Life Kit - Remembering Petra Mayer: Everyone's a 'real writer.' Here's how to write that book

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Beloved books editor Petra Mayer believed that all you have to do to be a 'real writer' is to write. We're re-running this episode in honor of Petra who died on Saturday. We hope Petra's generosity, wit and passion for story will help shut down those distracting voices and honor the stories you have to share. (This episode originally ran in April 2020.)Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey LifeKit listeners, Andi Tegel here. Today we've got an extra special episode for you hosted by Petra Mayer. Petra was a books editor for the Arts Desk here at NPR, and also a wonderful friend to me and to LifeKit. And her absence will be felt deeply by the book world and by everyone else who was lucky enough to know her. Petra was fiercely intelligent, as quick-witted as she was kind, and exceedingly generous, with her enthusiasm, her nerdistry, and her time. Please enjoy this episode and join us in honoring the supreme talent and the vibrant, colorful character that was Petra Mayer. I'm not a real writer. How am I ever going to find the time to write? I mean, I've only ever written fanfic, and I'm afraid of getting in trouble for writing something outside my own experience. And who cares what I have to say? I'm just not a real writer.

It's kind of a truism that everyone has a book in them, right? We all have some kind of story to tell, but it's equally true that a lot of us have those crummy little inner voices telling us it's never going to happen. I don't know, I'm one of those people. Hi, I'm Petra Mayer. I'm an editor at NPR Books, and for this installment of Life Kit, I decided to talk to some people who've both been there and done that, about how to shut those little voices up and get started on your book. Because as we're going to hear from today's guests, all it takes to be a real writer is to do some writing, no matter what you're writing about. Now, I bet a lot of

you out there have said to yourselves, I'm going to write my book someday. And someday tends not to happen in life. You know, people, when they say I want to write a novel someday, they're waiting for the perfect time. They're waiting when they have maybe more money or, or maybe they're retired or maybe their kids have left the house. There's all sorts of like, you know, perfect writing conditions just rarely present themselves. And so you have to create the condition to write. If you've been thinking about finally writing your book, but it just seems too big, too new, too scary, or you're waiting for that perfect moment, that bolt of inspiration, maybe a sign from the heavens that says write your darn book.

In this episode of Life Kit, we've got some helpful advice to get you going. Now before we get into the deep stuff, let's start with the most basic thing, our very first takeaway. Carve out some time to write, and then start writing. I'm betting most of you don't have, you know, like a perfect sunny nook where you can settle in with a cup of coffee, your favorite pen, and your lucky troll doll and spend a few hours cranking out a chapter of the next great American novel. But what almost everyone has is time confetti. Time confetti? What? That's Grant Faulkner, the executive director of National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo, and he wants you to think about all those little absent-minded moments, the little blanks in your day when you're not doing anything.

Instead of using these moments to take out your phone, scroll through some headlines that are going to depress you, use that 5 to 15 minutes to write and you can actually get a lot done. Faulkner also, of course, recommends that you sign up for NaNoWriMo. One of the things that makes NaNoWriMo so successful for people in general is that we lower the bar of writing. You know, so many people operate with a sense of perfectionism and they let their inner editor get in the way of their words and the page. And NaNoWriMo is all about setting a goal and a deadline. We say a goal and a deadline is a creative midwife. And that helps open the gates to your creativity and lets you get the words out without trying to make them all perfect.

One way to do that? If you've got a chunk of time confetti, try a word sprint. You get a prompt to write about. Faulkner says you don't have to have one, but it helps. And that prompt could be anything. A favorite family picture, a phrase, even just a single word. NaNoWriMo actually has a Twitter account devoted to word sprints that offers prompts like something unreal or waited too long. And you write for a duration of time, maybe five minutes, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes.

And you write really energetically and strenuously. And again, you banish your inner editor and just let the words flow. You try to write without your pen leaving the page or your fingers leaving your your laptop keyboard he says in the hundreds of sprints he's held over the years he has never once seen someone not be able to write there are stories in the cauldron of your brain just waiting to come out and you just have to create a little crack in the door for them to come out and And so these word sprints really, they are that crack in the door. Elizabeth Acevedo is one of the writers who found inspiration in NaNoWriMo. You might know her name.

