Strong Verbs And Hard Truths. Good Writing With Anne Lamott and Neal Allen

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Episode: Strong Verbs And Hard Truths. Good Writing With Anne Lamott and Neal Allen
Date: March 23, 2026 | Host: Joanna Penn | Guests: Anne Lamott & Neal Allen

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the craft of writing strong sentences, the importance of authentic voice, and sustaining a writing practice through uncertainty and self-doubt. Joanna Penn interviews Anne Lamott—renowned author of "Bird by Bird"—and Neal Allen, her husband and co-author, about their new book Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences. The conversation covers practical editing, trusting your unique voice, writing through difficult times, and the hard truths of sustaining a writer’s life and career.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rule 1: Use Strong Verbs

• Editing for Power: Anne and Neal emphasize reviewing your manuscript sentence by sentence during revision to strengthen verbs, cutting weak language for clarity and vividness.
  • Anne: “One place to start is to notice how weak our verbs are...if I say Joe lurched towards us across the lawn...right away you’ve improved the sentence.” (25:06)
  • Neal: “Strong verbs often preclude the need for an adjective or adverb...if I say ‘I trudged,’ it’s shorter than saying ‘I walked slowly and depressed.’” (26:43)

2. Writing Process and Collaboration

• The couple’s co-authoring approach is conversational, blending Neal’s structure and explanation with Anne’s encouragement and emotional resonance.
  • Anne: “Neil is an explainer and he’s like an ATM of information. And I am the class den mother who brings treats… Mine is always, ‘You can really, really do this, trust me…’” (31:58)
  • Neal: “It was pretty serendipitous...I set out the rule, I explain the rule, and Annie drives it toward catharsis and usefulness.” (29:47)

3. Rule 8: Trust Your Voice

• Finding Voice: Both acknowledge it takes time and repetition—often years—for writers to find and trust their authentic voice.
  • Neal: “Malcolm Gladwell’s...10,000 hours of repetitions before something can just flow...for most people it is a hell of a lot of repetitions.” (32:31)
  • Anne: “Our voice is good enough. It’s hard to believe. If you have a story to tell me, I just want you to tell me your story...I can probably go through and help you maintain your voice while making the writing stronger by following certain really basic rules.” (33:57–35:59)

4. Writing Through Hard Times & Self-Doubt

• Routine and Reality: The guests advocate forging routines that include daily writing, even when the world feels dark or one’s role as a writer feels unimportant.
  • Neal: “I am not going to let the external world ruin my day...I am perfectly productive without having to say I should be more productive and more concerned about the foibles of the species.” (39:55)
  • Anne: “I get outside every day because that is the most nourishing, spiritually reset button I can get to...and I really recommend that to writing students: write down what you do every day and in it figure out at least one pod—a 45 minute pod—where you can get a little bit of writing done.” (41:45)

5. Sustaining the Writing Life

• Hard Truths: The writing life is difficult. Success in publication is rare and fleeting, and the love of the process—not external validation—must sustain a writer.
  • Anne: “Nobody cares if you write, and so you had better...the horrible thing is that you just have to keep setting aside...an hour...that will give you maybe 40 minutes of actual writing…” (57:26)
  • “If the carrot that is enticing you to get any work done is publication and finding an agent and getting published, it’s not going to happen for you...but if your dream is to become a writer and to become a member of the writing community...you just keep pushing back your sleeves and keep your butt in the chair.” (60:42)

6. On Writing "The Hard Stuff"

• Truth-Telling: Anne explains that writing her particular “truthiest truth” is her calling, while encouraging others to write what they most love to come upon.
  • Anne: “I’ve always told my writing students to write what they would love to come upon, because then they’re creating it...my calling is that I love to write about real life and I use my immediate experiences of daily living...” (52:14)

7. Humanism in Writing and Being “Cancelable”

• Neal: “The authors who I respect the most tend to be humanists, and humanists tend not to be canceled.” (54:09)
• The conversation recognizes the risk and courage needed to write honestly in a culture of judgment.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Anne Lamott:
  “What is fun about writing is to have spewed out something on the page and then to get to go back...and start cleaning it up a bit, straightening it out, probably inevitably shortening it. And one place to start is to notice how weak our verbs are.” (25:06)
• Neal Allen:
  “A writer is first concerned about the puzzle of a sentence, second concerned about the flow or paragraph, really, and only thirdly concerned about the subject matter.” (46:38)
• Anne Lamott:
  “I don’t find it all that fun. And I never find it fun and easy...I think that’s an illusion...becoming a writer is unlearning what you thought it meant.” (49:11)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [24:19] – Interview begins: Use strong verbs
• [26:43] – Strong verbs vs. adverbs/adjectives
• [29:47] – Writing as a couple; collaborative process
• [32:05] – On trusting and finding your voice (Rule 8)
• [39:23] – Writing through dark times; daily routines
• [46:10] – The “hardness” of writing and why it matters
• [51:41] – Writing truthfully in an age of judgment
• [54:09] – Humanism and “cancelation”
• [57:26] – Tips for longevity as a writer; real-life realities
• [61:43] – Closing: Where to find the book and authors online

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Resources / Where to Find More

• Book: Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences by Anne Lamott & Neal Allen (Penguin Avery; released March 17, 2026)
• Web:
  • Neal Allen: shapesoftruth.com
  • Anne Lamott: Substack, Facebook (@annelamott)
  • Book available at all major retailers (including Penguin Random House, Amazon, and others)

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Final Thoughts

Joanna concludes by reflecting on the inspiring perspective of veteran writers:
“We write because we think in words on the page... or we have stories we want to tell. This is what we do.” (63:26)

For more practical writing wisdom and inspiration, listen to the full episode or check out the authors’ latest book.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Creative Penn Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots [e-mail] and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show. Hello Creatives, I'm Johanna Penn and this is episode number 855 of the podcast and it is Monday 23rd of March 2026 as I record this just a bit late as I just got back from a research trip to Paris. So in today's show I'm talking to the wonderful Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird, which I am sure most of you have read, and her husband and fellow writer Neil Allen. We talk about their new book Good Writing and discuss how to write strong sentences, how to keep writing when the world feels dark, how to push past self doubt, build a sustainable writing practice and trust that your voice is enough. And given that I am recording this just before publishing it because of a few days off, here's an appropriate quote from Anne herself. Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes and including you. So yes, sometimes we need time to unplug and I certainly feel better and refreshed and I will tell you a bit more about that in the Personal section and the interview with Anne and Neil is coming up in the Interview section in Writing in Publishing well, the big news this week was traditional publisher Hachette cancelling the book contract for author Mia Ballard for her book Shy Girl, which was reported in lots of places after the news York Times suggested the book was written with AI and the I think the most thorough and as ever the most even handed article written about this is from the New Publishing Standards Mark Williams, which I'll link to in the show notes. So the book was originally self published and so successful that the author was offered a traditional deal, but after the New York Times article it was cancelled for alleged undeclared AI use in the manuscript. The author has said that she did not write the book using AI and a freelance editor she engaged may have used AI tools without her knowledge or consent. She's pursuing legal action and little more has been said publicly for that reason. So we're not debating what happened because that is unclear. But whatever the truth, it has exposed a few things about the industry. As Mark says of Hachette, did anyone there actually read the manuscript with critical attention or did the self publishing sales figures do the reading for them. And also if you believe that AI will never write as good as a human, no one will ever buy anything written by AI and nobody wants AI writing, then what is the problem? Because no one would buy the AI written book, no publishers would contract the book, and we certainly wouldn't need to label anything as AI written because the quality is so bad, it's obvious from one single fleeting glance. And whether this book was co written with AI or edited with AI tools, well it was good enough to sell lots as a self published book, which is why a traditional publisher, Hachette bought it in the first place. So it should bring up questions in people's minds in general. Mark also tackles the issue of AI detection tools which have an incredibly high level of false positives. So you can upload a book written years before AI into the many of these tools which will be flagged as AI generated. Some of these tools have flagged the Declaration Declaration of Independence as AI generated all parts of the Bible and our work is in the training data. So if you upload one of my books written before 2022, when generative AI hit the mainstream, you're going to most likely find some of it is marked as AI generated, even though it's not so. I've always used EM dashes for example, and I continue to use them. I will not give up my EM dashes. I know many of you also will not give up your EM dashes. So although I must say I do second guess it sometimes. But often things EM dashes I out, my editor, human editor Kristin, puts them back in again and will sometimes leave a comment about, you know, this is a place where an EM dash is necessary. So yes, it's very important I think that we don't use these AI detection tools as a witch hunt thing because of the false positives. And as Mark says in this article, the continuum from Grammarly to Hemingway app to full AI generation is not a series of clean steps. It is a blurred gradient. Nobody has a reliable instrument for measuring position on it. And of course we all sit somewhere on that spectrum. As you know, I use AI tools for some things and not for others. I am not generating AI books, full AI books, but I certainly use AI tools in my creative and business processes. And many of these tools incorporate aspects of AI somewhere. If you're using Grammarly, if you're using ProWritingAid, if you're using Microsoft Word, if you're using Google Search, I mean there's just so much of it now incorporates some aspects. If you think of the Continuum. That's the line we're talking about. But going back to traditional publishing, I would say if you want a traditional publishing deal, then don't use AI writing. It is that simple. But as Mark says, publishing contracts need to extend their AI disclosure requirements beyond the author to every professional in the editorial chain, including their own people. Since, as I mentioned last week, traditional publishers are certainly incorporating AI into different parts of the business. The New York Times, even though they are anti AI in the actual writing, and they have, they do have an AI policy on their website and they do use AI tools as part of their in other parts of their business. Also, I find it quite amusing that Pangram, the tool that the New York Times used to assess the book, actually uses AI to assess manuscripts. So by uploading a manuscript, you're uploading it into an AI tool. And you can go to pangram.com research howitworks. I'll link to this in the show notes to actually see how they're using AI to assess AI. I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm just saying I think that how this is all being bandied around now is becoming kind of increasingly ridiculous. But I would just say, you know, if you do want a traditional publishing deal, just stay away from using AI in your creative process. I don't think it's that difficult. On other traditional publishing things, there's an interesting interview with John Yagit, CEO of macmillan, on the David Perel podcast. And remember, publishing is an industry that sells books. It is the business of selling books. That is what they do. So a few things from the interview. A book is considered back catalogue after just one year. Anything older than a year is classified as backlist. And this older catalogue makes up about half of Macmillan's entire business. Because the marketing budget has mostly been spent and the paperback printing costs are lower. Backlist books are highly profitable and act as a financial annuity for publishers. So I think that's very true for indie authors as well. Building up a backlist as we talk about means you have more baseline revenue each month. Even if you do absolutely nothing at all, there should still be some baseline revenue. Of course, that's not a hard and fast rule, but it's certainly something that happens as long as you're touching the flywheel in some way. I guess for me, I touch the flywheel of my business by doing this podcast every week, and that results in some book sales somewhere sometime, as well as all my other marketing efforts, of course. Also in this interview, in terms of the business model they say On a standard $30 book, and this is a US publisher on a standard $30 book, the retailer Barnes and Noble or Amazon or whatever takes more than 15%. So as a starting point, the publisher receives less than 50 cents of every dollar of the book cover's price. And this is exactly one of the reasons that many of us do not seek out sales in, because it is the same for us. I actually had met a bookseller here in Bath the other week and I said, well, why would I want to distribute my books into bookstores when I have to do 55% discounting? I mean, I know it works for some people, absolutely works for some people. But for most of us Indies, the 55% discounting is uncomfortable and obviously for publishers as well, because you have to make a heck of a lot of money back to make it worth the marketing side. One thing he said that I also think is not necessarily true is he said this is the CEO of Macmillan and I mean, why should he know this? But he said well over 95% of sales for successful self published authors come from ebooks, whereas ebooks make up only 30% of sales for best selling traditional fiction. So this is interesting to me because I think you can segment indie authors now. I think those of us who sell direct do much more in print. So in terms of my own 2025 book sales revenue, so this is only book sales revenue which I shared in detail on my Patreon a few months back, 29% of my revenue is paperback and 11% is hardback. So that's 40% in print. In total, 35% ebook, 18% audio and the rest bundling rights, licensing, etc. And the bundles obviously include some print and some digital. So yeah, I think he's wrong there. So ebooks are 35% for me, which I guess is more equivalent to his 30% of sales for best selling traditional fiction. There you go. But I would say that indie selling direct, whose print sales far outstrip their digital. In fact they're almost negligible digital sales compared to print. But I think traditional publishing just, well firstly doesn't take us that seriously. Plus selling direct does not come up in any statistics at all. So Bookscan, which they use, does not pick up kickstarters or shopify sales or payhip or local fairs or hand selling. So you just wouldn't know about most indie authors print sales because they're not at all registered in any statistics. So if you see statistics in anything traditional, traditional papers like the New York Times, the Guardian, Traditional publishers like this, there's no way of them knowing this. So amongst indies, this is more of a, I guess, anecdotal discussion. And back to the interview, they talk about AI use. Yes, they do. Not in writing, but they say AI is highly effective as a Google on steroids research assistant to synthesize information and can be a massive asset for marketing by helping you write promotional summaries and continually tweaking your metadata and keywords to keep older books discoverable in search algorithms. Yes. Yet again, AI used to do promotional summaries and metadata now, and I just want to point out once more that to get a promotional summary of a book, you need to upload that book. So I just, I just find it so interesting how the discussion on this is not acknowledging the technical way that these tools are used and they must be uploading books into AI systems in order to get promotional summaries and metadata. That's just the way it works. So, yeah, that's interesting. I