imagination and then you have to render that imagination as fully formed people that are doing multiple things at the same time and how they interact with each other. You can't just come up with an idea. You have to be utterly inspired and then you have to do the research, you have to do the work. When the book The Confessions of Franny Langton really came to life for me. It was a combination of research and magic. So the research bit was that I had been reading a book about Francis Barber, reflecting on the fact that there was this deep, rich, black cultural life in Britain.

During the Regency, I had been this obsessive Jane Austen bookworm, but the black characters are ghosts in that, aren't they? They're sort of never in the center, always in the margins. So, you know, reading that book triggered something in me, the story about how Francis Barber had essentially been brought from Jamaica as an 11-year-old boy, given to Samuel Johnson, the great philosopher and dictionary writer, and raised by him and become quote unquote, beloved by him, so much so that when Barbara ran off to join the Navy, Johnson called on all of his contacts high up and got him brought back. And I just thought, what a wonderful little capsule of emotional entanglement right there to be in that house with this very wealthy, very intelligent Englishman,

the kind of symbol of the power that has kept you uneducated and to try to fight against that. And I thought, I'm going to do that with a woman. So that was the research bit of it. But then the magic bit of it came when I was starting to write. And I think, again, this is my manifesto for this pod class. I'm going to let people know that the writing is shit. Like, you know, I tried so many different hammy, derivative, like schlocky, awful, awful false starts for this book that Nell of course never saw. But then there was a moment where the thing that became the first line of my manuscript jumped out at me and I saw, we talk about seeing and hearing characters, I saw my woman and she was standing on the steps of this grand Mayfair mansion and there was a fog and everyone was against her. She was being arrested

and she wanted to say something and the thing she wanted to say was, but I never would have done what they say I've done because I loved her. And that was the line that gave me Franny's voice. And so I made it the opening line of my novel. And guess what happened, Mel, do you remember? When our editor got hold of it, she said, I think you should chop this whole bit. If you read the book, you'll see that I actually put it in as a kind of little fake epigraph, because I'm like, fucking hell, that line is staying in.

This line means something to me. She said, well, you can put it in, but no one's going to read it. I'm like, I don't care. It is staying in this line means something to me she said well you can put it in but no one's going to read it i'm like i don't care it's staying in so it's actually not the first line of the novel but it is a little sort of epigraph that's when the whole book just presented itself to me which brings me to my point i think which is that having the idea is not the problem the world abounds with ideas it's judging the idea. And for me, there are two aspects to that. One is technical and one is mystical. So the technical part of judging it is, does this have the kind of DNA of a novel in it? Does the premise have conflict? Do you have a protagonist or protagonists who want something that is interesting and taps into something universal and they're going to have trouble on

the way to getting it? But then there's that mystical thing. It's like that feeling when you're on a great first date, you know, you've met this idea on Hinge and you're like, oh my God, this idea is making something happen in my stomach. But you've got to filter your own ideas and decide, has this really grabbed me? Does it have the ingredients of a story in it? And can I live with writing this for six months, a year, or two years, and day in and day out, spending time with these people in this concept? ["The World Is Our Home"]

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Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alex Murray, and I'm Leah President. And welcome to Crunchyroll Presents the Anime Effect. It's a weekly news show with the best celebrity guests and hot takes galore. So join us every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. So we've heard about how ideas can come to you, sometimes in unexpected and inexplicable ways. But how do we know if it's an idea worth pursuing? We pick up again with Sarah. Can I ask you both, because people will want to know this as well, when in the process do you know when you're looking at something that's on submission to you? If it's a good idea, if it's one of those ideas that you're going to fall in love with and you think you can sell? Is it with

the pitch? Is it with the first chapter? Is it something else? How long does it take you to make that call? So maybe you should start. Well, obviously I've been thinking about this quite a lot as a publisher and as someone who runs a publishing division, Because people come to me with their own ideas all the time. There's just this instinct where you're like, oh, tell me more or you're like, oh, don't tell me anymore, please stop talking. It's so awkward when that happens, but also interesting to see how you feel about something in that moment.

