 Good afternoon and welcome everyone to Writing Recharge with Paulie Campbell. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And before I introduce our speaker, I just wanted to thank you all for attending, especially those of you who chose to support this event by paying a little something. Now more than ever, the people support counts because it helps the Institute provide more free events that help people grow as writers. If you've never been to the Institute, let me tell you a little bit about it. We are an independent membership community founded in 1854 that houses a wonderful library. It is in fact the oldest design to serve the general public in California, not just mechanics. We're also a cultural event center and host scores of events and activities like this a year, many of which are free. We're also a chess club, which is the oldest in the United States. And it really is ground zero for the Bay Area chess world. And if you love stuff like this, I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It is only $120 a year. And with that you help support our contribution to San Francisco's history, culture and literary scene. Now this event was produced in partnership with the San Francisco writers conference, which we work with closely here at the mechanics Institute to provide writers activities and classes and opportunities for literary readings, stuff like that. So today our speaker is Polly Campbell, who is the author of you recharged, which is a book that will help you beat fatigue, amp up your energy and enjoy life again. She also is the host of a podcast called simply said how to live well, do good and be happy. She's also a regular blogger with psychology today and writer whose articles have appeared in various print and online publications. I'm going to put her website, which links to her podcast in the chat space, and also connect you with a local bookstore that carries you recharged. And it is available at any local bookstore by to order. Now before we get started we have kind of a big audience for meeting, and there will be plenty of time after Polly's presentation to answer questions, but I want you to put them in the chat space, as they occur to you. So if she's done presenting, I will call on you to, to ask the question directly. Okay, thank you all for coming and welcome Polly. Thanks so much for coming to virtually to San Francisco. Yeah, I wish I was there for real but this is awesome thank you all for coming. Please turn on your camera. I like to have the exchange and yes we will get the questions and stuff toward the end or comments or whatever so thank you for being a part of this I'm, I'm excited. I'm excited you can see my even my hair is excited I, I prepped I put on hard clothes. I did a little makeup. This is like a big deal. So thank you for being a part of it this afternoon. You know, anytime I have a chance to talk about writing, I get fired up. In fact, I like to talk about writing sometimes more than I like to write. The notion is romantic right we're going to sit down and and work on a piece of nonfiction an article or a blog or we're going to create this thriller mystery or a romance or we're going to research our next literary novel literary fiction. And we sit down to do it. And it feels like slamming like a fly flying into the glass right we just keep hitting over and over and over and not getting to where we want to go in the right. I have been there I've been a professional writing meaning I paid my bills as a writer for 28 years. Some years better than other years I've done all kinds of writing fiction and nonfiction, but I have published nonfiction my whole career written several books and articles and so forth. And there are times when I sit down, and I can't get the writing to work. I don't believe in writer's block. I'm not one of those that think we get stuck that way. I think creatives are never at a loss for an idea I mean think about it. Last time you, you know, went on vacation, it seems like forever ago, or had an experience during the pandemic, an interaction that was unique. I imagine even when you're not writing you're thinking about it. You're, you're identifying possibilities for poems or article ideas or characters in your fiction from an overheard conversation. I think we can all write. What I think happens to us is we lose our tolerance for bad writing, right, because we can't all write well, and even the days we do write well the very next day, we might write crap, right, that's the reality of being a writer. When Anne Lamott talks about, you know, shitty first drafts, I'm telling you, shitty 25th drafts, right, it happens. So while I don't think we get blocked, I think writers lose their tolerance for bad writing. I think we hit these walls where we feel like our focus is off in every article we're writing, or we are dull. But the words we're putting down, don't come together. They don't make sense. We lose the angle we're going for or the thread of what we want to communicate. And that feels icky. And that feels, that's a technical term, by the way, icky. That feels icky. That feels exhausting. That feels, for me, insecure. After all these years, I can't even write a decent sentence anymore. I'll never write again, right? It becomes all very dramatic and stressful. And as I go through that cycle, it becomes harder to write anything at all. So part of recharging your writing, and part of amping up your prose and getting excited about the writing you're doing again, is to learn how to tolerate that discomfort a little bit. Because you're not blocked. You're just not going to write well all the time. And it's still writing. It still matters. It's still how you need to keep going on. The times when I feel most dull and drab in my work are the times when everything around me feels harder, too. Maybe I've had an issue or a challenge with my 15-year-old. I've been quarantined with a 15-year-old daughter. That's been an interesting experience and good in a lot of ways. But we're doing that. There's been ups and downs with my income this last year and other years prior to this, too. My husband is now working at home. I've had health issues. All these things come into our lives. You know what I'm talking about, because they come into your lives, too, right? This is life. And it edges into the writing, because when I go to work, I bring me there. Writing is such a personal experience. Whether we're writing fiction or nonfiction, poems or blog posts, it originates from here. We are inventors. This is the commodity, us, our ideas, right? This is where it comes from. So when life feels more challenging or more dull or we're burned out by the routine, it's no surprise to me that's also when my writing feels