She won the National Book Award in 2018 for her young adult novel in verse, The Poet X. And her new book is Clap When You Land. During the school year, she's on the road a lot, speaking to students. She says that when she has to talk to hundreds of teenagers a day, she often doesn't have the energy or time to write. But when she's home... I wake up at nine, I sit at the laptop for about an hour, and I'll put my phone in a different room, I set a timer,

and it's like for this hour you are just writing. So it's almost like sprint. Acevedo says she writes most of her manuscripts that way. She'll do a sprint, get up and take a walk, have a snack, sit back down and see how far she can get in another 30 minutes or so. And she works well with deadlines, like the ones writers set for themselves for NaNoWriMo, because they keep her from overthinking things. Here I am. I have to just get through this. And it doesn't matter if it's good or not. I have to meet my word count.

And in general, that tends to be a rule that I've found is really helpful. I don't revise as I'm writing. I don't go back and reread pages. I kind of just plow ahead. Just plow ahead. Words of wisdom. And that's our first takeaway. Carve out some time in your day to write, and then just plow ahead. But I hear you asking, how do I plow ahead? In which direction should I point this metaphorical plow? Should I have every plot point mapped out? Should I know every nuance of every character? Should I know how it's all going to work? Spoiler alert, no. Which brings us to our second takeaway. Once you get going, there's really no one right way to write your book. People come to us and some people are scared and some people are planners. We call them planners. They'll meticulously outline their

novels ahead of time and other people are pantsers. They just jump in and wing it. We also have a term that is very unique to NaNoWriMo, plantsers. And those are people who are in between planning and pantsing. That's where I find myself. Yeah, there are many different ways to write a novel. And we're not prescriptive about it. We just want to encourage people to find their own creative process. The writer George R.R. Martin says something similar.

He divides writers into architects who plan and draw up blueprints and gardeners who plant seeds and see what pops up. But really, you could be both. Why not plant a beautiful garden and build a summer house in the middle of it? Okay, I got a little carried away with that metaphor there, but here's the thing. Are you a planner? Are you a pantser? Are you a gardener? Are you an architect? Who knows? Certainly you don't have to know when you're starting out. Just try something and see what works for you. But no matter how you go about it, says Elizabeth Acevedo, creating isn't easy. Maybe you missed your goal yesterday and you've got double the work

today. And those days suck. But also, I don't know, I think it's important to recognize sometimes that like, you can't ghost your characters, you have to show up for them or they won't show up for you. That's it. Just show up for your characters. Doesn't matter how you do it. Just be there. And that same flexibility applies to nonfiction too. I called up my former NPR colleague Kat Chow, who's writing a memoir about grief and identity called Seeing Ghosts. Chow says she's a planner. She plotted out the direction of her book and the questions she wanted to answer. I think that memoir, I mean, it's so narrative driven too. So I feel like for a lot of forms of book writing that are

narrative driven, trying to figure out the best flow for what comes next in the book is, I mean, it's a creative process still. And so I think giving yourself this flexibility and this space to be really vulnerable or to really go for the thing that scares you writing wise, or the challenging piece of your book, you got to kind of like gear yourself up for it and get yourself in this emotional space to write those words. I think that's kind of the core of it right there. Once you're in the emotional space to write, it doesn't matter how you do it. And that's our second takeaway. There's just no one true way to write your book. So we've talked about making

time, setting goals, and all the different ways that you can write. But there's something else important. So here comes our third takeaway. You need other people. Because no matter how romantic it seems, you are not up there in the garret by candlelight scribbling away alone in your genius. I mean, you know, maybe you are, but in that case, you're probably already beyond what we're trying to do in this podcast. Kat Chow says her memoir, Seeing Ghosts, has been a hard book to write. It's nonfiction, but it's also about my family. It's about grief. But sometimes there are just so many distractions.

Like, I'd rather walk my dog. I would rather, you know, get on the phone or watch an episode of like Tiger King or something. And when she was really stuck, if walking the dog or organizing the closet didn't help, Chow says she'd call up a friend with a different way of thinking. Or I would talk to another friend who's writing a book. And it would kind of help me reset or have to think through the issue with my book. And I would be able to come back and feel like I'd had a reset. And you don't just have to stick to your friends. Reach out to people who are also writing books, any issues that you're having with your book.

