This month, Lon, Janet and Marianne join JP and Crys for another book club, this time reading Story or Die by Lisa Cron. They discuss hot takes, useful advice, and how they will incorporate this book’s lessons into not only their author business, but their lives.
Show Notes
Story or Die by Lisa Cron
Her Last Tomorrowby Adam Croft
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune
Your Brand Should Be Gay (Even If You’re Not)by Re Perez
Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends. Welcome to the Write Away Podcast Episode 60. We’re here with our book club and we have read Story or Die by Lisa Cron. I’m Crys Cain and with me this month is…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Janet: Janet Kitto.
Lon: Lon Varnadore.
Marianne: Marianne Hanson.
Crys: So I have a confession about this book and that is that I didn’t realize it was a marketing book when we picked it. I just went, yeah, Lisa Cron, love her. Let’s do a craft book, yeah. It’s not a craft book. I figured that out very quickly.
JP: Yeah. You would be correct. It is not a craft book, but it does tell you how to tell compelling stories to your audience, or that you should, I guess. Not really how to, just that you should.
Crys: There’s some how-to, for sure. But a lot the importance of not telling terrible, not even stories, not having terrible information about anything. Sharing meaningful information, AKA stories.
Lisa Cron is a writing coach. This is a marketing book, I would say technically. And it is how to teach people something almost. How to compel them to do something. So this is really good, not just for marketing, but if you are a speaker of any sort, if you are selling anything, any time you’re trying to convince someone, parenting your child.
Marianne: Leader of a cult.
Crys: Absolutely. You can always take any kind of information and take it to cult level. That’s always a possibility. We trust Marianne to do this effectively. I actually last night used this, as my kid likes to just go on adventures by himself and we are in a hotel in Vegas, so that’s not advisable for a five-year-old. And he was messing with the door and rather than just be like, Hey buddy, we don’t do that because it’s not safe, I was like, ah, I shall tell him a story. Buddy, if you go out adventuring by yourself, you will be kidnapped by pirates and then you will never get to see me again. That is my story for him to convince him to not go adventuring on his own, rather than just telling him the result I want.
What is the hot take from everybody else other than manipulating your kids with pirate stories?
JP: So for me, I knew this, but it still hurt to hear that when it comes down to it, facts and data will never a win over a compelling story. Part of it is just my upbringing, my generation, we were brought up when the internet was becoming more of a thing. And so I distinctly remember how we were always like, check your sources, check your facts, and cite everything. And facts were way more important than anything else. And then this day and age… yeah. It’s a very much painful but true statement that I have taken into strong consideration.
Marianne: I don’t think she’s saying that there’s no place for facts. I think it’s about how we’re presenting them.
JP: Yeah. Yeah.
It’s more or less, the way that I took it was that a compelling story can supersede fact. And so someone who wants to convey facts and data, shouldn’t put that in the forefront of their conversation, but should more or less try to find ways to connect with people on an emotional level and then utilize that to leverage facts and data.
Crys: Yeah, I think at one point she says something like facts are meaningless without interpretation, and that’s where we run into trouble currently.
Lon: Just agree with what everyone is saying. And then also it was weird because she would present facts at the very beginning of things but she would tell us not to do this, so why are you doing it. And that’s the reason why that first part was just hard for me to get through. I listened to the first part in audio and just, I wanted to slam my head against the steering wheel several times because it was so boring.
Crys: You’re saying that it was hard to get through because the front end was all facts before she got to story?
Lon: Yeah, exactly. And she front loaded everything with facts and was like never do this, but here are all the facts. Nevermind.
Janet: She calls it data smog, and I get that. Your brain just goes on this neurological path and for some of us it’s not a fun trip. But I got excited about the I words. And when I say, I am talking about like capital I, identity. And I can talk about identity for a long time. And I won’t, but that was one thing that she constantly talked about, the identity of the person we’re trying to get this information to.
And the other one is intelligence. And in this context it’s about our ability to be understood. And I don’t retain facts in my head. That’s not how I’m wired. I can’t read a textbook and remember all the details, but when I can see and feel and understand what’s happening between me and the person I’m interacting with, those are the details that I’m going to remember. And that’s what I connected in this book was all of the ways that I can think about how that’s done.