harder and poor and bad. And that's when I want to quit. And that's when you need to keep going. But I found some ways to make that a little easier for us, because I had to figure it out in my own life. Several years ago, probably four years ago now, I was finding myself waking up every morning and counting the hours until I could go back to bed. And I would sit up, sit on the edge of the bed and think, oh, okay, 15 hours to go, or whatever it was, right? And I go out to the couch. The house was cold and winter in Oregon. I mean, I don't know if it was winter, but that's how I remember it, right? Because it was a dark time. I went out, sat on the couch and had my coffee. And I had no energy for the day ahead. And I thought, what is this? I'm 50 years old and I have on paper a great life. I'm very fortunate. I'm married to a nice guy. My daughter is healthy. I have a house with heat, right? The basics were covered. And I was doing my dream job. It was 28 years ago that I left a stable income, first as a journalist and later in public relations, to tackle this writing career head on. And it's worked for me. I've worked hard to make it happen. So I'm living the dream. And I sat there and felt ashamed. Because I had created this whole life for myself. And I was bored by it. It was drab and dull. And my writing was drab and dull too. And I didn't even want to do it anymore. This was a loss because my whole life, I was one of those nerdy kids that knew the minute that I could read that I was born to be a writer. But that was my goal in life. That was my purpose in life. And now I wake up at 50 years old after having had books published and articles published and these good things come together in my life and I didn't even want to do it anymore. I didn't know what I was going to do. And I sat and stewed about it for several days. I felt ashamed that I created all this, this lifestyle that others are working hard to make work. And I wasn't enjoying it anymore. And I decided life was too short to live that way. I wasn't going to do it. There's not enough time for us to live a life that is unhappy. Sure, there's going to be challenge. But we can find our way through those challenges. And that's where my book, the recent book, you recharge came from. It's about how I restored myself to myself, my physical health, lost weight, got stronger, my mental health, and my writing career. Because to me, those are all related. If you're a writer, you know what I'm talking about. It's all the intersect. There's not a time that I can't write. So when I didn't want to do it anymore, I felt afraid. So I got to work trying to figure that out. And I think if you are intolerant to these kind of discomforts, then maybe it's time not to write. Because no matter how much experience you have, no matter how good you are, there's always going to be somebody who doesn't like what you've written. There's always going to be a day that it's hard to come to work. There's always going to be a voice of reason or expertise that can help you make your piece better. Writing isn't something we master. It's something we experience, right? We create and shape and mold. And in the process, we create and shape and mold our lives too. And that's why I do it. And when I came back to the why, the work got easier. The work began to recharge. And the energy came back into myself and my career. And I'm going to give you some specifics as we go along today. And then if you have questions, we can talk about those too as we go up. Because it's really hard to think about going forward and recharging when you're stuck on the couch every morning in the dark, feeling sorry for yourself and bored, right? How does a middle-aged mother with chronic illness, I live with rheumatoid arthritis and gray hair, get the energy when she has zero to revamp and recharge her life? It starts with baby steps. It starts with the easiest, simplest thing, because that's all I could do at that time. And what I discovered along the way is not only do I have greater vitality in my entire life, but I'm seeing my work in a way that I haven't for a very long time. Am I enthused about it? I'm exhilarated. I'm excited. Does that mean I'm writing good stuff? Oh, no, no, no, no. Sometimes I have the skills to get there. I work hard, right? But this is the thing. If I can do it, all of you can do it. This is for all of us, right? But the place to start, the place I started those cloudy, cold mornings was to figure out your why. Because if you're motivated by external rewards, money, fame, good reviews, it may not be enough to keep you going through the icky-dose. It may not be enough. It wasn't for me, right? What I had to get back to is why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. And the conclusion I came to is that writing was the thing that grounded me. It was the thing that allows me to learn and grow and process these big feelings in my life and to experience the world in a new way. It also provides meaning because when we write and we share that writing in our books or articles or blog posts or poems or screenplays, when we share that writing fiction or nonfiction, it changes the world. I'm idealistic enough to think it's true, but I've seen it happen time and time again. I am not kidding. We inspire others. When we process our experience, we become a translator. We write in beautiful language, in clear ideas and focus sentences. What others want to know too, what they're trying to learn about themselves and their experience, what they need to know to be inspired to learn, to grow, to feel. And that's what drives me. It's the grounding. It's the chance to connect and learn through the writing with my own life and then hopefully inspire and entertain others. That's a pretty big why for me. And what I realized during that time when the work in my life felt so dull and drab, there was nothing wrong. It was just stuck. I'd come off this experience where things had gone well. I'd published books and I'd been on the fly traveling around in the days that we could travel. And I had all these big experiences. I had a little girl at the time. So parenting was a different job than it is now. And there was a lot going on in my life. So when things settled, when I finally hit a place, a plateau where I could experience that and feel that, I settled into the corner of the couch. And for a while, it felt really good. Ah, I made it and paid my bills this month or I got a good review where my daughter's thriving in school. And this felt good. I was tired, right? I was tired of hearing myself talk. I was tired of hearing myself reading my own writing and I got really comfortable and that's good. We need times like that. But what I realized on those darker