I would say that for me, I think that you can almost say anything, but it depends on how it lands. And if it lands in a way that is intriguing and you have that moment, tell me more moment, then it's obviously a good idea. If someone's recoiling from your idea, then it's not a good idea. Yeah. I love this idea about recoiling because I tell you, one of the things you have to develop as a novelist is an ability to recoil from all the ideas that people are constantly foisting on you without looking like you're recoiling. Because as soon as people know you're a writer, at least half of them will say, oh my God, I'm going to have to tell

you my life story because there's such a great book in this. And it's like being forced to sit listening to people's dreams. I'm going to be real. I'm going to be really real. I judge things based on the back of a book. When you walk into a bookshop and you pick up the book and you look at the back of it and you read the back and you put it down, that's them going, no, not for me. When the pitch comes in, I will pick it up, I will read the pitch and I will go, not for

me. People might be literally gasping in horror at this point, but that's how people read. You read the back of the book, you look at the synopsis and you go, does this sound compelling to me? No. And in part, that's also because of how people write their pitches. I'm always very much like, if you can't write a submission letter, I do not believe you'll be able to write a novel.

If you cannot condense your notion of what this is down in this one moment, when you of all people who spent time on this should know what this is, if you can't do it, then no. And the minute I saw your entry in the Lucy Cavendish Prize, Sarah, and I saw your pitch for Fannie Langton, I was like, absolutely, 100% yes. 100%. It was a yes from me as well. That is so interesting.

I was like, I immediately... Please keep feeding my inbuilt arrogance, guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's what we're here to do. That's literally the job. I'm going to say something kind of controversial here, but we love controversy, don't we? Yeah, we love it. I think you've got to be really deeply fucking arrogant. I do! Yes! I'm sorry!

Yes! Hell no! Wait, what? Are you saying that writers are deeply fuc- Well, okay. I agree. Are you happy? It's not controversial. I think honesty is important.

I'm going to, again, be real. I think this is kind of a controversy that I find in a lot of female writers, more than non-female writers. But I think because there is- Really? Yes, I do. I think there's a level of, I need permission to move forward with this. I need to outsource and make sure, am I allowed to do this? I think you just have to be really arrogant because, I'm sorry, I think our industry is based on a little level of arrogance.

Oh, because in a way, writing is a very arrogant thing to do if you think about it. Like, by its very nature. Come on, let's be real. Let's be real. You have an idea. It comes to you. You're inspired by something, whether that be a painting, whether that be an experience, whether that be a conversation, whether that be an article. You could be inspired by anything, whatever, just anything that's happening. And then you're just like, from that kernel of an idea, that flicker of a thought, you are then like characters come and then their voices and only you can hear them and you're like, I can hear them and then I'm

going to write it down. I'm going to write it down on a page and that is really, really difficult but you're like, I'm going to do this and I'm going to take myself away from all the other things that I was doing before in my life, from my friends and my family and my work and all the other things. I'm going to take myself away and I'm just, because these things in my head, I can't stop hearing them. These different people, their personalities, their drive, their ambition, all of it. At which point most people would say this is a mental illness. But it's arrogance, but not being an asshole. Arrogance is an act of faith. Arrogance is

an act of faith that what you have to say say someone needs to hear. And the problem we're going to have to dive into a little bit is when is the idea shit and you need to not be so arrogant and receive the information that this is not for you. And when do you have to keep going? This whole industry is based on a level of arrogance of being like, I like this, I think you'll like it too. Based on what? We don't have any data. My husband finds it insane. He's like, how do you guys know? And I was like, what do you mean? No, because I know. I'm not a tourist. I'm a native. I'm enmeshed in this world. We don't just read the books that are published. We read the books that don't get published. I spoke to an editor today, it's like I spend a lot of time basically reading bad books

to find the good books. And it's true, that's kind of what we do. So I think you do have to be a little bit arrogant. But an idea is a promise. It's a promise. It's I am asking a question and I'm setting up a level of expectation. And then the reader decides, have you fulfilled the promise and have you lived up to the expectation? That's where things move on.