Chow says that if she's just read something really great, she'll flip to the acknowledgement. And I just love reading who these writers are thanking because oftentimes it's really thoughtful people, or it's books that have inspired them or helped them be better writers, or kind of fellowships or writing centers that have provided support. And there's an entire writing community out there meant to basically support writers in this big journey of writing a book. And if you're looking for that kind of community, NaNoWriMo is a good place to start. They have a lot of local groups that meet every month, or you can check with your local library to see what kind of writing events they host. And once you've got a good group around you, they can be accountability partners.

They can jolt you out of a rut, they can check in on you, they can call you to see if you've done your sprints, they can read your pages, they can hold your hand when you need it. That's our third takeaway. Find a group of people, writers you do know, writers you wish you knew, that'll help guide you through this intense experience. You don't have to be alone. But did you hear what Kat Chow just said about writers and the books that inspired them? Because beyond the people you know, you also need a group of writers you admire, whether or not they're, you know, people you could just call up the way Holden Caulfield wishes he could call up Ring Lardner. And that brings us to our fourth

takeaway. You gotta read. I spend a lot of my day editing the freelance writers who review books for NPR.org. And when I'm working with someone new, there's one thing I always tell them. I mean, apart from no passive voice. And that's read. Reading helps you figure out what you like, and it helps you refine your own voice on the page. But sometimes I get a little pushback. You know, I'll hear something like, I don't want to read other writers because what if it influences me? Influence doesn't mean that you're a copier. That's Kay Tempest Bradford. She's a sci-fi and fantasy author and a writing teacher. Influence doesn't mean that, like, you are not you. You're not uniquely you. No matter what you do, you're always influenced by something, right?

Because that's how culture works. Your voice is always your own because it's coming from you. But reading good writers can help you make your own voice better. Kat Chow says she finds it helpful to read about how other writers think about their craft. Earlier, we heard her say she likes to look at the acknowledgments in a good book, but she does a little more too. She'll read interviews and background information on the author. This shows sort of how sometimes I can be a little bit type A, but I'll copy and paste the inspirational quotes from these interviews and put them in a Word doc or Google doc. And

just having all of their thoughts on craft specifically or what it means to write about family or what it means to report on XYZ topic is really thoughtful and it kind of helps bolster me on days that are harder. By the way, both Kat Chow and Tempest Bradford have some great reading suggestions for budding writers. You can check those out at npr.org slash life kit. Because remember, that's our fourth takeaway. You gotta read. So now you've got your building blocks. We've given you some tips and tools on how to write. Now it's time to think about what you're writing. Are you the person to tell this story? Are these the characters you need to include? And that brings us to our fifth takeaway. You will screw up, so learn to take

criticism gracefully. Beyond just keeping you on your deadlines, having a writing group or an accountability partner is helpful in another really important way. They can provide perspectives that aren't your own. And they can tell you when you've gotten something wrong. And you will get something wrong. Because you are a squishy human being and not a perfect novel-producing artificial intelligence. Maybe your plot sags in places. Maybe your prose is clunky.

Maybe you read the beats in high school and now your inner Jack Kerouac just will not shut up. And this is just me, your friendly neighborhood editor speaking. There are better influences out there. But I digress. Maybe your character depictions are kind of cardboard or stereotypical or even racist and you didn't do the work to make them real people. Whatever it is that's wrong, you're going to get feedback and it won't all good, and you want to be able to receive it gracefully and learn from it. Which is something to think about, especially right now. Because the publishing industry has always had a serious diversity problem, things have really been blowing up recently over issues of cultural appropriation, of white writers profiting off the stories of other cultures. And that leads to the kind of huffy, bordering on bad faith flounce that you see in some corners of social media.