mornings was that that comfort all of a sudden wasn't as comfortable anymore. I became bored. I had stopped engaging with life in a way that allowed me to write and allowed the fun in. Now this all happened a number of years ago, but I ended up writing, you recharge this book during the pandemic. And that was another time where I needed to actually draw on these skills again and again. They work for me. The things I'm going to share today, some of them from the book are the things that I use every day of my life. And that's all I write about. If it doesn't work for me, then I'm not going to share it. I want to be the guinea pig because I needed to get myself out of this rut. And I needed to decide what that was going to look like and how that was going to happen. So I figured out my why. What is your why? What is your why? What are you motivated by? Why do you sit down and write? Why if nobody was expecting you to meet a deadline, if nobody ever was going to read your stuff, if you were never going to get paid for it, would you write any home? And why? When you know your why, post it above your desk, and the next day you're writing poorly, the next day you feel stuck, look at the why, and you just keep writing on going. Because I'm not saying that after 30 years I write well all the time. I'm just saying I still write. I don't write well. Sometimes it takes hundreds of times over a science. But I know why I'm here to do it, and I keep going. After you clear on that, and after you've decided whether you're going to pursue your work or you're going to quit, which is okay, I quit lots of things, gives me more resources to do the things I want to do that are meaningful to me. So if this is no longer it, or if this isn't it right now, that's fine. No shame, right? No shame. But if you're going to continue with the writing, the very next thing I did was I decided that a good day was going to be any day that I wrote. I wasn't going to worry about outcome. For the first time in 25 years I wasn't going to worry if I could sell a piece, if I could publish a piece, if anybody would read it. Now I'd never done that. I embarked on my career as a full-time writer when I was still pretty young. I was 25 years old, and I was my sole support for 12 years. I had to figure it out. And that developed a lot of discipline and a lot of habits that had me hustling, writing everything from public relations, press releases, to speeches, to websites, to corporate brochures, white papers, until I moved into my real specialty in what I really wanted to do and wrote magazine articles and books. It took me a while to get there. And I developed the habits that needed to keep the business going. But those weren't always the same habits that needed to keep the creativity going. So I needed to step back and move back to what's important about writing for me. It's the grounding, right? It's process over outcome. It's the process of writing and researching and revising and editing and thinking and structuring that matters to me. Now if you do those things, the outcome will take care of itself. You're going to get a finished piece that can be workshopped, possibly sold, posted on your website as a blog, on medium or other platforms. Right now is a great time to be a writer. There's lots of places to get your stuff read. But don't start there, right? What is your process? What drives you during the day? How can you sit down and get to that? That's the first start of recharging for me. I'm going to do it. I'm just going to do the writing. And I'll give you some tips on that, how I did that in a minute, to go from a place where I didn't want to write anything back to this place. A number of years ago when I was fairly new to the profession, I got an assignment from Magazine Family Circle. And it was a fancy, glossy magazine at the time. It was a huge market for a writer like me in those days when I was young and I had very few clips. And that was one of the bestselling magazines at the time. And the article was about this group of women out in Yoder, Oregon, I live in Oregon, who made a potluck dinner for the town once a month. And it was a little village out on this farmland. And all these people from all over would come. And these women who were all in their 80s, one of them, the youngest one, was like 75. The oldest was close to 100. And they've been doing this for years. They would make turkeys and meatloaves and potatoes. And if people could come and buy their lunch or bring something to share, that was fine. If people didn't have the food or the money spare, that was fine. The town opened the meal to everyone. And they'd been doing this for decades. Their mothers had done it and their grandmothers had done it. And that was the article for Family Circle. When I got the assignment after pitching the query, I was so fired up. I couldn't believe it. Look at me. I've made it, right? You never made it. But it was a great opportunity. It was good money. And I was grateful for that too. And I thought, oh, people are going to love this. My mom is going to be able to buy this article on the newsstand. And all this big fancy stuff was going to happen, right? So go out and spend days with these women. And I go to a meal and I do all this research. And I write this article, send it off to the editors. Fortunately, they liked the article. And they slated it to run in the November magazine. Six months later, that was six months from my deadline. So by the time the article came out, I didn't even realize it. I wasn't even thinking about it, right? I didn't tell people because I wasn't thinking that it was November and it's time for this Family Circle article to come out. The way I found out about it is one of my mom's friends bought it on the newsstand and saw an article by Polly Campbell. And they were excited and supportive. And that was great. But what that taught me really early on was it's not the book that matters. It's the making of the book that matters, right? Now, the book, perhaps you'll read, you recharge, or another one of your favorite books. And the book will matter to you. I read lots of books that have changed my life. It's a big deal, a book, I think. It's the way I learned my life and my imagination's peak. But for a writer, it's the process of writing. That weighs heavier than the outcome. And when you think about it like that, it's easier to recharge. Because then there's no pressure, right? If you sit down and do your work every day, you're going to have words on the page. You don't have to judge them right now as good or bad. You don't have to know that. You don't have to decide that. In fact, one of the greatest tips I can offer is set your writing down for a couple of weeks and come back to it