Then it's my job to tailor what you've done to make it as attractive as possible when I send it on to Charmaine. But I mean, Charmaine, how many times do agents probably call you up and go, I've got this book and they start pitching and your eyes just go, Jesus Christ? Especially with a division and imprints like mine, it's very clear. Our messaging is very clear of what we want. I'm very vocal in the industry about what I want, and part of that is because there's a specificity to what I'm looking for. For example, I really love multi-generational narratives. I love family dramas. I'm really into, and I think I publish really well, books

that have that sweet spot between the crossover of literary and commercial. The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett is a really good example of that. I want to give that book a shout out because it's one of the best books you've ever published in my opinion. I just, it's such a good example of that. Exactly. Exactly. And that's my kind of book. It just has all of the elements and we'll go through those elements in later episodes. By the time it gets to me, then the agents know me, they know my team, they know all the editors in the industry, and they're making a list of all the people that they think would like these books. So I'm not really getting

that many books that I just think, no, immediately. And I know that they've taken the time to think about me as a reader. So I'm doing the same thing that Nell's described, which is reading the synopsis and the synopsis has just got to hit me. It's just got to hit me. That pitch letter has got to hit me. And sometimes I write to agents and I'm like, this pitch letter is so incredible. I cannot wait to read this and I'm like, this pitch letter is so incredible. I cannot wait to read this and I'm going to clear some space. But then I think the thing that happens is the living up to the promise. Did those characters do what you said?

Did that world building work in the way that you allured to when I was reading the synopsis? Bring me in and keep me there and then I'm home. It's like I just want to be lost in that story. Nothing else matters. What I really loved about being in Bookseller when I was 16 and then owning a bookshop later was the fact that you were taking people into a different world for eight to 12 hours of their lives. And I just felt that was such a huge responsibility. I think all my friends were going off and doing big jobs and earning lots of money. And I was like, I just want to work in a bookshop,

and I just want to help people find a different way into a different world. And books are the best way of doing that. When you think about those eight to 12 hours, then you have to be quite confident that this story is going to keep you there and that these characters are going to keep you there and the world is going to keep you there. I take that experience of being a bookseller and use it in my practice as a publisher and

as an MD. The focus of all of that is that kernel of an idea that you are going to be illuminated by the world that's on offer, on promise from that blur. And when a writer gets that right, it's magic. Absolute magic. And then when that happens on the page, it all has to be woven together. There's a lot going on. When you read a synopsis and you're like, it's very clear to me what this writer wants to do. I've got goosebumps just talking

about it right now. Like so intoxicating. When you're just like, I am in. What are they going to do next? What are they going to say next? Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more. Hello, I'm Elizabeth Day. You might know me as the creator and host of the How to Fail more, tell me more. agent and a powerhouse publisher, this 12-week masterclass will take you right through from developing an idea to nailing the plot. If you want to get all episodes at once and completely ad-free, subscribe now. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jesse Tyler Ferguson, host of the podcast, Dinner's On Me. I take some of my favorite people out to dinner, including, yes, my modern family co-stars,

like Ed O'Neill. I had friends in Organized Cry. Sofia Vergara. Why do you want to be corruptible? Julie Bowen. I used to be the crier. And Aubrey Anderson-Emmons. I was so damn bad for the middle of Miranda when I was like eight.

You can listen to Dinners on Me wherever you get your podcasts. We've spoken about how an idea not only needs to have promise, but it needs to live up to that promise in the execution. And we've also chatted about how authors need to have a little arrogance to keep going, just a little mind. So now we're going to look at which ideas are for you and whether some ideas are best left for other people to pursue. Here's Nell. Can I ask a controversial question? Another controversial question. Miss controversy.

I know, I'm Miss controversy. So we're trying to help people write their stories and you're like, and chills violence. That's my industry today. Please God, when I go, let that be part of my eulogy. Please God. And it depends on whether or not it's true, babe. It depends on whether or not it's true. I feel like for most women, most days it is true, whether we show it or not. But I'm going to ask a question about the moral quandary around ideas, because I've been thinking about this a lot since we're going to do this podcast. I loved memoirs of a geisha when it first came out. I loved that novel. I adored that novel. I still love that novel.

Yes, I know where you're going with this. Of course you do, babe. Oh my God, she's going there. But I'm going to go there. But at the time, it's written by Arthur Golden and he was sued by a geisha who said that he had used events from her life to put an insert in chapters in the book. And he paid an undisclosed amount of money. It's hard because I still think that book is a fantastic book and it opened me up to an entire world and culture I had

no idea about. I was like 15 years old when I first came to it. It was thoroughly illuminating in every way, shape or form to me. Now, my question is when an idea is meant for you or not meant for you. And there will be people out there who will think, okay, I've got this idea, can I write it? Should I write it? And I guess that's the question. When is it can and should and when is the answer? No.