did think one very pleasant surprise was he said, by using AI for demand forecasting, Macmillan printed 1 million fewer unnecessary copies in a single year, saving tremendous costs and trees. So that's very, very good. So using AI and demand forecasting, which means how many books do we think we're going to sell of this copy? And the traditional publishing industry is not very green in general, because if you print a hundred thousand books and then 50,000 sell, you have to pulp another 50,000. And so all the books in the world don't just sit in warehouses waiting to be sold. Many of them are pulps and that is not very green and lots of them shipped around the world and all of that. So doing this kind of demand forecasting means they are printing fewer unnecessary copies. So that is great. A very interesting interview. A behind the scenes sort of discussion of the publishing industry with Macmillan CEO John Yaged on the David Perel podcast. In personal news. Yes, Jonathan and I had a lovely few days in Paris. We stayed on the Rive Gauche, the Left bank, and we got the Eurostar over. It's extremely easy. If you're in the UK and you want to go to France, it's extremely easy to just get the Eurostar. It's much easier than flying. Much more pleasant, really. So, yes, we went over on the train and stayed just near Notre Dame on the banks of the Seine and the weather was fantastic, 17 degrees centigrade, whatever that is in Fahrenheit. And we walked a lot along by the water in the sun and we ate Bertillon ice cream from the Ile St. Louis. And if you go to that area, Bertillon is just still some of the best ice cream in the world. Does not disappoint. And I did some book research for Crown of Thorns, which will be my Arcane, my 14th Arcane thriller coming up at some point, probably next year to be honest, at this rate. But at Notre Dame, which is where the circlet of reeds relic is held and venerated, all the thorns were taken off, but it is the circlet of reeds, supposedly, allegedly. And we also went to Sainte Chapelle, which was built for the relic originally, and did some other things and just generally it was wonderful to get away. We really needed a break and there are some photos on Instagram and Facebook fpent author if you want to have a look. So as I said, that book is a while away. I have a few things to finish in the meantime, I have to get back to my master's degree. I have some essays to finish and a dissertation to research and write. In terms of my own writing, I did publish just before I went away, I published the Black Church, my Iceland short story inspired by my visit to the actual black church last year. And what happens when a doubting priest stays there for a solo retreat and the northern lights appear and lots of things happen and he realizes there might be something older than God there. So it is human narrated by me. If you'd like to listen to the audio, it is also in my collection the Buried and the Drowned. If you are interested in that or if you've read it before. I always appreciate reviews. So wherever you buy it or wherever you review Goodreads, that would be much appreciated. If you would like to buy it and read it as a standalone story, jfpenn.com blackchurch or just wherever you get these things. The Black Church by J.F. penn and excitingly, I also I got back and there was the proof copy of Bones of the Deep, the gorgeous hardback. I am super thrilled with my end papers. I had to do a few changes to those, but I just love them. And yeah, I'm really thrilled with it and I just need to finish the audio. The direction of the audiobook. I'm using my voice clone from 11 Labs, the same voice you heard in last week's episode. If you enjoyed that, and many of you did. I'll talk about that in a minute, but I need to do the book trailer. I need to do the launch video. My plan is still to launch after Easter. So just after Easter weekend, the Kickstarter will include a discovery writing webinar again as well as because that was that was really fun. I really enjoyed doing that and I actually by doing a discovery webinar myself and we do lots of writing in that webinar. I get to work on my own stuff so I'll be doing that webinar. There will be some limited consulting slots if you want a session with me and of course the book in all the usual formats plus bundle deals and add ons. So that's at jfpen.com forward/bones if you want to be notified on launch. Depending on when you're listening to this, it'll probably launch around the I don't know, 8th of April ish sometime around then. So yes, thanks for all your emails and comments and photos this week. And in fact last week's episode on character tips received the most comments ever. I mean seriously, I was just so thrilled because what happened when social media really became a thing? I don't know what, 15 years ago, 1015 years ago website comments dropped off. So back in the day when I started blogging and podcasting, so 2008 podcast comments and website comments were huge. We all used to talk in comments and then social media arrived and comments really disappeared. So this was the first time I've had so many comments in really a very long time. Now 95% of them were overwhelmingly positive. There were a couple of people who didn't like that I used AI tools to help. But if and if you listen to the end, I explained the process. So if you missed that, if you cut out the ending, I talked about how I made it. Most people were absent. Absolutely thrilled. I can't read all the comments as there literally are so many. There really are so many. But here's a selection. Karen said, the timing for this in for this episode could not have been more perfect. I'm sitting down to revise the rough draft of my very first attempt at fiction. These tips are already helping me deepen the characters and I'm so grateful. Anne Marie Said, I like that you pulled the best tips from multiple shows. Please do more podcasts like this and keep putting your source material in the show notes. I'm listening to your podcast on my Walk Talks in Orlando, Florida. Andre said, I particularly like this compilation of past episodes into a best of advice. If you're considering doing more such episodes on the craft of writing, I say yes please. Chris Said, I loved it. I'm in the column of having you do more of them and I was impressed on how you created it. Andrege ESTGamer on YouTube said this is probably the best episode of yours which is saying a lot since most of the are great. This advice is so much more useful than the generic stuff out there. I especially like the tip to use voice as a rhythmic tool. Really lovely to hear that. Thank you. And finally ream detective on YouTube I wanted to just mention this said I love this idea. Hope you do more. I'm going to copy the transcript and send it off to chatgpt and ask her to delete all the timestamps and then I will have a nice list of all the different suggested ideas. I am absolutely fine with you doing that Dream Detective but remember there is a transcript without timestamps on my website. So if you didn't know you can go to thecreativepenn.com go to the podcast link or the blog link has all the most recent ones or you can go to the podcast link and find all the backlist. Every single episode except a few of the original ones like from way way back has a transcript. You can copy the transcript and use that. Or if you go onto YouTube and copy the link and put it in notebooklm it will also have the transcript and you can also query that. So anyway, I just wanted to mention that so you don't have to remove all the timestamps and everything. Okay so please leave a comment on the podcast show [e-mail] or on the YouTube channel. Or email me, send me pictures of where you're listening. Your favourite cemetery, crypto or churchyard? JoannaTheCreativePen.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation so today's show is sponsored by prowritingaid because however you choose to publish, whether you go indie or you want a traditional deal, you need to make your book the best it can be. It is one of my absolute must use tools in my writing process. Firstly to go through my first draft before printing and hand editing which is still my process after all these years and then again after I put the edits edits into Scrivener since I always make more mistakes and I do all of that before sending to Kristen, my editor. I use prowritingaid for every book and short story, fiction and non fiction. I mainly use it with Scrivener but you can also use it with other software or online. I work through each chapter and ProWritingAid knows all the rules of editing and helps you apply them. And of course you can choose not to make the changes as you like it helps with making your writing more active. Finding repeated words, finding words and sentences you could improve adding sensory detail, sentence structure, grammar and punctuation issues, as well as typos, spacing problems and more. That spacing thing I often I'll make changes and then I'll find spacing that I've put in. For some reason, I don't know why. ProWritingAid also now has a set of useful reports including story strengths and weaknesses, areas for improvement, and other analysis. Using AI tools to help you improve your writing. So why use software to help? Why don't you just learn all the grammar and writing rules and apply them yourself? Well, we all use tools to improve our process and we are also often blind to our writing issues. It helps to have another pair of eyes, even if the eyes are software. So won't an editor do all this? Well, yes they can, but I'd rather pay my human editor to fix the things the software can't. So I use prowritingaid as my essential editing tool before sending to my human editor. Check out the free edition or get 15% off the premium edition by using my link prowritingaid.com Joanna J-O-A-N-N-A that's prowritingaid.com Joanna this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my [e-mail] thecreativepenny thanks to the 10 new patrons who've joined over the last week and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to all my backlist videos and audio covering topics on writing, craft, author, business and AI tutorials. Last week I shared an article on how to find and capture ideas for your books. And coming up this week is the monthly Q and A Extra solo show. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. So if you get value from the show and you want more, then come on over and join us at patreon.com P-A T-R-E-O-N.com TheCreativePen Right, let's get into the interview. Neil Allen is a spiritual coach, former journalist and author of non fiction and flash fiction. Anne Lamott is the New York Times Best selling author of memoir, spiritual and creative nonfiction and literary fiction, including Bird by Instructions on Writing and Life, which many authors, including me, count as one of the best books on writing out there. Neil and Anne are also Married and their first book Together is Good 36 Ways to Improve your sentences. So welcome to the show, Neil and Anne.

[B]

Thank you so much, Jo. We're happy to be here.

[C]

Hi, Jo.

[A]

Hey. So let us get straight into the book with Rule 1, which is Use strong verbs. So how can we implement that practice practically in our manuscripts when most of us don't start with the verb? You know, we're thinking of story or we're thinking of message.

[C]

Yeah. Throughout the book it's pointed out that these are rules for the book is a bunch of rules for second drafts. Right. So you've put it down, right? You've already got your story down, you've already got your piece down, your email, your text, it doesn't matter what. And then you stop, you pause, you go back to the beginning and you go sentence by sentence and look at them.

[B]

But also, I'd like to add that there's a lot in the book, usually on my end of the conversation, that has to do with really using these rules anywhere and everywhere. I mean, whether you're writing a memoir or a grant proposal, I believe these rules apply to getting everything written at any time, in any phase of the work. Because, you know, from bird by bird, I'm all about taking short assignments and writing really God awful first drafts. But what is fun about writing is to have spewed out something on the page and then to get to go back right then and to just start cleaning it up a bit, straightening it out, probably inevitably shortening it. And one place to start is to notice how weak our verbs are. Like if I say Joe walked towards us across the lawn, it doesn't give the reader very much information. But if I say Joe lurched towards us across the lawn, or Joe raced towards us across the lawn, or Joe whatever, then right away you've improved the sentence just with really two or three quick thoughts about what you actually meant with that verb and a better one. So it really applies to every level and stage of writing. But Neil's right. This is really about going back over your work sentence by sentence and seeing if you can make it stronger and cleaner and clearer and the best way, the reason it's rule one is to write strong verbs.

[C]

And a nice thing about strong verbs is that they often preclude the need for an adjective or an adverb. Right. So if I say I trudged, I don't. It's shorter than saying I walked slowly and depressed.

[B]

Yeah,

[A]

yeah, absolutely. And how you answered that question is kind of how the book works.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because Neil does a sort of outline of the rule and then Anne comes in and comments. So maybe you could talk a bit about that process. You're both strong characters, obviously you've been writing a long time, so talk a bit about how you made the book and how that worked as a couple as well.

[C]

So I'd had these rules collected for a number of years and had them on my website. And when I met Annie, she liked them and would hand them out when she was doing writing sessions. And I was intrigued at some point in a few years ago and looked around to see whether there was a list like mine out there. And I noticed that all the other lists I saw were much shorter. Hemingway had his four rules for rewriting and Elmore Leonard his eight, which are wonderful. Margaret Atwood has 10. The longest I saw was Martin Amos had, depending on what year it was, 14, 15 or 16. He'd go back and forth with a couple of them. And I had 30 some. And I wondered, well, 30 some might be enough for a book. And so I didn't want to write a scolding book book, like a grammar. And so I didn't want it to be academic or written like, I'm the expert now. I'll just let my mind range. I'll explain the rule and then let my mind go where. Where it went. Right? Which, by the way, is one of the rules, which is show, then tell. Not show, don't tell, it's show, then tell. You let your mind riff after you've explained something to the reader or shown something to the reader. And so I. I wrote the book. It was too short to be published. And I showed it to Annie and I asked her, what do I do with this?

[B]

And I said, hey, I know something about writing, bub. And I asked if I could contribute my thoughts and. And retorts and examples and prompts to each of his rules. And so we were just off and running because his stuff was so solid, but mine is more maybe welcoming and giving encouragement and hope to writers because writing's hard. It's still hard for me. And this is my 21st book, and I'm only a third of it. And writing's hard. And what we hope is that our conversation can help people understand. It's A, it's hard for everybody, and B, it'll work if you just keep your butt in the chair and do the best you can and then go back, back one day at a time and try to make it a little bit better.

[C]

It Turned out to be pretty serendipitous because just naturally, I'm more an explainer and Annie is more driving toward catharsis. And so it works where the call and response is always, I set out the rule, I explain the rule, and Annie drives it toward catharsis and usefulness.

[A]

And in some chapters you do disagree in some form. So how did that work in. In the process of writing?

[B]

Well, usually I disagree because Neil might be using words that are too big and. Or it might be a little bit elitist, I would think. Or of course, I would point out that he's completely over educated, whereas I'm a dropout. And so I have a much plainer, more welcoming version of the rules. All of the rules are so strong. But I would feel that the way that he explained it was sort of beyond me. And so I would come in and try to explain what Neil had been explaining. And so it was actually really funny and fun and. But also, we do come from really different directions. And Neil is an explainer and he's like an ATM of information. And I am the class den mother who brings in treats and party favors on everybody's birthday. And in my. Is always, you can really, really do this, I promise, trust me. But you start where you are, you get your butt in the chair, and then Neil comes along and says what has worked for me. And he was a journalist forever, so he writes in a very different way than I write. It just turned out that the two of us together kind of make a whole. We, you know, people have asked us if there were a lot of conflicts or if we really objected to the other person's take. And I can tell you, Joe, there wasn't a day when we had only conflict. We just were laughing and we were excited because one of us sort of remember a great example from literature. And so we came to believe that these two very distinct voices would form one voice of encouragement for any writer.

[A]

Well, that, that brings us to rule number eight, which is trust your voice. And I feel like, like this is easier when you've been writing a while. You know, we're told to find our voice and. But I remember as an early writer when I read Bird by Bird and other books, and I was like, how on earth do I find my voice? And so maybe you could talk about this more for early stage writers, I guess, about how do you find and trust that voice?

[C]

Boy, that is a haul for almost all of us. This follows from any, any intellectual pursuit that requires lots of practice and repetitions. Malcolm Gladwell's great statement or discovery or restatement from somebody else who discovered it, that it requires to the human brain 10,000 hours of repetitions before something can be allowed to just flow without thought, flow as if intuited rather than thinking. And I don't think that's any different for in writing than it is in basketball or football or anything else. Sports, creative pursuits, everyday pursuits. There's just a lot of repetitions required. And some people have the experience that I did where you're just going along, getting better and better, doing it over and over and over and over again, learning this, learning that, adding in this, adding in that kind of moving toward a goal of virtuosity or whatever, whatever. And all of a sudden, bang. One day it all works, and your voice emerges. Other people don't have that experience, don't have that one day that it happened or that feeling that it suddenly happened. And some people, it takes less than 10,000 hours. But for most people, it is a hell of a lot of repetitions.

[B]

And I think for me, the most important aspect to finding your own voice is noticing how desperately you don't think your voice is good enough and that you want to write. Like, I always mention that when I was coming up, like, at 20, I wanted to sound like Isabel Allende because I loved her work so much, or Anne Beatty, who was writing those wonderful short stories in the New Yorker, or Salinger, who I'd started reading probably at 10 years old. And I had to come to the understanding that I can't tell my stories and my truth and my version of life, which is really what writing is, is in somebody else's voice. Unless I'm kind of advanced, writing would be to do just that and to write in the voice of alcoholic billionaire in Spain. But for most of us, it's about finding out that our voice is what people want to hear. It's hard to believe, but it is absolutely true. If you have a story to tell me, Joe, I just want you to tell me your story. I don't want you to try to sound like Virginia Woolf or Margaret Drabble. I want you to be Joe. And if it's the written version that you're sending me, I can probably go through and help you maintain your voice while making the writing stronger by following certain really basic rules. But spiritually and psychologically, this is just about the most important rule of all, because that's why we're here, that's why we are on this side of eternity, is to discover who we are and why we're here. And part of that is discovering who deep down, when all the layers are peeled away, we are. And then how to communicate that to a reader without trying to sound more impressive or more brilliant or more ironic than we actually are. Our voice is good enough. It's hard to believe. Our voice is what we want you to tell us your stories.

[C]

And I distinctly remember the day I found my voice for. For odd reasons. I just. I can remember it. And the first thing I did when this story felt like it had written itself to me back was look at it and go, crap. That doesn't sound like Faulkner.

[A]

It sounded like you're. So do you think this. That we have to find our voice?

[B]

Voice.

[A]

Maybe multiple times, depending on genre. So, for example, I recognize that feeling with one of my novels. It was like novel number five. I was like, oh, that's my voice. You know, I really was sort of, oh, I found that. But then it took me a lot longer to find that in memoir because, well, I think memoir is super hard. So do you think we have to almost go through these 10,000 hours in different genres? Cameras?

[C]

Gosh, not for me. For me, I don't think any differently about how I'm entering into a business letter, a text, a novel, self help book, any of the things that I do. I feel like I just have to turn this switch and let it go and I can trust myself. So that's interesting. I can imagine that I. I can imagine you could develop a second voice. I haven't ever needed to.

[B]

Yeah. I would agree that I write my novels and my nonfiction, really, from a kind of central bus station deep inside of me, which is that I write. One of our rules is write the hard things. Write about life and death and loss and grief and relationships and getting old and being here during these incredibly cold, dark times. Because the reader, I. E. Me, is just desperate for truth and for real. And so I started out wanting to sound like John Updike or sound like a New York glitterati male writer. And I can't tell you what is really real in somebody else's voice. And a. I disagree with Malcolm Gladwell. I think it's 10 hours, so a little bit different there. But when I'm writing autobiographical spiritual pieces or my novels, I have to kind of settle myself down like gentling a horse and find that bus station inside of myself where I'm observing and I'm tugging on the sleeve of the person sitting next to me and saying, I just saw something really interesting. Do you have a minute and that's really what writing is. I just saw something or thought of something or imagined something or remembered something really interesting. Do you have a minute? And then if I'm talking to the person next to me, I'm not going to try to sound like Laurence Olivier or anybody else. I'm just going to tell them my story. The best quote, the 4 or 5, 4 or 5 word, great quote is from our screenwriter friend Randy Mayam Singer. And she said, tell me a story, make me care. That's six words. And that really transcends all genres. It's just, just I can tell you a story my way if you're interested.

[A]

Got a minute or a few minutes for a book? For sure. You mentioned they're really interesting. You said I need to settle myself down, particularly in these dark times. And this is not a political show. And obviously we're all from different countries here and we all have different views of what difficult times are, but we all go through them. So when big things in the world make us feel like perhaps what we're doing is not so important, how do we get through that? That sort of shouldn't I go do something more important than writing a story feeling?

[C]

Yeah. I mean, everybody is encouraged to be a political scientist nowadays or to be an ethicist or to be a moralist as their job. And that's just kind of ridiculous, right? We've been handed our role. By the time you're 30, you've been handed your role in the world and that's your productive role. Right? You have certain citizenship requirements which might include voting or marching or watching the news every day. Right? But that's not the rest of your day. Unless you actually work in Parliament as an aide and you're doing some kind of social policy wonk kind of work. I am not, not going to let the external world ruin my day. I'm going to keep that to a certain number of minutes of my day that is appropriate to my role in the world. Right. I am perfectly productive in the world. I have lots of things that I do. I work hard. Everybody works hard. There's no lazy people in this world anymore. It's just civilization is too difficult. You want lazy? Go back to 300,000 years of tribal life where as soon as you had fulfilled your last need for calories for the day, you made it back to camp slowly. So you didn't burn calories, Right. And lulled from about anywhere from 10am to 2pm the rest of the day, you reclined so you weren't burning calories and gossiped with your fellow tribes people. None of us is like that. Now I am perfectly productive without having to say I should be more productive and more concerned about the, the foibles of the species.

[B]

You know, Neil does something with his clients who, with whom he does this work on Taming the Inner critic. And it's about having them make a list of what they do every day that rain or shine or catastrophe or peace or war or whatever you just do. I wake up, I pray, I put my glasses on, I get a little bit of work done every day. I meditate for 15 minutes every day. I get outside every day because that is the most nourishing, spiritually reset button I can get to. I catch up with my friends. We have a grandson here, we hang out with him. I do certain things every day and one of them is I get a little bit of work done. And of course what I'd rather do is just stay glued to CNN and have my tiny opinions on every, every single thing that is happening and how things would be better if they followed my always excellent advice. And instead what I do is I will meditate for 15 minutes a day and it won't be really beautiful and inspiring. It'll be like a monkey at the mall, you know, who's taken some who's over caffeinated. But. And I will also get outside. I don't know if I'll get a really good long walk with 10,000 steps in, but I will get outside and I will pay attention. I will breathe in the fresh air, I will gawk and have moments of wonder and I will sit down and I will be doing it after we talk. And I'm going to get my own writing done for the day. And I really recommend that to writing students is write down what you do every day and in it figure out at least one pod, a 45 minute pod where you can get a little bit of writing done. Something that may serve your audience, the writers in your audience, is that I make long lists. And I encourage all beginning writers to make long lists of every memory and, and thought and idea that they've had. But mostly memories, often starting very young. The thinking about early holidays and school are great prompts. And make a list of 25 memories you have that you've told people over the years that are meaningful to you. If you remember them, they're meaningful. You may think that they're meaningful because of this or that, but you sit down and you write about them for 45 minutes and you're going to, to discover that there was a kernel of insight or even healing in them that you hadn't known when you set out to write them. So I taught Writing Forever at this bookstore called Book Passage in Marin. We would spend a part of every hour having the writers, the students, explain to me why they weren't getting any writing done. And they were excellent ideas. And any excuse your listeners have about why they're not getting any writing done, believe me, it's a good excuse and I've heard it 10 times. And so if you are committed to writing, you have to meet us halfway. And that means that you set aside 45 minutes or an hour and a half or whatever you can give me to get a little bit of writing done, to get one passage written, the first or eighth thing on the list of really important memories that you've carried in your pocket all these years.

[C]

You know, the typical amount of time that a Booker Award winner or a National Book Award here in America winner spends writing novelists is one to two hours in the morning getting 45 minutes to an hour and a half of work done. A thousand to fifteen hundred words, and then they stop. And the reason they stop is it's really brain consuming to do. This is hard work writing, and it's intellectually vigorous. You know, programmers, high end programmers can work two and a half hours on average before they have to stop because they've used up their brain energy. Right? The blood going to the brain and expending calories and whatever is going on in there. It's not a long time. It's just repetitive time. Right. The Booker Prize Award winners, they work every. They work typically six days a week, not five days a week. An hour and a half a day is about the mean. About 1200 words is about the mean.

[A]

Well, it's interesting because you mentioned there about what's stopping people from writing and you also mentioned there it's hard work. One of the things I've heard a lot recently is this is really hard. I thought that writing was meant to be this romantic myth where I would sit down and things would stream into my brain and it would be easy. And if it's not easy and fun, then maybe it's wrong for me. So maybe you could explain more about the hardness and why hard is still good. It doesn't. It doesn't mean it's a bad thing.