later. And then look, some things will be good, some things will be bad. In my case, I have a lot of bad stuff, but I have the faith, the confidence maybe, the capability, the skill, just like all of you to know I can make it good, because that's the craft, right? That's something we learned. That's not a talent. That's the craft. So we all have that. So focus on the process. Take the brains off and let yourself go. Get the words out. Have fun again. And the writing will recharge. Another suggestion I have and something I carry with me in everything, in parenting, in cooking, in whatever, cocktail making, right? Is adopt a growth mindset. Now, Cara Dweck is a researcher at Stanford University and she pioneered this thinking years ago. It's been magic for me because what a growth mindset supposes is that humans are expansive. We do best when we feel like we can keep learning, when we can keep improving. There's no failure in writing. You can look at an article. You can look at a book in 100 different ways. How good it is, how smooth it is, what people like about it will differ according to the person. There's never one right answer. There are many possibilities. And that feels excited to me, right? Because that's unlimited opportunity for us as writers. So again, when I say, I don't think we get blocked. I think we get stuck in our intolerance for bad writing. But understand that bad writing is the possibility. In the writing, in the experimentation, in the exploration of our work is the possibility of the next idea. Or the next better sentence or the next bit of research that's going to turn the whole thing around or a piece of dialogue that's going to elevate it. So a mindset, the growth mindset moves writing back into the creative experimentation exploration, which is probably one of the reasons you started writing to begin with. It is for me. I wanted to make sense of this life in a more abstract way than what I was living. I wanted to understand myself differently. So the way I get into this, the trigger for me for this is I use the word yet. Have you published a fiction book? No, not yet. Because there's the possibility of growth and improvement and expansion and creativity. Have you finished a chapter not yet? Of course I will. I haven't done it yet. Have you published a blog post? Not yet. How we talk to ourselves and think about our process changes how we experience our writing and really our world. So if, and you've probably experienced this too, but so many people are like, well, you're a writer, huh? Well, what have you published? To me, that's an outcome question. That's for them. But what I've learned and the process and the way I've up-leveled and advanced my writing over the years is the thing I celebrate. So no, I haven't published a fiction book yet. I will one day if I keep working at it. And if I decide that's important to me, right? So don't get caught up in the rejections. Don't get caught up in the failures. Don't get caught up in the judgment of right or wrong, good or bad. Writing doesn't work like that. Writing is all. It can be any number of possibilities. Then some work better than others. And that's something we learn the more we write, right? We express it. And then we'll go on to a new format or a new structure and we have to learn again. I'm writing some fiction now, which I haven't done ever seriously and I haven't done it in a long, long time. I don't know how to do it very well. But I'm working on it. And the process is so fulfilling that I get excited when I think about it. And that has helped me recharge. So have you published? No, not yet. But that leaves open the possibility that you continue to improve and learn and experiment and explore until you get that outcome if it's when you want, right? All right. The one thing that I realized in those dark mornings on the couch was my comfort zone that I talked about became really uncomfortable because I knew what to do. We all do this after a certain age or a certain job, right? We've been in these roles as adults, often for a long time. And people expect us to know what we're doing. I have written nonfiction magazine articles for 25, 28 years now. And so people call me and say, will you write this? And the last few years, that's all I've done. Will you write this? Will you do that? And I know how to do it. Now, there's always a challenge. Each topic is unique. Each idea. There's no set format. But I got pretty good at knowing what needed to go in the articles, how to efficiently do the research and those kind of things. And I made money doing that. And it came down to it that my comfort zone was so comfortable because I was only doing what I had always done. And that wasn't that interesting anymore. I was doing the work for the money, which was never enough for my intrinsic motivation to ignite, right? It's external motivation. And that certainly is an important part of what I do. I have to make a living. But it was never the sole reason I did it. And it was never enough. And so when I woke up feeling all comfortable on the couch, I realized that wasn't interesting anymore. I was doing what I'd known how to do. It took me years to learn how to do it. Years to create the opportunities for my writing. And I had done that to a certain extent. And it wasn't creative anymore. It didn't feel interesting. And that's when I mentioned earlier that I wanted to quit. Maybe I'm not a writer. Maybe I've never been a writer. And that felt really sad to me because that didn't feel right. That didn't feel who I am. So what I decided to do is I decided that I needed to get a little uncomfortable. And I don't love that. I don't love to be uncomfortable. You're talking to a woman who has worn her sweats for 12 months straight. I am not even kidding. I'm not an uncomfortable type of person. But what I'm talking about here now is called optimal discomfort. It's the way we move from apathy to ignition, to recharge our vitality, our creative energy, our enthusiasm for our work again. And if you're going to keep writing over the years, if this is a part of your lifestyle, it's going to be something you need to challenge yourself to do. And the payoff has been huge for me. Too much discomfort eases us into overwhelm and stress. And then we become paralyzed. Too little discomfort, we become bored and dull. So we're going for the Goldilocks version of optimal discomfort. We want just the right amount of discomfort. We don't want to know it all. We want to explore it. There can never be a mastery because then we become bored. And interestingly, this is where passion resides. Because passion comes when we can do things pretty well, when we can learn and improve and get better and better. And we achieve some form of