When is there a moral center where it's like you should not touch that idea? Yeah, this is a question that writers talk about a lot amongst themselves. And I've actually noticed through hearing from some of my writer friends about this, that agents and editors will steer people away from ideas as well, which is interesting to me that there is this sense that when you're being advised about the sort of market, I know Charmaine doesn't like that word, but you know, will this sell? That part of the decision making process is, are people going to accept you as the teller of this story? And I guess I have two answers as a writer first and then as a human being second and they are different answers as a writer.

Of course, I believe anyone should be able to tell any story because that's what I want. When you were talking about Memoirs of a Geisha, I was thinking about Sacred Hunger by Barry Hunsworth, which I absolutely love. And it was one of the most sort of illuminating books about the experience of enslaved people that I had read at the time. I think I read it in my 20s, maybe early 30s, written by a white man. There are examples of this being done well, and it is essential for people to be free to write what they want. That's my writer answer. But my answer as a human being is more complicated because nothing can be separated from the question of power. And I think that

the question of power really affects how people respond to who is writing what. It's just this imposition of power, including power in relation to storytelling. Because let's be honest about this now. I am a black writer and it has been a thorn in my side since the day I tiptoed into the publishing industry, that there are these narrow expectations about what I can write. You know, everyone expects me to write about race with a capital R, but then white men write about everything. And that for me is a kind of metaphor for who dominates everything in the world, who has got dominion over not just the animals and everything else, but the words as well. And if you choose to use that power to then inhabit historical suffering, I do think that's a bit difficult. If you

choose to do it, you've got to examine your motives for doing it and you have to be prepared for, I think, engaging in people who respond to what you have done with your notions of their suffering. I think that is the very minimum sort of moral contract. If you can't do that, then I think you've got no business writing in that vein. Kit DeVall, who's a writer I really admire, I think wrote about this and she'd said something like, don't dip your pen in someone else's blood. That's a sort of golden rule. Me reading a white person on the topic of being black, then there are all kinds of things that come to that scenario that have to do with the question of power. That's a very long way of saying there is no straightforward answer to it.

For me, it's different in my job, again, because my focus for the division is around inclusion. I'm not getting submissions from people who don't have a history or culture or lived experience that is shared with the protagonists or narrative of their book. But this idea of who gets to tell the story is my big thing. Coming from the Caribbean, for example, we come from 450 years of slavery, and then we come from 250 years of colonialism. For all of that, and before that, as African peoples, we have been telling stories. Those stories were passed through enslaved peoples, through colonized peoples, and then to the shores of Britain when we came here as part of my grandparents' generation in the 50s as part of the Empire Windrush and the call to rebuild post-war Britain from

the Queen. The idea that the only way that you can tell a story is through this very narrow understanding of the 17th, 18th century European novel is really, really reductive. Bernadine Ivaristo talks incredibly eloquently on this, saying that when people say to her, are you still going to write stories about race? She's like, but there's so much to say. There's so much to say, you haven't even heard it. It's all about race. That reminds me of that interviewer who asked Toni Morrison that question. It's just such a misguided question.

So the question was, why do you just write about black people? Yeah, something like that. Or are you going to write about white characters next time? It's so misguided. And just to finish on that, I think for me, the point is, is whilst we're making these shifts in the industry to ensure that we have this inclusion behind the scenes, then what we want is for people to be coming with their ideas and really digging deep and really getting those narratives on the page and telling us about what we haven't yet heard. It's really important that we're even doing this pod class. I hope empowering people that your ideas are valid, but what's required is the vulnerability to understand that it might not be right. And that doesn't mean that you can't write.

What it means is that it might not be what can sell. It might not have as big an audience as you might have imagined, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't keep trying and keep writing. That brings me to one of my favorite quotes ever, which is by Elie Wiesel. He said, God made man because he loves stories. I love that quote so much. I think that is it in a nutshell. We are the stories that we build for ourselves, the stories that we tell other people, and then the stories that we see cultivated in a mass cultural platform. And we're going to leave it there for part one. What better place to pause than on that

quote, God made man because he loved stories. And there are so many stories to tell that we're making this into a two-part episode. In part two, you'll hear about whether there's any such thing as an original idea, how you know when an idea is ready to share with others, and there'll be a listener exercise to help you get your creative juices flowing. Plus, the perils of perfectionism and Sara's orgasm metaphor. Join us next time, until then, goodbye. Thank you so much for listening and please do remember to like and subscribe and share a link with everyone you know. This is a Daylight Productions and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast.