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PODCAST

#AmWriting

#AmWriting with Jess & KJ

Entertaining, actionable advice on craft, productivity and creativity for writers in all genres, hosted by Jessica Lahey (freelancer, essayist and NYT best-selling author of "The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Children Can Succeed", KJ Dell"Antonia (NYT contributor and former editor; her novel, The Chicken Sisters, debuts in June 2020, How to Be a Happier Parent is available now) and Sarina Bowen (USA today best-selling author of more than 30 romance novels).

arts books

All Episodes

44:39

369: You Are the Protagonist (memoirs need ideas too)...

#AmWriting ·

2023/07/28

But wait, isn’t a memoir a book about my life? What do you mean, I need an idea? We mean, you need an idea. Because your whole life is… really not book material. But one thematic chunk of it? One recurring event, one series of catastrophes, one relationship, one moment that changed everything? Now you’re talking—and so are we, to the amazing Rachael Herron, host of the How Do You Write Podcast, author of Fast Draft Your Memoir and leader of a recurring, very hard to get into multi-week class of

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35:27

368: How to Decide if Your Book Idea is Solid (or...

#AmWriting ·

2023/07/21

This is the third in our 2023 Summer Idea Factory series. Jennie Nash is back, and this time, she and I are talking about the process of testing out ideas, talking through them, and spending enough time with them to figure out if they’ll sustain you through an entire book—and if you want them to. Good news for memoir writers! Y’all probably know how much I love Jennie Nash’s Blueprint books. They really are the closest thing I’ve found to a guide for getting through draft after draft. I start with

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47:16

367: The Airport Game (or, how to come up with 8...

#AmWriting ·

2023/07/14

THIS IS MY FAVORITE THING EVER. Jennie Nash and I (KJ here) are talking ideas this summer: getting them, keeping them, taking them from baby spark idea to big-enough-to-hold-a draft idea. In this episode, I lay out my favorite technique for forcing myself to do two things: thing of something beyond the single spark I’m attached to at any given moment and take all of the sparks I can generate and push them harder until they get to a point where they might just stand on their own. I hope you like it

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39:34

366: Welcome to the Idea Factory (Good Writing Comes...

#AmWriting ·

2023/07/07

Writers, I have IDEAS. Usually a lot of them. 99% of them go nowhere. You can feel me bubbling over with ideas in every episode and even in the title of many episodes. There is so much I always want to say. Like me, Jennie Nash is an idea cannon. So between us, we come up with a lot of plans. This is all to say that first: this episode, and the 7 “Idea Factory” episodes that follow, are the result of one such idea. At the beginning of this year, I (It’s KJ here) was deciding on what to do for what

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24:24

365: How to Start a Novel (and keep going) Episode 365

#AmWriting ·

2023/06/30

I did a call with a writer this week who really is just getting started, with a few short stories finished and dreams of the future, and after we talked at probably unnecessary length about the fundamental truth that writing is hard and you have to actually DO it, not just think about it and plan for it, so annoying, she asked me how I start a new project*. This episode is my answer, pretty much—because I’ve just done exactly that. My first outline document for the book I’m working on is dated

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30:50

Summer Reading for Writers (plus a #FlashbackFriday:...

#AmWriting ·

2023/06/23

Two years ago, Jennie Nash and I (this is KJ) got into a debate about what was the best, most helpful book for a writer’s bookshelf. Almost instantly we realized that we couldn’t choose just one (although if we could, I suspect it’s Save the Cat Writes a Novel for me and Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit for Jennie, but even as I write that I’m having second thoughts in favor of Big Magic but I’m just SO ANNOYED with her right now because of the whole take-back-my-book thing) and, yeah. Anyway

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41:31

364: Satire: writing just below "over-the-top" with...

#AmWriting ·

2023/06/16

The book is The Society of Shameand one of the many, many ways you can tell it’s satire is that it keeps making people who don’t get it mad. Satire is fiction, hopped up on humor and then amped up by all the things that seem like they couldn't quite happen and yet you know they might. (Another commonality of good satire? The most outrageous bits are often the ones that come straight from the headlines. The author is Jane Roper, who is also the author of a memoir, Double Time: How I Survived–and

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38:21

363: How to Hate Your Work and Also Sell It-- at the...

#AmWriting ·

2023/06/09

Howdy from KJ’s office, where I’m trapped because outside these doors, an angry child lies in wait, ready to tell me all I’ve done wrong as a parent over lo these many years. Good thing I had Jess and Sarina to keep me company while we talk about marketing, selling, navigating the socials, blurbing and asking for blurbs and reading blurbs and oh, still writing the whole time. Links from the pod: The Flying Pig The Chain, Adrian McKinty On Good Authority, Anna David The Eragon series,

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55:31

362: Talking Fat Talk and Substack Success: Episode...

#AmWriting ·

2023/06/02

SO. Virginia’s Substack—here it is right here—which also features a podcast, went from 700 people to 4500 people to 28K subscribers. BEFORE her new book, Fat Talk, hit the NYT best-seller list. Wouldn’t you like to hear how? We’ve got you covered. Replicating her success? Well, that’s never the way it works. But everything we learn helps. Links from the pod: FAT TALK: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture @v_solesmith on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body

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61:11

Flashback Friday: Episode 288 with Joni Cole

#AmWriting ·

2023/05/26

How do I find a writing group and what if they’re mean? That’s a question we get asked a lot, and we always encourage writers to reach out in our Facebook group or boldly throw it out there anywhere else online that you hang out and see what happens. You don’t even have to trade pages to be a writing group. You look for the kind of support and camaraderie you need. But if you’ve ever thought of hying yourself off to your local version of Grub Street or our local spot for in-person writer-ness, The

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31:27

361: Scrivener Tips: It's only taken Jess 361...

#AmWriting ·

2023/05/19

Jess here. I know, I KNOW. I’ve been meaning to get to this for ages but who has time to just sit and watch videos about software? Not me. However, last week Sarina told me about some of her Scrivener tricks and I realized it’s time. I put my butt in the chair and scrolled through ALL of the Scrivener YouTube videos (for Mac) and searched on #scrivener #scrivenertips and a few other hashtags on TikTok, and I have to admit, I learned a lot. I’m no guru, but I’ve solved some problems I was having with

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33:17

360: Summoning My Accountability Buddies: Because...

#AmWriting ·

2023/05/12

Jess here. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I know how my brain works, which is to say it doesn’t, unless a hard and fast deadline looms large in my calendar. I’ve been known to tell my agent or editor to expect chapters on a given day, or I plan to have a completed book proposal to her by X date three weeks hence, but this spring, I’ve decided to call in my writer reinforcements. I summoned KJ and Sarina to a study room in the Howe Library in Hanover, NH on a very rainy day in late April because I

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43:41

359: Dealing with Goal Fatigue What to Do When the...

#AmWriting ·

2023/05/05

Dana Bowman is the author How to Be Perfect Like Me and Bottled Up: A Mom’s Guide to Early Recovery. She was the 2016 recipient of the Kansas Notable Book Award, making her the only podcast guest to share that distinction with me. What else do we share? The experience of feeling a level of exhaustion with the goals we’ve set for ourselves and the need to find our way back into the work. Links from the Pod Clifton Strengths The highly competitive Kansas Notable Book Award! Jon Acuff Becky

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41:35

Flashback Friday: Jodi Kantor Chases the Truth

#AmWriting ·

2023/04/28

Jess here! This week, I’m coming to you from somewhere in Indiana, tired but happy. Getting out on the road and speaking to students, teachers, and communities is both exhausting and incredibly invigorating, and this week I got to speak to a classroom of student writers, kids who are just learning about the basics of researching, writing, and even podcasting. There’s nothing I love more. When I’m in these classrooms, and especially when I’m talking to kids looking to change the world by writing

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36:04

358: Intoxication for Inspiration: Do drugs and...

#AmWriting ·

2023/04/21

As a former member of the “write drunk, edit sober” club, I thought it might be interesting to look at the research on alcohol, weed, stimulants and their effect on creativity so we can figure out what’s working for us, what’s not, and weigh the pros and cons of intoxication for inspiration. I cite a few studies in this episode and, for the #AmReading segment, share a few of my favorite books on the topic of writing and intoxication. A fun article about the Delphic Oracle in the New York

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39:59

357: The Anxious Writer: Turning fears into...

#AmWriting ·

2023/04/14

Actually, there is no action without anxiety. We all feel it, and we’re all driven by it—and almost no one is completely at peace with it. Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever and Hiding in the Bathroom: How to Get Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home), has been working for years to normalize those feelings and the spectrum on which they appear to bring mental health struggles out into the open and encourage people to rethink the relationship between their mental health and their

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18:35

356: Writerly Tech: the hardware, the software and...

#AmWriting ·

2023/04/07

We’ll admit it. We like our writerly gear. We get a little rush from visiting our favorite Vermont stationery store together. (In fact, we just did this last week.) But in all seriousness, we spend a lot of time on this job, so it’s good to figure out what works for us. Today Sarina takes us through her novel-writing tech stack. She covers hardware, software and the “why” behind the tools she chooses. Links for some of Sarina’s tech: Scrivener Keychron K series Keyboard Inexpensive ergonomic

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38:49

355: In My Expert Opinion: Pitching, Prepping, and...

#AmWriting ·

2023/03/31

Becoming an expert takes years of work and many of you have asked how you can take that expertise out for a spin in the media. I don’t blame you. From the moment the my first Atlantic article, “Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail” went viral in 2013, I was eager to get on television and radio so I could talk about my work, stir up interest in my topics, and hopefully maximize my chances of selling a book on the topic. One decade and two books later, I still pitch producers all the time about

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37:28

354: Good Writing Comes Last: the form and function...

#AmWriting ·

2023/03/24

Jess here, because I hate outlining. Hate it. It sounds boring and feels like an assignment, writing stripped of all flow and joy. I asked KJ and Sarina to help me with this problematic mindset, because my novel in progress clearly needs a solid outline and yet every time I go back to work on it, I feel irritated, frustrated and blocked. Thank goodness for my accountability buddies, because they came through for me in this episode. In fact, the moment we logged off the Zoom call, I got back to

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47:23

Sensitivity Reader Reboot: looking your topic from...

#AmWriting ·

2023/03/17

Recently, someone on Twitter asked if sensitivity readers are still a resource writers utilize and where to find them. Yes indeed, sensitivity readers are still a great resource, and since we interviewed Jordan Shapiro and a sensitivity reader he worked with on his book, Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist Dad. I hope you enjoy this re-airing of episode 266 the #AmWriting podcast. Hey all, Jess here. When I agreed to read and blurb Jordan Shapiro’s new book, Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist

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