mastery, but we can never get it all. We can never figure out every move on the chess board or every way to write a piece of writing. That's where the excitement comes in. And that's how we recharge into our writing. Because optimal discomfort then, using the growth mindset, I can learn this. I just haven't done it yet. I can improve. I've never written a screenplay, but I can learn how to do that. So I decided to move from this place of comfortable discomfort to this place of optimal discomfort, where I was exploring and participating and engaging in my writing again in a new way. I didn't know it all. I was challenged. And the way I got to that is a way that I think will work for you too. Because creativity is really about problem solving, about adaptation, about finding ways to do things differently, to translate our experience into a piece of work, or writing, or art, right? To move our feelings and ideas and energy into the pieces that can convey important things to other people. And to be a writer, you've got to make thousands of decisions in any one piece. What character, who you're going to kill, who you're going to maim, right? Who you're going to talk to for your research, what dialogue or quotes you're going to include, how you're going to open the article, what the focus will do. There's thousands of writing, what words you're going to use that you're going to encounter in any piece of writing. We don't have to be the experts to do that part, but when we move away from what we've always known into a genre we've never explored before, our creative process, our problem, picks up. So I didn't leave magazine writing behind, but what I did is I started looking at the excuses I'd been making, the things I'd always wanted to try that I excused away. I love to do a podcast, but I don't know how to do it. And I took the simplest next step. So on one of those dark mornings when I was sitting there all riled up and thinking, oh, I need to quit writing, I thought, hmm, I'd like to write a podcast. I wonder what that would be like. And the simplest next step then was to get up that day and buy a microphone. I bought an expensive microphone, hello, that I didn't know how to use. And three years later, I'm talking to you about it. And I have a podcast that's drawing thousands of listeners. So the way to move into optimal discomfort and to recharge your writing is to get over the yes, buts. Yes, but I can't. Yes, but I don't have time. Another thing I did was I decided to try some new genres. So, man, I began doodling a little bit. I'm not a visual artist at all. I don't know how to draw. I did some programs on YouTube. And that experience infused my creative energy and changed the way I felt about my writing. The other thing is I signed up for a fiction thriller class. I love thrillers. It's pretty much all I'm reading right now. And I always wanted to learn about it and work with this author. And I thought it'd be fun. So I did that. I stepped outside of my comfort zone into a place of optimal discomfort. And I learned a ton and I had a great experience. And that without me, even micromanaging or thinking about that moved me into a writer's workshop group that has been personally and professionally one of the most exhilarating, interesting, fun, meaningful experiences I've had in a long time. These are great people. My writing is getting better, but so is my life. Right? So when we move to this place of optimal discomfort in our work, things happen around us that we could not anticipate, that open up that creative exploration, that gets us excited again. And what happens then is the cycle becomes sustainable. It takes a little bit of energy to buy that microphone. But then the microphone comes and I'm looking at it and thinking, this is ridiculous. I've got to learn how to use it now. For sure. My excuses are out the window. So I signed up for an online class that was really cheap. Learn how to podcast. And then the next thing I did as part of this recharge effort was I went for good enough because if you're like me, it's really hard to show your work to anyone until it's perfect. And when I'm in a place of optimal discomfort, nothing's perfect. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just exploring. I'm just trying. So I decided to produce a podcast within a month of receiving the microphone. I taught myself. I went online. It was imperfect. And people loved it because I showed up in my imperfection, right? Because that's a humanity that we can connect to. And that courage, it takes courage to do what you're doing and you're writing, to sit there in that quiet space and translate your experience on the page. But when we do that, we change all the energy around us. We draw other people to us, people who are excited or who want to understand or learn. And then they return that energy to us and we go again. Optimal discomfort. Take the simplest next step, simplest easiest step. Push yourself into a place of discovery and curiosity. Baby steps, little things, buy the microphone, sign up for the class, and then unpack your excuses. And say, well, yeah, yeah, but I don't have time or I don't know how to do a podcast yet, right? And that moves us into growth mindset and away we go. And then go for good enough. Trust yourself to put the work out there, to rest authentically in your own humanity and to know, as Brené Brown would say, that you're stepping into the arena and that that process matters more than any outcome, right? That's how I recharge. And that's how I have reinvigorated my practice. And it's interesting because all these years I've been focused on, you know, exploring some of these things as a side light to doing the articles I needed to do to make an income. And I still need to make an income and I'm still doing those things. And what I found was when I started to throw my energy behind my interests, move into this place of curiosity, the money came too. The opportunities came too. And that's where you recharge came from. I published a book after having this experience, this three year long experience of not only rejuvenating my career but getting healthier and becoming revitalized in my life. It's something that is there for all of us. This kind of creative energy. It's something that will infuse our work if we do the work. We don't have to second guess it. That's what the writing does. But you do have to do the work. And I don't care if it's good or bad. I think sitting down to do it is what matters most of all. So don't buy into this business of being all stuck or blocked. We're not blocked. We have to increase our tolerance for discomfort. We have to increase our tolerance for bad writing, our own bad writing or bad ideas or things that never pan