Crys: Can you dig into that just a little bit more for readers who have not yet read this book?
Janet: I got excited about her take on intelligence because in the context that it’s talked about in this book, it’s the ability to make ourselves understood. And it’s not about how many facts I can take in, how many facts I can retain in my head, because that’s not how I’m wired. I can read a textbook and I can’t remember the facts.
So it’s about the intelligence, about how we read people, and how we interpret our lives through story. So if I can see something by what you’re telling me, if I can feel something, if I can understand that story, those are the details that I’m going to recall.
And I love that intelligence is looked at that way. Like we’re wired to read body language, we’re wired to understand emotional responses. And I liked that interpretation of intelligence in that way, because like I say, I’m not wired to remember all of the details. Put me on the spot and I’m going to feel this threatening thing that happens and shuts down my brain.
I love to think about how I can connect to other people through story.
Crys: Yeah. I think that is a thread in all of Lisa Cron’s books. And she recounted a story in this one that’s one of my favorite stories, I believe from Wired Stories, she also shares about a man who had a tumor in his brain, a benign tumor, but it was pressing on areas and eating into areas. I guess that’s not benign. Anyways, he had a tumor in his brain. And they cut it out and they had to cut out some damaged bits of his frontal lobe and afterward he tested the same on all of the intelligence tests and everything. And they thought he was fine until he just began royally screwing up his life.
And what they realized was, after taking him off disability because his intelligence level is still high and theoretically he should have been just fine, that because the areas that had been damaged, been cutaway, had been his emotional centers. And he no longer felt emotion. And when he was no longer able to feel emotion, he no longer could prioritize what might be more important than anything else.
And she really highlights in all of her work how important emotion is to being a human. And that I think is one of the threads that she really digs into and really hammers that. And JP said, like the hard part of the facts and logic are not the thing that convinced people. Even though as nineties kids, especially, I know that was something that was hammered into us. That’s what we needed to know. That’s what was going to convince people.
And she’s no, it’s not. And it’s not manipulative or to think that we have to use stories, it’s not a lesser way to reach people. It is the way to reach people. It is the historic way that we were built. And if we don’t reach people through stories, we’re kneecapping ourselves.
Marianne: This is really good. Mine brought up a question because at the very beginning, she talks about how we want to get lost in the story. And when people tell you a story, you relax and enjoy and lean into it. And all I thought about was, but what about all those people who then comment, on page 46 you missed a comma. And so at some point story does not completely take a person.
JP: I listened to a podcast after reading this, it was an interview. It was on the Write Now Workshop Podcast. And she talked about this a little bit. And really it was she’s a huge proponent of Seth Godin. She believes that newsletters are like your way to get your audience. And she is a very politically outspoken person. And she’s proud of that. And I think that also ties into what you’re talking about. I was like, you will get people that are not part of your group, some people use the word tribe. You will get people that are not part of that. And that’s not the audience you’re trying to speak to. You are using emotion to drive the story and the conversation. And I believe it was her, she was talking about how that emotion might be derisive, that emotion might cut some people off from the story that you’re trying to reach out to. And those people may interact. They may tell you that you have a comma missing on this page or something like that, but that’s not the audience you’re reaching out to.
And a part that I really liked about the conversation that she had, both in the book and then on this podcast, was really about how she doesn’t believe that authors should promote saying things like buy my book, but that they should promote themselves or like this authentic personality and utilizing story to drive a conversation. And then the audience, the fans, are the ones that promote and say buy this person’s book. Because you are basically selling yourself, selling the fact that you can tell story in some compelling emotive way. And then that is proof that other people will then use to be like, support this person, follow this person.
Janet: I don’t know. I feel like that might be a discussion that’s in the circles of people who are talking about author services more than they’re talking about readers, because I don’t want to tell someone to buy my book.
I want someone who’s read my book to say, I bought this book and I read it, and this is why I like it. That’s the only way we’re going to have more readers is to have the first reader talk to somebody else.