Well, I'm white, so I guess I can't write about anything. It's not that people are going to yell at you or be mad if you write characters who are outside of your culture, outside of your race or other major identity trait. What people yell about and what starts causing fights is when writers do it badly. That's Tempest Bradford again. She teaches workshops through writingtheother.com aimed at helping people not do it badly. The first thing to do, she says, is ask yourself why you want to include a particular character in this story. And sometimes the answer is, I want more representation. Everybody says there should be more representation. I'm like, okay, so I'm going to make sure that my book has more representation of people of color, of people with disabilities, of people from the LGBTQ spectrum. And that's actually fine. But sometimes the impetus is because people are like, well,

I want to have, you know, this character of color because I heard that they're trendy. And that's, let's not do that. It's not that you should never write outside your own experience, Bradford says, but you should know why you're doing it. And you should make sure that the people from whatever group you're writing about have had a chance to tell their own stories for themselves before you jump in. You can write that thing, but then after you write it, get some sensitivity readers and some other people who are from that group to talk to you about it and to either explore other ways that you can, you know, have this character, other ways that you can tell this story that is respectful of the people that you're trying to portray.

Writing the other is a collaborative process, she says. It involves research, discussion, bringing other people into your work. And despite all that, you might still get something wrong. I mean, we all make mistakes. Which is why workshops and writing groups are actually really good, because if you get a good one, you can learn how to like, accept criticism and sit with it and, and whatever. And obviously the criticism that you get from your writing group, I hope is not the same kind of criticism that you're getting from Twitter. I really, I really hope. Learning to accept criticism with grace and humility, whether it's from your writing group, or God forbid, angry folks on Twitter is a part of the writing life that people don't often

think about. So that's our fifth takeaway. Don't be afraid to write outside your own experience, but don't be afraid to take criticism when you screw something up. Don't be afraid is actually a pretty good thought in general, and it's kind of the final takeaway. I want to go back to something I was thinking about way back at the beginning of this episode. That dumb, depressing, and my god, persistent thought, I could never write a whole book. I can't crank out 2,000 words a day. I'm not a real writer.

Today's guests had some thoughts about that. I think that someone who is storytelling from a place of urgency and is attempting an original way of documenting the human experience, I think that's a writer. Let's hear it another way. If you write, you're a real writer. And I think you need to embrace the term being a real writer and call yourself a real writer and believe in that because that will give you power on the page. Still don't believe me? Anytime somebody's like, well, you're not a real writer unless you X, I'm going to say that they're full of hooey unless they're saying, well, you're not a real writer unless you write. And I'm like, okay,

like that, that's the one that I'll accept because you just got to write. That's our last takeaway. Whether it's poetry, fan fiction, letters to yourself, even a description of two squirrels fighting in the yard. If you write, if you tell a story, you are a real writer. That's all you got to do. Just write. And you'll find yourself, little by little, writing your book. so just to recap takeaway one make some time to write and then start writing takeaway two there is no one true way to write your book takeaway three find yourself a community that can help you on the journey. Takeaway four, read, read, and then read some more.

Takeaway five, don't be afraid to write outside your experience, but learn to take criticism gracefully when you screw up. And takeaway six, last but certainly not least, if you write, you are a real writer. But here's a thing. I don't know what the world will look like when you're hearing this, but I bet one thing will be the same. We'll still be stressed out, probably exhausted, maybe not really feeling like getting in touch with our creative selves, no matter how

beneficial that might be. So if that's the case, be gentle with yourself. Your story will still be there when you're ready to tell it. For more NPR Life Kit, check out our other episodes. We've got an episode on how to read more, another on how to appreciate poetry, and lots more. You can find those at npr.org slash life kit. And if you love Life Kit and you want more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash Life Kit newsletter. And here's always a completely random tip. This one's from listener George McMahon. Hi, I just read Andrew LeMond's piece on poetry and thought that if people want help getting into poetry, there's a free poetry app from the Poetry Foundation, which allows you to spin topics and search for poems.

It's amazing. It's a wonderful way to get introduced to a lot of different poetry. If you've got a good tip, leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823 or email us at lifekit at npr.org. This episode was produced by Andy Tagle. Megan Kane is the managing producer, Beth Donovan, the senior editor, our digital editor is Beck Harlan, and our editorial assistant is Claire Schneider. I'm Petra Mayer. Thanks for listening.