out. But know that that's part of the process. And by stepping into that process and focusing on the things we can explore and add to the things we can learn, the other ways we can direct our creative energy that we can come back revitalized and recharged in our work. So if you haven't written today or this week, if you are feeling dull and blocked and stuck, remember, you just haven't figured it out yet. It's not over. All this mess and ick and the discomfort is part of the job. It isn't coming because you're not good enough. It isn't there because you're doing something wrong. It's there because you're moving forward. That's the process of writing. That's our writer. That's also where people quit. If you're going to continue on, use the discomfort to experience the process. That's when people say, that's when I say people are a writer. It's not if you make money. It's not how many times you publish. It's if you sit down every day and do the work because you value the process and you're committed to it. And I think we can all get there. I think that's how we overcome blocks. I think that's how we recharge our writing. And you know what? I think that's how we change the world. So thank you for showing up with me today. I'm here. I'm happy to take any questions. I love talking about all this stuff. As you know, I'd rather talk about it than write. That's for sure. So hit me with anything. I can talk about it. All right. Looks like our first question is from Carol. Carol, do you want to turn your mic on? Yes. I think I have it on. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Hi, Paul. I appreciate your enthusiasm. That is great. That's very helpful. I'm going to a writer's residency next week for the first time in my life. I've been a writer, but never a books. And what I'm doing is I'm researching a book about a remarkable, but forgotten woman who's like many women. I'm not interested in thinking about it. I'm not interested in talking about it. I'm not interested in getting rid of it. I'm writing about it. So I'm in history. I didn't figure. The challenge is while actually a great deal is known about. Her husband. And. To a lesser extent about her because of how significant he was in US history. Two years before she died, she burned all of her journals and personal correspondence. But all of her personal thoughts, dreams, struggles, including some interesting questions about her personal life are gone. So my question is, and I actually had a brief exchange with Teran, is in such a case, am I better off of not even trying to write her story as a biography and just write it as a novel? I'm just curious what thoughts you might have. I think it's a fascinating idea. And like I was saying in the talk, I think there are so many different ways to take this. And I think you have to gauge for you what makes you feel excited. Do you feel like you can suppose enough about this woman to create a historically fiction character that would be true to her, whether we know if it's awkward or not? And is there anything available of her if you were going to write a biography? Because to me, if there's no outside party, I guess what I'm trying to say is if she's a forgotten woman and her biography is all going to be people commenting on her, then it's really going to feel to me maybe like more about them than her. And of course, that depends on how you write it. But I think it seems like you know quite a bit about this character and this person. And if you enjoy, if you're curious about the fiction process and creating the world you think she may have lived in, I think that can be a whole lot of fun to read and write. If you are going to write a biography, I think you want to make sure you can get close to what her experience was, not just from the eyes of others, although there have been great biographies written that way. It sounds what's drawn you to the project is the mystery and the unsung heroics of this woman who we've never heard about. So I don't know if that helps because I can make an argument either way. Where I'm at in my work right now, I think writing a fictional piece would be super fun. But that's just me personally right now. I appreciate that. Thank you. Well, good luck. Let me know when it's out. And I just wanted to comment on that because I'm a little bit in the same boat. Keep reading biographies and historical accounts of people's lives because the more examples you have, not to use as a model necessarily, but they're going to help stimulate your thinking about how to present your subject's material. I forget the author's name, but there was a pseudo biography, a fictionalized biography of Ronald Reagan called Dutch that is famous for being a fictional biography. So I'll put that in the chat just so you can check it out. It's an interesting exercise and maybe according to Ronald Reagan's family, what not to do. Yeah, and I thought that was interesting because there was so much on him. And at the time, and the book took such liberties and didn't initially say it was a fictional account. I think Carol, I think from my perspective, the biggest thing you can do is get clear with you. I think reading other, there maybe is a structure we haven't even thought about yet. I have maybe a blending of the two. But you need to be clear with you so that you can make it clear to the reader. So they know where they're at in the story and they'll follow the thread no matter which way you do it. Exactly. Let's see, there's another question here by, oh, I lost my chat window, by Margaret. Margaret, do you want to turn your mic on? Hi, yeah. This is great conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm a fiction writer and I'm thinking about doing, I found myself writing about a woman who blogs and then I started thinking, I just want to write these blogs. She's a fictional character who runs a feminist website and I'm like, no, I'm just really having fun writing these blogs. So I was looking at places to just start blogging about women's issues in the workplace and you mentioned medium at one point in this talk and I'm just this familiar with it. Is that, would you say that that's some place I should explore to get my, I have no idea how to get nonfiction looked at. It depends, the answer depends on who I'm talking to because for years in the professional writer ranks, the ones who are seriously hitting the magazines and the work you read all the time, there's dissection around people that write for free, right? And when I started my career, I did some early stuff I published for free because I wanted the clips. I didn't do many and for a long time was like, you know, you could pay me or... When I went through this bump a few years ago, I changed my tune on that and