Crys: Yeah. Specifically with this grammar issue that comes up, and I do think that this does tie into Lisa Cron’s statements that you can’t appeal to everyone.
First of all, I have known many authors who I originally as a grammar nerd thought succeeded in spite of their massive grammar issues. And honestly, I almost sometimes think that those people succeed because not because nobody goes and reads a terrible li grammar written book. I can’t even speak in good grammar a book with terrible grades.
But it weeded out people who are going to be super nit-picky because they couldn’t get past the first bit, and only let people who are only 100% there for story and not any of the pretty trappings of prose out. Like they were out. And only let the people who are a hundred percent for the story in. I wouldn’t recommend that as a thing. But I think that sometimes happens. And I just recently looked up reviews on a recent book and someone was like, oh, I love this story, but it was riddled with so many grammatical errors. But they finished the story.
Marianne: Why don’t marketing books ever market books? Like this book talked about cars and talked about tampons and talked about different things like that. I would like a book where I don’t have to find a metaphor or how to have it apply to me through a roundabout way.
I would like a book that would just say, look authors, this won’t work for everyone. Or just to have an example of an author. And I often don’t see that in marketing books and things like that. Am I missing?
Crys: I honestly think that it’s because authors and publishers don’t know how to market and therefore we are terrible examples.
And I honestly, I think because for so long publishers didn’t sell to readers, they sold to bookstores. And now, only in the last 20 years ish, when did the Kindle come out, early 2000s, mid 2000s. So not even 20 years have we had direct sales to authors and let’s face it, we’re slow on the uptake. We’re a large majority introverts who really don’t like one, talking to people, two, selling our stuff, three, selling ourselves. So that’s all against us on how quickly we pick up good marketing tactics.
Janet: Marianne’s comment actually made me think about a craft book that we did read here on the book club and it was about sex and it had examples in there. I think that these types of books often fall to something that’s very mainstream and very short. If you haven’t seen the Always commercial, it’s something really easy to look up and get the gist of it really quickly. And maybe that’s why it just falls to something that’s about some kind of product we can buy rather than some kind of story we can write or read.
JP: Yeah. And I think too, this panders to a broader group than just authors. And especially if you can find short little examples that people can look up, then you’re going to hit those business people that want to use this in their marketing plan or something along those lines. So I think that makes sense when you speak to a broader audience, but I would love to see something very niche for authors. That would be wonderful.
Marianne: Or just one of the examples be an author. Like we can keep the tampons, I believe in keeping tampons, but if we could add an author as well.
Crys: I think most of the time authors don’t know why they end up selling what they sell. I think one of the only examples I know of an author who crafted their hooks so strongly and it succeeded is Adam Croft’s Would You Kill Your Wife To Save Your Daughter? And that’s not even getting into this whole identity, like that’s a completely different kind of marketing. And that’s the only way that authors are taught, like you have to have a really hooky story. But not all of us want to write hooky stories. And that’s where I think that this book actually is starting to unlock some of what I think I need to market in a way that is both useful and healthy for me.
Marianne: I know a lot of actors make fun of Matthew McConaughey, his Lincoln town car commercials. But I think at the same time they do sell because they have a story with them in a way.
So would it work for a book if I just had Matthew McConaughey in the passenger seat of a Lincoln town car reading my book?
JP: Yes.
Marianne: Okay. I’m going to call him.
Crys: Yeah. I think you really just need to see what kind of relatives you have who are actors and stuff, and be like, yo, I can’t pay you for product placement, but if you don’t have my book sitting on set as an option, I’m going to really be really upset.
JP: One of the things I like to do is follow the authors that I read and see what they’re doing, why they hooked me into reading their stuff. And only because I recently listened to an interview, TJ Clune’s House in the Cerulean Sea, and then some of the other books that are coming out. I really like his approach on how he tells his own story. And it explains why he writes the things that he writes. And he focuses more on that as opposed to buy my book. But he talks about how House in the Cerulean Sea, his upcoming Under The Whispering Door, and then the third one that’ll come out next year. So all about different versions of kindness and how that’s being expressed.