[C]

Yeah. The interesting thing about writers is that they are really interested in very complex thinking about sentences. Right. So what distinguishes a writer from somebody who writes about, from a subject matter expert or a plot plotter who either writes a. Writes plots and is interested in the movement of plots, or who is a subject matter expert in something and either novelizes it or. Or writes non fiction, is that a writer is first concerned about the puzzle of a sentence, second concerned about the flow or paragraph, really, and only thirdly concerned about the subject matter. So I don't care what the subject matter is. What I want to. What I want to concentrate on ultimately, is the sentence. And getting this sentence to look right in context requires me doing building sentences upon sentences upon sentences. And it's more like painting than it is like writing in that sense. In that the. If you look at a painter as. Once they've put one brush stroke down, and usually it takes them a while to figure out what that brush stroke is, is right, how big it is, how wide it is, how thick it is, how grainy it is, all those sorts of things, then the second brushstroke becomes a puzzle based on what they just did with the first brushstroke and the remaining canvas. And so a writer thinks that way about each sentence and realizes that each sentence has layers of information in it. Diction, color, rhythm, harmony, melody. All sorts of things are happening, plot in it. And how many of those are taken care of in that sentence, well, that becomes the interest. So it's hard in the sense that to be virtuosic at it, to be really good at it, requires a lot of study and a lot of mistakes. And most of the mistakes are getting rid of cliches and finding your way past, past them. And that's a long, long process. Like anything is a long, long process. This isn't something that can be just kind of picked up because you have a talent, right? You were told at a certain time you were a talented writer. And so you can just pick it up as soon as you get into it. You see that the sentences are demanding a heck of a lot of work.

[B]

Yeah. And I would add that I don't find it all that fun. And I never find it fun and easy. And I've been doing this professionally for 52 years now, since I was 20, when I worked at a magazine. And I think that's an illusion. I mean, so much of becoming a writer is unlearning what you thought it meant and how it would go, and that you would sit alone like Bartleby the scrivener, hunched over, working on your ledger. And that was not true at all. Because a lot of our book, good writing has to do with the Collaboration between you and a writing partner, a writing group or a writing collective or. And eventually an editor. But it's not about that lonely, hunched over, romantic, Wuthering Heights sense of seriousness. And it's also not giddy. It's not Walt Disney. It's just very real. It's one human sitting down at the desk with paper or at the keyboard. And it is just trying one day at a time to write what's on your heart, what's on your mind, what's on your scribbled notes, what's what you're trying to transcribe from this little bit of a flicker of an idea about something that you've always meant to tell on paper. And then writing it, you know, in some parts of the day's work will be pulling teeth. And the secret of writing, and I write about this a lot in Bird by Bird. I write a lot about it in good writing, is you just don't give up because you wanted to be a writer when you grew up. And what that means is that you write a little bit every day and you read about writing. You read good books on writing. You read Stephen King. You win. Read William Kinser. Is that his name?

[C]

Zinsser.

[B]

Zinsser. You read all the Paris Review interviews of writers at work, and you enter into the writing life because it's a calling, like a monk to a monastery. And it means you're in. You've gotten into the water, it's a little cold at first, and you stay in it. And it starts to be something that is so fulfilling. It's maybe not fun, but it's fulfilling. And you will feel this rare excitement that you're doing what you have put off for so long or that you're re entering it in a new way with a different sense of commitment and maybe a little bit more wisdom and probably a lot more stories to tell.

[A]

Well, I did want to ask Anne, because coming back to Bird by Bird and many writers listening will have read it. And I've also read over the years about your son and your faith. And these are really personal things, right, that you have shared. And it feels like we live in this age of judgment and cancellation and. And writing what you call our truthiest truth can be very difficult. People are afraid, so what would you say to them? And Obviously also Rule 33 is write hard stuff. So I guess that gets into it too. But how do we do this?

[B]

Well, a lot of people don't have the calling to write personal stuff or autobiographical stuff or stuff about spiritual or Emotional or psychological healing. They want to write about. About. They want to write about England in the 1300s. I've always told my writing students to write what they would love to come upon, because then they're creating it. And if they love to, to read historical romances or they love to read journals, I have to say I read every single journal of Virginia Woolf's in my early 20s, and I read every single volume of her letter letters in my early 20s. And because it was thrilling to be in that intimate umbilical connection to a writer that I love so much and into the world of Bloomsbury and into the world of England between the wars. And so people may not want to write like I write. I would assume they don't. But my calling is that I love to write about real life. And I use my immediate experiences of daily living and my family and my husband and our animals and my nation and my recovery and my church. All of that is the stuff that I love to come upon in other people's work. And so I write it. Neil writes different than that. Neil is a journalist and a novelist, and he is writing a lot in a much more sociological way than I am. He is writing with this font of knowledge about socioeconomic and historical understanding of the world. And yet he's just raggedy old Neil Allen, and he's. But he loves to come upon different stuff that I love to come upon. Does that answer your question?

[C]

Yeah. And I think one thing to notice is that the whole bully victim cycle that we are promoting and living in now, and it's a cycle because if somebody claims that they have been bullied, then their only defense is to become a bully themselves. Right? And so the victims become the bullies. The bullies. It just gets worse and worse. It's the old revenge story. And what I've noticed when I think about it, is the authors who I respect the most tend to be humanists, and humanists tend not to be canceled.

[B]

Canceled.

[C]

And I've never felt a great danger. Of course, I watch my words in certain ways that are fashionable, you can't use this word anymore, and all of that kind of stuff. But in terms of ideas, humanists embrace the world in a funny different kind of way than people who chase after conflict, chase after separation of people from each other, tribalism, all of that of kind kind of stuff. And I, I, I mean, it's weird when I look back and I go, you know, my heroes were always humanists. Whether they would be, some of them might be canceled now, but just for the weirdest reasons, like Henry Miller or Mark Twain might be canceled for very strange reasons. But these are absolute humanists who love. Love everybody in the world. In a certain kind of odd way, Virginia Woolf is the most incredible humanist in the world. She's not going to be canceled.

[A]

Canceled, you know, canceled herself.

[C]

There we go.

[A]

But as we come towards the end now, I do want to return. You've both talked about calling and you've been handed your role and this sort of. We are writers now. Both of you have had great longevity in the career. And I've been doing this now 20 years. And I've noticed so many people who leave the writing life. And so I wonder what. Wondered what tips you had on making it long term. How do we do this long term, assuming that we are feeling. Feeling a calling. But people have to balance sort of the money side. They're balancing book marketing, which is always a nightmare for all of us, and the writing. And so tips for longevity, I have no idea.