I'll tell you what. Number one, right where you want to write, that's between you and your work and the publisher. Number two, you don't have to give away your work for free to find it to be published now. So medium is a platform where if you write to the audience, which I think we all should do anyhow, I think as a published writer, the goal is to write what you want in a way that reaches the market. You got to know the market really well and you got to know what you're trying to write really well. But if you do that, you're going to make money. And so what medium does is it allows you to write blog posts independently or as part of the medium publications, which there are several available to writers that you can align with. And if you want to write according to their style and their market for that publication, then readers are going to like your piece and if they like your piece, you're going to get paid a little bit. So make thousands, so make $5. But it's been an interesting way for me to target my market a little bit, to kind of see what's working, doing things that I want to write to explore my own boundaries a little bit and grow a little bit that might not be picked up by the magazine or that I don't want to go through the whole publishing process on because it's much more immediate. So depending on what school you're in, absolutely. I think there are several platforms out there that allow people to write articles or blog posts that potentially can earn you a little money, sometimes a lot for me, it's slight, but allow you to explore your ideas and get better as you go. And then you can link to it on your Facebook or the other places as a clip. Right. And so I really think when we get into this rigid mode as writers where, let me tell you what, you have to do it this way or you have, I think we're losing the thread and I was there for a while. But I think the most important thing is to find a match that allows you to express the ideas that are important to you that bring you joy and growth in your writing and find a place that's going to respect the work and the writer to put it. And Medium has been one of those places for me and I have made a little money too. So the best way I would suggest to do that, I read Medium for a long time before I published on it. See, read the publications you like, look for writing that's like your writing, the topics and see what kind of fit you think it would be. And the one thing I say about writing for so-called free is it's not worth selling your soul for. So when I decide to write for free, it's something that matters to me, has more intrinsic value than the paycheck and where I feel like the work is respected. I'm not gonna just write about anything. It's gotta move me forward in some way. Absolutely, yeah. Cool, thank you so much. Also, as a small press published fiction writer, I'm used to making very little money. So there's nothing there. You got it, me too, I get it. I think we're all used to making very little money. All right, it seems like no one else has typed any questions in. We can go ahead and open it up to a free for all if you want to chat directly with Polly. Feel free to turn your mic on and just say hello. Hi. Hi, sorry I was late. I missed the opening of your talk. I'm at my writer's group. So cool. How's this? Yeah, it was the first time we've been together in 15 months, it was great. Oh, we're good, that's good. Zoom the whole time though. Who is this talking? This is Kenny. Hi, oh hi, I've seen you've been attending lots of events. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Well, we did record the event and after I, you know, after the weekend I'll edit it and send it out to all the registrants. So you didn't really miss it. You'll be able to watch it at your leisure on our YouTube channel. I do have a question. Good. Does anybody else feel like the blog writing is changing writing in general and books? I did some research yesterday of comparable books to my book that I've just finished. And I sound very old fashioned now. It's not just quick little blurbs. It's got some thought in it and so forth. The parallel books to mine. And I just wondered. I think that the access to writing. Like when I started, my daughter would just laugh because this is so old. When I started, I mean, I did it on an electric typewriter and the reality is it wasn't that long ago, you know? And so there were very few places to write and there were certainly very few places to have your work read. For people like me, when I was young and had very little experience and was just kind of driving on a dream, then the internet came along and no writer was ever gonna write for an online publication because that just wasn't classy. And now I'm only writing for online publications because the quality of writing on the internet has increased so much. And then blog posts were more like a travel log or a daily log and now they're full on publications. So I do think if you go to the right places, the quality of writing overall is getting better. I think there's always something to be said for the inclusion. More people of all ages and all backgrounds and all ethnicities can write. I think the pandemic, Taryn and I were talking about this has created an opportunity that we haven't seen in a very long time for artists and writers. From all over the world. I mean, last time I was on a book tour, I went to San Francisco and I met with 15 people at a bookstore and they were all from Northern California area. Today we have people on the call from Illinois and Tennessee. And so we have access now to so many more choices that I think many of them we gravitate to are better. Not all of them, but I think we have, we can see it's almost like I was tying my husband the other day, it's like that show American Idol. They have incredible talent and these people are just out in the community all the time. So I think there's incredible writer talent out there and people who have not had the access and now they have the access. And if we're discerning, we can find it. And I think that's awesome. I think that's great. I don't worry about competition. I don't think there's such a thing because the reality is those of you who showed up for this kind of thing or showed up for your writer's group to start a pandemic despite a pandemic are the ones that are going to be writing and publishing. Other people are going to think about it and they're not going to do it. But the more of us who do do it and take it seriously, I think the better for all of us. So yeah, I do think, I'd be curious what you have to say Kenny, but I think it's out there now. Yeah. Well, we have access to it, maybe. And let's face it. I mean, no one's talking about how difficult it