And that simple explanation, that own story of how these three that have nothing to do with each other but hold that strong theme, is enough to hook me to be like, yeah, other people need to buy this book because it’s amazing. So that’s the kind of things that I do is I look at those authors that hook me in and see how they’re not saying buy my book, but saying, buy my book.
Crys: Yeah. She uses the example of Diet Coke getting an advertising scheme miserably wrong. And I’m going to try and tell it in short, but we’ll see how successful I am. But basically they told themselves a story about their customer base. And that story was that people were embarrassed to be drinking Diet Coke, that it was a secret thing.
And so they crafted this whole campaign about how, I drink Diet Coke because I can do whatever I want and nobody can do anything about that. Like you want to run a marathon? Okay. Whatever. Like I want to drink Diet Coke. And it made it this weird thing that put the idea into people’s heads that, oh, should I be embarrassed about drinking Diet Coke? Is that a thing that’s out there? When they had never thought that before. And I can’t remember what it was about how she discussed that the fallout and like what the company could have done instead.
But there was something about that example that kind of nailed it for me about understanding who my reader is. Not because I want to write my story necessarily to answer a problem for them, but so that I know, and like I’ve known this, and saying this is going to fall flat because I feel like I’ve known this, but there’s something that unlocked in my head and I haven’t quite parsed it out yet.
But knowing what my readership, what my audience wants in their life, what they want to feel emotionally, the kinds of goals they have, and then how buying my books gives them a piece of that. And I feel like that’s really just vague saying it like that, which is another thing she preaches against, but I don’t have specific words yet.
I have not intellected on that far enough.
Lon: There actually was a little bits of things mostly because of the marketing aspect and trying to figure out who it is that I would want to sell to, the “tribe” that I’m trying to find type of thing.
There were little bits and pieces throughout that I could parse out and think, okay, we could probably do something with that, I could do something with that, I could do something with that. And I will actually stay that there was one thing I remember something about the whole digging deeper into your story, which is something you’ve heard numerous times. Just randomly, I was thinking about this story way in the back of my head and followed a plot thread and came home and wrote a bunch of notes for it that completely changed how it was going to go from the original.
There are some good parts in it for me at least.
Crys: Do you remember any of the specific bits that you were interested in taking and running with?
Lon: I think the what, like what is it that you’re trying to sell? And just drilling down into trying to figure out who it is that you want to sell to.
Crys: Yeah. The thing that I’m really interested in going back through this book and wrestling with is ,what is my customers’ or readers’ hidden resistance to buying one of my books? What is it that would keep them from buying one of my books? That is an interesting thought for me as a writer, because the easy answer is it costs money and they need to spend that on necessities. But the thing is readers will drop ridiculous amounts of money regardless of how much their grocery bill needs that money that month.
So what is it that keeps them from buying my book? Don’t have any answers. So that’s a question that I’m going to be grappling with.
Janet: Yeah. And I’ve been turning that into the what, into the why, because you can’t just know the what, unless you know the why.
Crys: Yeah. Why, why do they feel this way?
Marianne: I’ve been hesitant to say this in case, but you know what, let’s see what comments happen. So I have been wanting to write a romance for a long time, but I haven’t because I thought, oh, romance is fluffy. And I won’t be able to get the point across that I want to get across because people will be paying attention to the whole boy meets girl part. And not the point that I’m actually trying to get across. And my friend, she looked at me and she’s, why do you think that? I honestly don’t know. I’m sure I could lie down on a couch and figure it out.
But it was interesting because somebody was over at our house and they said that they liked writing and then asked me what genre. And so I just said, because I wasn’t sure if what I’m writing is going to be clarified as like chiclet women’s fiction or romance, so I just said romance. And I’m going to get used to it. And he said, oh I’m really not into that. I like to read and write science fiction. And the thought that came to me really fast was, but every story has romance in it.
Every story has a relationship and whether or not you would clarify it as romance or not, you need to figure that out. And all of a sudden it opened up my eyes and showed me that it doesn’t matter the genre I’m in if I can tell the story correctly. And then part of me wants me to write under the genre of romance and then have the goal of having stories that teach certain things and then say screw you, romances can teach something. But maybe screw you is not the right phrasing when discussing romances.
Crys: Screw you is great. Sub-genres of romance. That’s going to be great. This relates both to romance and to the stories that readers believe about themselves and what it actually means.
One of the things Lisa Cron talks about quite a bit is particularly with that. Why aren’t you using this product or why aren’t you buying this book? The customer doesn’t actually know. They will have a story for why they don’t do that thing, but it’s often not the actual reason. And Cron talks about how you try and learn your customer so well that you know them as well as they know themselves. And you have the added benefit of being on the outside looking in. So you’re not blinded by your story about yourself. You’re looking at someone’s story about themselves and being able to see the hidden stuff. And there’s this TikToker and I’m going to link this video that I’m talking about in the show notes, who does the deep, psychological wise that readers are drawn to specific tropes. For instance, like one of them is oh, you like the morally gray hero, is that because you’ve never had anyone stand up and go to the ultimate lengths to protect you before? And she just pokes holes at what different tropes might mean for the people who love them because they are answering a need for someone.
And I think that’s actually really pertinent to this conversation about one, why we as writers, write the things that we do? They’re answering an emotional need for us. And two, our readers are also responding to that emotional need that they have.
Janet: And I don’t think it’s just like you make one point in your book and that’s the point that all of your readers are going to connect with. You keep hitting the same conflict over and over in different ways. And so that’s why you have so many people that can connect to the same book.
Someone’s going to connect to something that’s said on page 79, and then someone else is going to not connect until the end of the story. So I think like we get too wrapped up as the writers, we get too wrapped up in thinking this is what my story is about, this is the theme, and that’s what I want readers to connect to. And that’s who I’m writing this for that target audience. But the truth of the matter is you don’t know on the page where you’ve stripped down your reader’s vulnerability, that they’re going to connect to that one point.
Crys: Yeah. In the beginning of the book, she uses an example of, and I’m not going to even be able to remember the TV show that this was related to, but like a documentary teaching movie that it was either about childbirth or birth control, like something in that realm of teaching you a scare tactic of here are the side effects of this or that and you should do whatever. Just straightforward facts, giving them a rule. And it didn’t really change a lot of minds. Because we all, as individuals, believe like we’re not dumb. We’re not gonna be the one who’s caught up in the statistics. We’re going to be the ones who are fine.
But then there was a TV show where the characters had to grapple with whatever that issue was. They had to discuss between themselves what they were going to do in the heat of the moment with this happening to themselves. And that TV show may not have had a, you the viewer should do this, it left it open-ended, but it made people dig deeply enough in the issue and feel the issue deeply enough that they then made a change or had an opinion about it at the very least.
JP: That’s what we do as writers, basically. We’re not throwing facts. We’re not throwing that our theme is kindness. But we have, for me, I like to know why I’m writing something. May not be something that resonates for someone else, but it’s my emotional anchor for the purpose of the piece that I’m writing.
And then I use that to drive the choices that the characters are going to make, but I’m not. Bashing the theme into the story. I’m not restating it over and over again. I’m showing what that looks like through action and through story. And I think that’s how we do it as authors. That’s how we convey whatever we want to say to the world. And we already do it through story. So that’s my 2 cents
Marianne: I think lately what I’ve been thinking about as to why I’m a writer and why I enjoy writing so much, I don’t know about you guys, but I get that question a lot. And I think it is in some ways, just because people don’t understand how important story is. And part of the reason why I’m a writer is I want people to understand how important story is. Because no one’s going to change their mind because of a rant someone does on social media. If anything, it would probably just make you stay firmer in your own belief than anything else.
But then when you hear the story of someone, then you can understand them better. And in fact, I was on a tour, and there’s very few Americans, it was mostly people from other countries, and somebody asked another person why they voted a certain way in the United States.
