After ten years of the #amwriting podcast, KJ, Jess, and Sarina are marking a milestone—and a transition. In this episode, the longtime hosts reflect on what the writing world looked like when the show began and share their best advice for writers trying to do meaningful work. They also pass the microphone to Jennie, who will carry the podcast into its next chapter.

Moving forward, Jennie will keep the show focused on helping writers do their best work and make smart decisions about their writing lives. Expect familiar features and new conversations, including Write Big solo episodes, Book Lab breakdowns of listener submissions, coaching sessions with writers across genres, and Margin Notes exploring the thinking behind creative choices.

The mission remains the same: helping writers play big in their writing life, love the process, and stick with it long enough to finish what matters most.

#AmWriting is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Transcript

Jennie: [00:00:00] Hi, I’m Jennie Nash and you’re listening to the hashtag am Writing podcast. The place where we help writers of all kinds play big in your writing life, love the process, and stick with it long enough to finish what matters most.

KJ: Hey everyone. I’m kj and you are listening to the hashtag am Writing podcast, the place where we help writers of all kinds play big in your writing life, love the process, and stick with it long enough to finish what matters most.

So today is a big day. We’re we’re

Jess: big day.

KJ: Yeah. We’re celebrating the 10th year of the hashtag am writing podcast, which I have to say is officially the longest I’ve been able to sustain any job-like thing. Um, and we’re announcing that we’re going in a new direction. So this is really cool. After a decade of talking to y’all, um, Jess and I and then [00:01:00] Sarina, who is at minus a decade. I don’t wanna, um, have decided to step back and hand over the reins to Jennie.

Jess: Yeah

Jennie: It is, it is such a big milestone and such a big deal. And before we. Actually say goodbye to the three of you. I mean, it’s not forever. You’re coming back as guests, all of you, all the time, hopefully.

KJ: Oh, heck yes. Absolutely. You, you, you and I have already planned all the things, so don’t get too excited and, and weepy here folks, but things are just, things are gonna be. New and fresh and more interesting and, uh, more craft filled and more inspirational. When I need inspiration to write, I look for one of our episodes.

That’s Jennie. So I think this is gonna be, this is gonna be great.

Jennie: I think it’s gonna be great too. But before we actually say goodbye, I mean, 10. Is a long time and I thought it would be fun to ask you all what it was like 10 [00:02:00] years ago when you started, and Sarina 10 minus whatever the time is, but what was the writing landscape like as a whole maybe for you, and then all this wisdom, all these years that you’ve shared.

What’s, what’s the thing that sticks in your head the most is what you would want to leave with, with the listeners, what is the your best piece of writing advice from all of this time? So. Jess, why don’t you start? You’re the og.

Jess: Well, I, I definitely wanted to start. For those people who have not been around since the very beginning, you have to understand that it’s really horrifying when people say they go back and like start from the beginning because, um, and we’ll be posting pictures in the show notes.

I have a ton of pictures throughout the years, but we originally, um, we, we would go into this little, I had a tiny, tiny house and we would go into the eve space off of my daughter’s room. And it was raw insulation with a light bulb, and we sat on the floor and it was [00:03:00] like. Maybe at the tallest point, maybe four feet high, so you had to kind of crawl in.

And I have a picture of us, um, podcasting from inside there. And it was, and it was very hot in the summer. It would get very, very hot. My house did not have air conditioning and um. But it was delightful and it was this thing that we had talked about doing for such a long time, and I was so proud of us.

And mainly it was kj. KJ was the one who said, we’re not gonna talk about this anymore, we’re just gonna do it. So she got us into gear and just brought her stuff over to my house in her basket and said, let’s go. Let’s do it. And we bought microphones and everything and it was. It was a big new adventure.

And if you had said, then, how long do you think this is gonna last? I don’t know that I would’ve said 10 years. But there’s, you know, then Sarina came in and, and Sarina has, has been a part of this as a guest since the very beginning too. And a couple of things that I wanted to share were that one time Sarina and KJ and I, uh, were doing a [00:04:00] double, a double header episode and I forgot to hit record for both of them.

And so. We did this incredibly fun, very long episode, broken into two pieces that, um, it went off into the ether and. I did learn from that. And then at the same time, by the time we were sort of on our game enough to be able to really interview people, we went up to Maine to interview Richard Russo and we went to record at his daughter’s wonderful bookstore in Portland, Maine.

And um, I had three modes of recording. I had, um. Two microphones and I had a handheld digital thing that I had on the table between us and, um, mode one failed and mode two failed. And so the only thing we had was, you know, our little digital handheld on the table in between us. So. There’s a lot of stuff like that.

There was the moment I got to text KJ and tell her that we were getting David [00:05:00] Sedaris, there was the day she emailed me to tell me that we were getting Anna Quinlan. You know, and I just so many cool things that, um. It makes me so happy that we’ve produced something good out of all of that. And one last thing.

The, the, the thing that I think I’ve learned the most is there is no one right way to do this. That every single time I hear about, like whether it’s the, you have to write, writer write every day, you have to write every day, or you have to write in a certain way, or you have to write in a certain place, or you have to write with the door closed, or you have to write with the door open, all of those things.

Um, none of those are rules. None of them are rules. They’re things that people do and I’m really glad that I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about all the different ways they do it.

Jennie: That’s amazing. Um, kj, do you remember this, uh, light bulb and no insulation time?

KJ: Oh yeah. I don’t remember the time you didn’t record particularly just ‘cause it happened more than once. And [00:06:00] the other thing I would throw in is that the more famous, the guest, the. Less interesting. They were, it was almost

KJ: always true.

Jess: It wasn them. It was, yeah. I think we got all jacked up about like, I don’t know. It just,

Jess: I don’t know.

Wasn David Sari’s advice to young writers was the worst.

KJ: Yeah. It advice really was

Jess: anyone has ever given, it

KJ: was,

Jess: yeah, a writer. He said, don’t submit your work. Don’t ask. Don’t try to get you, wait for people to read it. Wait for people to ask you if they can read it.

KJ: Yeah,

Jess: that’s which this, this is,

KJ: this worked for him. He is an NF one and it will not work for you.

Jess: Right. Yeah, I think that

KJ: my favorite, I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna lay it out there. I’m not even gonna put any caveats on that. That won’t work.

Jess It won’t work.

KJ: No. I think it’s always been the most fun when we get in deep into the craft and anytime someone is too practiced with their answers or it’s the same answer they’ve given a million times.

You’re [00:07:00] right. It was cold and it was, um, it just wasn’t good.

Sarina: Yeah. So the more fun people were always the people who were really in it with us.

KJ: Yeah. Yeah.

Jennie: So, Sarina, do you know when you came in, do you know what the, the n minus number is?

Sarina: No, because I was a guest star even before we got out of the, the, um, kgs closet.

It’s true. It’s true.

KJ: One of those not recorded episodes was recorded in the eve space. That’s true. We had, we roped during fairly early.

Jennie: Yeah. In that 10 years, you’ve probably written more. More than, well, how many books have you written in that time? Sarina, I mean,

Sarina: um, 50. At 50 50 ish.

Jennie: That’s crazy. That’s crazy. So what do you know now that you didn’t know then?

Sarina: Oh, so much, so much that, like giving advice, you know, I, I [00:08:00] now feel like less qualified to give advice than I did then, you know how that goes. Like, the job gets harder, not easier. I have a, a good working vocabulary for why, but it doesn’t make me feel like anybody’s, you know, special savior.

Jennie: Yeah. Yeah. What do you remember about starting...

10 Years of #amwriting: Looking Back and Moving Forward