is to get published right now, but it is a traditional way. And then those publishers don't really support the writer the way that they used to because the whole financial model has changed. So I don't think there's any shame to say you're a blogger or you publish online or you publish e-magazines or you, I don't know what, do all these other types of writing and exchange of your ideas and your writing. I just think it's a whole different rodeo now. I did too. I don't think there's any shame in doing any of it either. And that's what I was just saying about writing for free. I mean, if you want to write for somebody and it's meaningful to you and the topic is interesting, go do the writing. Just do the work and you'll be ahead of everybody else anyhow. But yeah, I still do blogs and I write a podcast which is just a new thing. And I'm playing with fiction, which I'm really terrible at. And that's all interesting to me. I think for too long I was in this box of, oh, this is what a nonfiction professional writer does. And I lost myself a little bit. What a writer does is they write. And if you want to show it to somebody, find somebody who's going to appreciate seeing it, whether they like it or not. I see lots of artwork I don't write, but every single time I sit down and look at it, I'm enamored and grateful that it's been created. And let's face it, having an online presence allows your work to last longer than your published work would. I mean, say you publish a book and it has a short print run and you get 100 readers, unless you're actively still writing and still publishing in the same way, that book is gonna have a finite life where it will be looked at and read. Unless somehow you write a seminal work and it's something that stays in a library forever. But your online presence can continue to grow and it's evergreen in a much more lively way. Listen, I would say the same, that's still true for me and other writers I know, that you gotta do good work, right? You be conscientious. Like I've been interested in self-publishing. I've never done that. I've only done traditional publishing, but I'm very interested in that model for a lot of the things Karen's saying. But I know people who have published in that model and not done well. And I've looked at their books and their books aren't for me. They're not edited. They haven't been carefully proofread. The covers don't attract me. This is a job when you take it to publishing. Now I'm not saying you should publish. That's up to you and your work. But I am a person who publishes certain things because I make an income from it. I treat everything I do with a high level of professionalism because if I put it out there, I don't know where it's gonna lead but I don't want it to lead me to the garbage bin. I want to sustain my career. So be conscientious about the work you do release but I don't think it matters how you release it if you feel like it's a safe environment and a respected environment for your piece. I'm totally interested in all these other models. I think it's a great opportunity. Are bookstores starting to accept self-published books if they're good? You know, some are. I've never written a self-published book so I'm taking that information off stuff I've read and learned. Taryn might have more feedback on that too but I know a couple of bookstores in Oregon that are and I'll tell you what, the platforms like Kobo, if you go wide on some of the platforms like Kobo's and some others will and they're not as big in the US as say Amazon but they're really big in Canada and Europe and so forth. So I think we're starting to see that more and more because I think we've learned about that model a little bit and people are getting really good at it. I mean, there's a great podcast. I think the guy's name is, you guys can correct me if you know, Mark Dawson I think is his name from England and he self-publishes and he's making millions of dollars writing what he wants to write but it's because he's treated each step. He has a cover professionally designed by a cover artist. He has the marketing copy written by another professional. You know, he's published his book like a big publisher would but he has more freedom about when it goes live and where he puts it and that is appealing to me. When I write something for a platform like Medium I can have it up in a day. I can be getting feedback and it takes me, you know three to six months for a magazine. When I write something on Facebook, I write these notes if you're interested you can check me out at Paulie Campbell author but I'll write these things about my parenting moments or some crazy thing that happened in the house and I'll write a really long note like a 500 word note and I'll have a thousand hits on that. So it's interesting to see what's hitting people and not only is it good practice for my writing but it also helps me understand my market who is a woman like me generally for the books that I'm writing right now. So it helps me see where their minds are and what they're feeling like and it helps me connect to the audience in a way that feels a lot more authentic. So self-publishing, I don't know Taryn do you know about bookstores that are taking the self-publishing book? Yeah, locally here in San Francisco I think many independent bookstores are interested in local authors work whether it be self-published or not. I know book passage is very good about that and I believe book shop West Portal is as well but again, you just can't cold call a bookstore I think you need to nurture that relationship a little bit and make sure that they know you that you're a regular customer that you publish this book and those two bookstores, I'm pretty sure they do this they buy on consignment, your books on consignment and then maybe they'll host you for an event of some kind but what I've learned in my 14 years of hosting literary events and working with local authors is that it's a give and take you really have to, you have to plant a seed and nurture that little relationship between the bookstore, the library, the librarians whoever it is that you want to work with eventually you got to start growing that plant and keep your end of the bargain but yeah, local bookstores especially independently owned ones are very interested in what the community is writing what they're doing because that's their service space that's their clientele Yeah, thank you All right, well thank you all very much for coming and chatting and sharing your experiences I did put some information there in the chat I will copy that for you and send it to you in an email along with the link to the video, let's say Monday and you have a great weekend Thank you for coming Thank you, Polly All right, bye-bye