And at the end of this person telling what I essentially would have called his story, the other person said, I don’t agree with you, but I do understand you. And that would never have happened had the person giving his viewpoint said I believe that everyone who doesn’t own a build-a-bear is satanic, something to that extent.
I tried to make that as impossibly…
It’s really hard to think of a sentence that won’t inspire a debate over something. And I’m sure somebody is out there who probably does believe that people who don’t own build-a-bears are satanic. I own one. I just want to go on the record.
Janet: Do you believe then that people don’t listen until they’d been heard?
Crys: Yes. 100%. Yeah. I actually have been studying and practicing something called Nonviolent Communication for over a year. And it’s built on that premise as well, that people are unable to hear you until they feel heard. And I practice it with my kid all the time. And we like to think that adults are more logical than that, but they aren’t. And until someone feels that you’ve heard their pain and that you’re taking that into account, they’re not going to listen. Absolutely. I would agree with that.
How does that apply to storytelling and marketing? Figuring that out, storytelling, I feel like that is what gives us characters of depth when we dig into pain that isn’t ours and attempt to understand it.
Marketing wise, I don’t know. What is that pain that our readers are not buying our books? What is keeping them from it? Is the pain that didn’t run it through an extra copy editor and I just happened to have a Legion of grammar nerds who wants to read my books, but can’t? Is that the pain? Probably not, but it’s possible.
Is the pain simply that they don’t understand the emotion that my book will deliver and that it matches the emotion they want to feel. I don’t know. That is the thing that I’m really interested in spending time with thinking about readers specifically.
JP: So as a buyer of books, and this may be skewed because I write them as well. But my ideal author is someone who has an opinion that they’re not afraid to share. And that opinion is closely aligned to mine, if not a strong opinion that I can then read to understand why. But like the stuff that I enjoy to read is the queer stuff, it’s the stuff that talks about like those deep emotions.
And so I seek out authors that really are more present in their social media, because those are the ones that I enjoy when I see the face behind who wrote it. And so that’s how I seek out who I read and that obviously doesn’t resonate with a lot of other readers. But I know that there is a huge community of people that are very similar to me who are looking for that front-facing author, who wants to see the face of the person that put those words down so that you have that connection, especially with those topics.
So I think that it’s all dependent on what do you want to say? And then how much does that audience wants to interact? Because if I’m thinking of post apoc I’m thinking of people that don’t really want to see your face, they’re not interested in that part.
When you’re talking about the stuff that I want, we want that community, we want to see each other, we want to be able to interact. And that may not be true, but that’s what I’m seeing is that, especially with post apoc, it’s more of that kind of distance. So I think that it’s dependent on what the message is that you want to bring to the table.
Crys: So for this book, who would you recommend this book for?
Marianne: This has nothing to do with writers, but when I was reading it, part of me wanted to send it to a few people who are very actively trying to persuade people in political arenas. And I wanted to send it to them and say, you’re not going to do this unless you start using stories. Until you start telling people why you feel the way you do and what has happened in your life so that people can understand you better. Because otherwise you just don’t want to hang out with them or be around them. But if you can get that understanding, and I feel like I would love everyone to understand how important story is because of how right now we’re relying so much on facts and figures, but they’re not facts and figures. Somebody else is behind it creating the story which is part of what the problem we’re having now with all of the social media and with everything that’s happening is that our lives are so controlled by story.
And until we’re able to see that, we’re able to see that whatever we feel is truly subjective, I think that there’s going to continue to be a disconnect and an inability for people to communicate with each other. And so I want to give it to everyone who’s coming to the family reunion in 2023. I think that might help just a little bit.
Crys: I’d want to be selective about what politicians I gave this to, just saying.
Janet: There’s a story in this about a politician and that politician wasn’t being effective telling his story. He had to look at what the story was of the people he was trying to reach. And so it was about the dirt road. He had to talk about winning those people over because no one had paved that road.
Crys: So yeah, there’s another anecdote, it was not referenced in this book as far as I can remember, specifically about World War Two. And I forget what the filmmaker’s name was, but he worked for the Nazis and the. Someone on our side. I wish I could remember details better, but again, the story is the important part.
