The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.
Here’s what we talked about in this episode:
Emma returned triumphantly after months away … but only for the first 20 minutes. She opened a really interesting and seldom-talked-about topic: The fact that sometimes things really suck as a writer … and here’s how we deal. (NOTE: We’ll unpack this issue more next week if people are interested … so, you know, let us know if you are.)
We talked a bit about backlist and advertising, and standing up for the books we’ve already written.
Then a bit about imposter syndrome, being vulnerable, and more of that downer stuff. (Writing can be awesome, but it’s not always sunshine and roses, people!
After Emma had to leave, Bill and I talked about “the writer’s unique fingerprint” — how repeated words and standard “safe home base” scenes become an individual writer’s DNA, so that readers can easily recognize their favorite writers’ style.
Lastly, we talked about telling stories in person. Do good verbal storytellers make good writers, and what do you do when your best verbal stories just kind of stop landing like they used to?
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