The 7 Best Questions I’ve Been Asked on Book Tour
In the spring of 2017, I was in Brooklyn on book tour for EAT THIS POEM, my literary cookbook. I was there for a live radio spot and a bookstore event, and while I was in town, I found the cutest coffee shop and parked myself at a table for three hours one afternoon. And that’s where I wrote the draft of my proposal for WILD WORDS, which came out a couple of years later.
It seems like a lifetime ago that I was actually flying to different cities and talking with people about my books. We’ve experienced a global pandemic since then, and a lot has changed, but when I was starting to work on a batch of episodes for this season of the show, I came across an old draft called “Notes from the Road” and inside were a list of questions I was asked at events—the kinds of questions that were so good that I wanted to remember them and share them with everyone who wasn’t there live with me.
And even though some of these questions are years old, they’re still 100% relevant, so I thought it would be fun to finally share my answers. Another benefit of doing this, I think, is that inevitably in the moment when these questions were first presented to me, I probably forgot something that was important to mention, or I couldn’t spend as much time on a question as I might in the format of a podcast, so true to my own process, having the space and time to be more reflective generates, I hope, a more meaningful and useful response as well.
7 Timeless Questions I’ve Been Asked on Book Tour
To guide where we’re headed, here are the questions we’ll explore:
If you have 3 kids and 20 minutes of free time, what should you work on first?
How do you get back to writing if you haven’t done it in a while?
Does your writing process change with each book?
What’s the secret of balancing writing with everything else?
Have you ever been afraid of success?
How do you reconcile wanting to write for yourself, but also the desire to get affirmation for your work?
How do you be content with just being a writer, and not being the next Ann Patchett?
If you have 3 kids and 20 minutes of free time, what should you work on first?
I remember this question vividly because it was the first one I received at the book launch event for WILD WORDS. I also remember smiling a little bit on the inside when I heard it because I thought, you are 100% my target audience. I’m so glad you’re here.
Writers ask themselves a version of this question all the time, because of course we have other things going in our lives, and we can’t spend all day/every day at our desks. But I see this question as one that’s less about time and more about priorities.
I’ve heard from a lot of people and experienced this myself, that you find yourself in a pocket where you have a few minutes—I call them margins—and if you haven’t done the work of identifying where your focus needs to be in this particular season, you’re very likely to spin your wheels. You might bounce from one thing to the next, touching a few ideas but not actually making much headway on any of them. You might end up scrolling on social media and wondering where the time went. And you might end this brief window of time feeling more depleted than energized, and a big reason for that I think is you were using a lot of mental energy to try and make a decision under pressure.
There was another question in this group that’s very similar, I’m going to lump it in here: And this person asked: When you have a margin, how do you avoid just scrolling through Instagram? My recommendation is to spend a minute getting organized. You might have a few things going on at the same time, writing-wise, and that’s fine, but if you haven’t thought through where your margins are and how to best utilize them, you won’t be maximizing those windows.
For example. You might have one margin of thirty free minutes at home when your kids are at school. That might be a better time for deeper work. Then you might have twenty minutes waiting in the school pick up line, or waiting for your kids to finish an activity or a sports practice. You might be out in public at that point, where your attention could be more scattered. That might be a better time to try brainstorming something or doing a writing exercise.
To sum up, Step #1 is to identify which projects are in need of attention right now. What are you working on? What’s most important? And make that your priority.
Step #2 is to identify your personal margins during the week, and deciding in advance what you’d like to focus on. Of course things might change here and there, but having a general sense of direction will really help.
How do you get back to writing if you haven’t done it in a while?
I love this question because it speaks to something we all experience, and opens the conversation to normalize how necessary it is to not write sometimes. Sometimes liminal space is very intentional, other times you’re thrust into a life change that you weren’t expecting. Either way, we all have times in our creative practice that are less fruitful in terms of writing down the words.
If you’re getting back into it, of course my advice is to start slow. You might print out something you worked on a while ago and give it a read through. That’s always a nice thing to do, it helps remind us of our work and see it with a fresh perspective having some distance.You might pull out a favorite book of poems and use it as a way to start writing. You can copy the first line of a poem into your notebook, and then just keep writing, adding your own words after it. Sometimes starting with someone else’s words can help generate our own, especially if we feel rusty. You might set a timer for 10 minutes and journal, just seeing what’s at the surface and might be wanting attention. You might take yourself somewhere—a park, a museum, a bookstore—somewhere that you find inspiring, and see what’s there. You can also ask yourself: What’s surfacing now? Get curious about the stories that want to be told and what might be bubbling up.
Also, don’t be afraid to explore other genres. You might not stay there, but it might feel fun to try writing a poem if you normally write nonfiction, or draft a personal essay if you’re always writing fiction.