Now the details, someone in the US was like, if we do not combat that man’s movies and stories with our own movies and stories, we will lose the war right there because his movies were so well done and so beautiful. And the stories were wonderfully told, but they were pro Nazi. And that’s the power of a well-told story is it brings you to understand a viewpoint that you may never have considered before for good or for ill.
These tactics are morally neutral. It’s just our job to use them to better the world rather than destroy it.
Lon: I would definitely not think that it’s something for beginners. This is something that you want to do after you’ve written and just fully gotten even a few books under you, and know, and have an idea of what your sort of idea of what you are, what it is that you’re trying to tell, before wanting to actually read this book.
JP: I tie this book really closely with Your Brand Should Be Gay because I felt like this was very much a branding thing. I would recommend this book to all millennials because I felt shortchanged until I read this book a little bit. But realistically, I think anyone that is looking to find a way to reach an audience while being front-facing should probably read this book at some point or another. I think that this book really shines when it comes to promoting your brand and like that short, like here’s who I am way. I don’t know if it’s going to be for everyone, but that’s how I’m taking it is how to utilize emotion and story to get people to connect with you as a person. And then through that become interested in your fiction.
Janet: Yeah. And I think it would be a good book for anyone that thinks, I don’t know how to connect emotionally to my readers, like I just write. And I think that there’s a lot of good passages in the book to show how it’s just part of our DNA. It’s nothing that you have to go figure out, it’s programmed in you already. That’s just how we respond to other people. And it’s just a way to look at brain science too, which is always fun.
Crys: Yeah, brain science is awesome. I agree with Lon that I don’t think that this is a beginning authors marketing book.
I’m in year five and still feel as if I’m just almost grasping onto how these concepts can apply practically. Like I’ve grasped them on the high level of, oh, of course this works, but bringing it down to how it can work for me and my books, but on a practical level, I’m only beginning to be able to like fully getf ahold of that.
But I’d also recommend it to anyone who just feels like they’re misunderstood a lot of the time. Because chances are there’s a few things. One, you could be around terrible people who are willfully misunderstanding you. There’s very little you can do about that.
But two, you may just be terrible at explaining yourself. You may be leading on only logic without using the story to bring someone along on the journey on something that’s important enough that they need to understand you. And so that’s who I think ought to read this book. I don’t know if telling my kid that pirates are going to kidnap him is entirely ethically sound but it seems to have worked. And rather than have him run out into the Las Vegas Boulevard, I think that’s a win.
Marianne: I still don’t cross my eyes for over a minute because they’ll stay that way.
Crys: There. Yeah. It’s only recently that I’ve stopped being worried about swallowing watermelon seeds and risking a watermelon growing up out of my stomach.
All right, friends, thank you for joining us for this book club. Once again, we are going to ask our dear members to share where you can find them. Marianne?
Marianne: You can find me at MarianneHansenAuthor on Instagram.
Crys: Excellent. Lon?
Lon: You can find me on Instagram at dragolite36.
Crys: Janet?
Janet: You can find me on a beach. Woo. But actually, JanetKitto.com.
That’s the easiest way to just find out where I’m hanging out, but usually a beach is a good guess.
Crys: Yeah. Excellent. JP?
JP:
Sure. Why not? I’m most active on Instagram. JP_Rindfleisch. R I N D F L E I S C H. If you can spell Fleischmans vodka, you can spell Rindfeisch.
Crys: Normally I’m on TikTok, except for this summer where I’ve just been on the road and not posting much, but hopefully that will change.
We will be reading, Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker.
Lon’s already giving me the thumbs down. He is our resident pantser.
Janet: Apparently he’s not!
Crys: He likes his pants off. No, he likes his pants on. I don’t know. I’m very confused now.
Janet: He wants us to think that.
Crys: He’s really a plotter. Excellent.
JP: Good old no pants Lon over there.
Crys: I need more coffee for this.
Next month we will be recording again. If you’d like to join us, please check out the link to our Patreon where you can have access to join us for these conversations live as well as help us pick out the book for November.
Thanks so much for joining us and we’ll see you all again next week.
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