[C]

I have lived outside of the writing life, just kind of using it as a secondary skill for half of my life. So I left journalism because it didn't pay well enough to support a family of six. And so I moved into the corporate world. I loved the corporate world. I didn't have any problem with it. And. But I. It wasn't the writing world. And when I came out of the corporate world and I first went into tame your inner critic kind of sessions with people, executive coaching, other kinds of coaching and stuff. And only lately, only in the last 10 years have really resumed my writing career. I think. I think maintaining a writing career, like anything in the arts, is. Is incredibly difficult financially. It just will be. Annie. Annie will tell you she spent. You were. You were what, 15 years into your career before you had your first home office? Yeah, more than that.

[B]

Yeah, longer than that. I was 20 years in before I had a door I could close to keep the. The. The Huns out, I. E. My child. But here's the thing. Nobody cares if you write. And so you had better. That crinkly sound that your audience hears is Neil pulling a empty bag of chips out of the garbage that our dog is trying to abscond with because there's powder at the bottom of it and crumbs. But no one cares if you write and if you hate it or if you. You have given up. It might be that you would find your creative soul, your imaginative, creative life force at ecstatic dancing on Saturdays in the town park, which we offer here in our tiny town. It Might be that you're a painter. My best friend started painting several years ago and she's incredible. But if you want to write, the horrible thing is that you just have to keep setting aside. I keep using the word pod because that's how I get any work done at all. An hour. Now, Neil and I can both tell you, Neil alluded to this. You set aside an hour and that will give you maybe 40 minutes of actual writing. And we'll give the Booker Prize winners 40 minutes of actual writing. You have two hours and that gives you an hour and 15 minutes. That's how it works. And so if you care and if you long to be a writer, to immerse yourself in the writing life, you know, I hate to sound like a Nike ad and I don't know if you have this in England, but you just do it now. One thing that gets in everybody's way is this fantasy of getting published. And how if they get published, it will be like the world has stamped, validated their parking ticket and their self esteem will now be much, much better and more consistently excellent than it ever was before before. And we can tell you, we've got, you know, we have this book that's out, that's brand new, and it makes you much more insecure and much more anxious than you were before it got published because how's it going to do? Is it going to get reviewed? There are very, very few places reviewing books anymore. Carol Shield, who wrote an incredible book 30 years ago called, what was it called? The Stone Diaries. Carol Shield, and she was teaching large, large, large writing retreats, a thousand people at a time. And she would tell them that 10 of them will be published, five to 10 of them will be published. And getting published means that you get your book out and you have one week to make it. You have one week in the bookstores for it to get noticed. And then there are 180,000 hardback books published in America every year. And general interest, interest. And so you write a novel that's about a small town, you have great eye, you have great dreams, that it's going to be an Oprah book and that it's. That this is going to happen. And it will lead to a second contract. And then you can start investing in diamonds or buy a set of fish forks. It doesn't happen. My first book that made any money at all for me was my fifth book. It was a journal of my son's first year called Operating Instruction. And it was the first time that I didn't have to have a second job. And I was 38 and I have been writing since and writing full time since I was 20 and publishing since I was 26. So if the carrot that is enticing you to get any work done is publication and finding an agent and getting published, it's not going to happen for you, I can just promise you that. But if your dream is to become a writer and to become a member of the writing community and to write, and it will be discouraging. But if you want to write, you just keep pushing back your sleeves and you don't get up and you sit down and you keep your butt in the chair. And if your work is really good, it may get published. If your work is excellent, it may not. But that can't be what gets you to commit to being a writer when you grow up.

[A]

Fantastic. So where can people find good writing and all your books and everything you both do online?

[C]

Well, on March 17th, the book comes out. You can get it online, anywhere online. It's published by Penguin Avery. March 17, it gets released.

[B]

As we said, it'll be in the bookstores for a while.

[C]

It'll be in the bookstores in America.

[B]

In America it might be.

[C]

You might have to go online in. In Great Britain at first.

[A]

Oh, yeah, it's definitely there. And what about your websites as well?

[B]

I don't have a website.

[C]

Yeah, I have a modest [e-mail] that kind of shows you, tells you about my other books also.

[B]

Yeah, I'm at Substack and Lamont. I'm at Facebook and Lamont. I'm kind of all over the place. But do you know this is kind of terrifying? 80% of books bought in America are bought at Amazon on cell phones.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely right. I was going to ask you, have you recorded the audiobook book as. As a pet?

[B]

And it's available if you go. I hate to always be plugging Amazon, but it's so easy. If you go to Amazon, it'll give you a choice of hardback or audio or Kindle.

[C]

And if you don't want to go to Amazon and want to want to find another place to buy it that you feel more comfortable with, go to Penguin Random House and just put in good writing and LaMotte, I think it'll take you to a splash page that gives you you a choice of a half dozen online places to order it.

[A]

Brilliant. Well, thanks so much, both of you for your time. This has been brilliant.

[B]

Oh, Joe, thank you.

[C]

Thank you, Joe.

[B]

Pleasure and an honor. Thank you for having us.

[C]

As you can see, we get, we really get turned on talking about this.

[B]

Yeah, we do.

[A]

So I hope you enjoyed the interview with Anne and Neil today. I always love talking to creatives who've been doing this for decades as longevity provides perspective and the craft of writing is a long term game and something that sustains us for a lifetime. Forget about the publishing side and the marketing and the business. At the end of the day, we write because we think in words on the page. Or at least I do. Or we have ideas we want to share or we have stories we want to tell and this is what we do. I think this is what it comes down to. At the end of the day, this is what we do. So I would love to know what you think. Please leave a comment on the podcast show [e-mail] or on the YouTube channel, or email me joannathecreativepenn.com Also, please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Next Monday I'm talking to Matt Cardin about writing at the Wellspring, tapping the source of your inner genius. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show [e-mail] podcast and you can get your free Author [e-mail] Blueprint if you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and x@thecreativepen or on Instagram and Facebook. Fpenauthor Happy writing and I'll see you next time.