Basically, permission to play and really feel your way back to the page. I can guarantee that something rich will come from this sacred pause, but it doesn’t always appear when we think it will, so of course, stay attuned to the world around you. Pay attention, stay curious, and be open.
Does your writing process change with each book?
The short answer to this question is absolutely. Every book I write is different, so naturally it demands a different approach. Not only that, but my life circumstances are usually different for each book too, so what worked when I was writing Eat This Poem before becoming a parent is not how I approached writing my memoir with a young child during a pandemic. I learn to write the book as I’m writing it. But one thing that does seem to remain similar across the board, I’ve noticed, is that my ideas really simmer. Regardless of the book, I’ve likely done a lot of thinking before I even start writing, and I’ve always had a Google doc or a notes file of some kind where I just add things to it before I really know what’s going on, and I just collect things for the future. So that part, the thinking and gathering, is pretty consistent, but how I write each book has changed based on my life at the time, and also the kind of book it is.
What’s the secret of balancing writing with everything else?
One of the keys to this is getting clear on two things: your current circumstances and your expectations. Circumstances play a huge role in your writing process. If you’re a mom with three kids, you’re going to have a different writing life than someone who lives alone. Within that, when you’ve looked around at your life and can say, OK, this is what I’m working with right now, it’s also helpful to set expectations that aren’t going to stretch you beyond your capacity, because there’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re falling short of your own expectations for months or years, and then realizing that you’ve always had the ability to move the goalposts.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past creating more work for myself, adding things to my plate, and creating artificial deadlines that are by me, for me, and then coming up for air and thinking—what am I doing? I don’t actually have to be doing any of this. Navigating this usually requires some experimenting to figure out a cadence that feels good, or a word count that feels right. You can set your own parameters of course, but just make sure it doesn’t start feeling like a job you aren’t measuring up to, because that’ll suck the joy right out of your writing process, I can guarantee it.
Have you ever been afraid of success?
We all have different barometers of what success looks like in the context of a book launch, but yes, there’s been a sense of nervousness over the years because I dreamed about writing books since I was a kid and then it started to happen. Now, with all the nervous system work I’ve done over the last few years, a deeper response to this question is actually at the level of the body, where success can feel scary because it’s new, and the nervous system’s job is to keep us safe, so if we’re feeling things like joy, contentment, happiness, success might feel really uncomfortable if we haven’t practiced embodying those emotions. So yes, I think I’ve been afraid of success because although I have this desire to have my writing out there, it’s also a real stretch in terms of visibility, and I’m not sure that’s something we can just switch over to immediately, I think it takes time for us to work up to those moments feeling good in our body.
How do you reconcile wanting to write for yourself, but also the desire to get affirmation for your work?
I think of this question in a few ways. First, even if I didn’t get affirmation for my work, I’d still be writing. I see this in my personal creative history, where I was writing for years and no one really knew about it, and it was compulsive sometimes. I had to do it. I still need to write. It’s so interwoven to my being and is one of the things that makes me feel most like myself. So, writing is necessary. There’s that.
But it’s also true that yes, we want affirmation, or attention, or visibility from our work! This is maybe where that personal vs. professional line comes into play too. If you’re journaling and just brain dumping and getting things off your chest—that’s not the work we’re looking to receive affirmation for. That’s for ourselves. That’s for processing and for healing. But once you add in craft, that’s when it becomes less about you and more about a reader, and when we take the time to shape a poem, to create a story arc, to devote years to writing a book for a wider audience than just our immediate family—of course, it’s natural to want some recognition.
Writing is for myself, but writing is also my vocation, and when it’s thoughtful and edited and considered and CRAFTED, of course I want eyes on it. Not all the eyes necessarily, but the people that my work can impact and encourage and make feel less alone? 100%. Ultimately, both things can be true. I write things for myself but I also write for other people to read.
How do you be content with just being a writer, and not being the next Ann Patchett?
It’s normal to want our work to be read in some capacity. That’s also the beautiful reciprocity of art—it can make us feel, it can help us understand, it can make us feel less alone. And sometimes our work can do that for others. I guess the way I think about not being the next Ann Patchett is that I’m not really interested in being the next Ann Patchett. I don’t know for sure, but I’d venture to guess that most writers with a fair amount of notoriety in their career didn’t know they were going to achieve that level of fame. They were just writing, the same way you and I were writing, and it happened for them.
But personally, I’m content with reaching the readers I need to reach. I like to remember that my work isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. And our work not being for everyone doesn’t cancel out the opportunity for our books and essays and poems to reach incredible heights and large audiences. Right now, I just want to lean into the writing I need to do right now and ultimately trust that my work will land with people who can benefit from reading it.
