Writing The Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects Into Meaningful Prose With Nicole Walker

Summary

Podcast Summary: Writing The Hard Stuff – Turning Difficult Subjects Into Meaningful Prose With Nicole Walker

The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers – Episode #870
Host: Joanna Penn
Guest: Nicole Walker (Author, Essayist, Poet, Editor, Teacher)
Date: June 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the craft of writing about difficult and emotionally charged subjects, featuring insights from Nicole Walker, the author of Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects Into Meaningful Prose. Joanna and Nicole discuss confronting personal trauma, the benefits of the “braided essay,” and specific techniques to transform painful experiences into engaging, meaningful writing. Nicole also shares practical advice on the writing process, truth in memoir, and effective book marketing in today’s publishing landscape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Nicole’s Writing Journey and the Pull of Creative Community

[19:08-21:20]

• Nicole describes her early love for writing, her academic journey through Reed College and the University of Utah, and her appreciation for the literary community she found in graduate school.
  • “My world has expanded because of my writing, and so that’s been a true gift.” (Nicole, 21:00)

Understanding the 'Tug' to Write and Leaning into Intuition

[21:20-21:46]

• Nicole and Joanna discuss trusting the urge to write and how writing helps make sense of the world:
  • “This is the way I like to understand the puzzles of the universe... This is how I make sense of the world, is through writing.” (Nicole, 21:18)

Metaphor of the Ball of String & Braided Essay Technique

[21:46-28:37]

• Nicole presents the metaphor of trauma and difficult topics as a “knotted ball of string.” Writing helps untangle these knots.
• She references Donna Haraway’s idea of the Cat’s Cradle, describing how playing with and sharing narrative can create connection, not just understanding.
  • “If you have this difficult subject and you’re like, I am shying away from it, you’re losing some of the opportunity to make connections and to make sense of what that nest of string sits around in your stomach and is.” (Nicole, 23:34)

The Braided Essay Exercise:

• Write about a difficult subject for two minutes, then switch to an unrelated topic you’re passionate about for another two minutes—repeat.
• This alternation gives space, helps draw connections, and prevents overwhelm.
  • “They write back and forth, and they’re able to take a break from the hard thing, but they are also tempted to go back to it ... and what happens is they start to make meaning between those two ideas.” (Nicole, 27:35)

The Benefits of Timed Writing

[28:37-30:48]

• Joanna highlights that short, timed bursts may make confronting trauma more manageable.
• Nicole agrees, noting it provides psychological relief and maintains freshness.
  • “If you think of research as your companion, like, I’m coming in there with you, buddy... you have somebody to rely on.” (Nicole, 29:38)

Being Concrete and Specific in Difficult Writing

[30:48-33:41]

• Nicole explains the importance of grounding writing in the physical and sensory world, using scenes, dialogue, and physical description even in memoir.
  • “We need to be able to see where you are. We need to see what is physically happening, how the interactions work. And dialogue... is one of the best ways to literally get your body on the page.” (Nicole, 32:24)

Memoir, Dialogue, and Truth (Big T vs. Small t)

[33:41-38:07]

• The challenge: factual dialogue is often lost to memory, so truth in memoir can become subjective.
• Nicole introduces “speculative nonfiction,” where phrases like “I imagined” or “perhaps” signal interpretation, not strict fact.
  • Mentions Lorraine Herring’s “A Constellation of Ghosts” as an example of blending the fantastic with memoir.
  • “You’re alerting your reader, yes, this definitely is not exactly what happened, but this is how I recall it.” (Nicole, 36:15)

Genre Boundaries and Reader Expectations

[38:07-42:46]

• While innovative forms like speculative memoir may challenge or limit sales, clarity of intention (stating upfront the sort of book it is) prepares readers.
• Ultimately, write with craft and authenticity, as the market is unpredictable.
  • “You can’t determine [sales success] in advance. So you should probably write what feels right to you... But the market to me feels... very non-negotiable.” (Nicole, 42:30)

Choosing Genre/Format for Each Project

[42:46-44:40]

• Nicole explains how the nature of the initial writing (sentence structure, tone) often determines whether something becomes a poem, essay, or fiction.

Project Management & Multiple Works

[44:40-46:14]

• Both Joanna and Nicole keep several projects simmering but dedicate themselves fully once a “critical mass” is reached.

Academic vs. Trade Publishing

[46:14-48:49]

• Nicole notes the smaller audience and more constrained voice in academic publishing.
• She praises writers like Ander Monson who bring a unique, informal voice to academic essays.

Book Marketing: What Works Now

[48:49-53:58]

• Nicole recommends organizing events with local authors to boost turnout and engagement.
  • “People will come to see their friend and then they’ll be introduced to you... you will create new connections and new friends thanks to that friend in that place.” (Nicole, 51:12)
• Social media is less effective than it used to be; personal connections are more impactful.
• Suggests experimental, informal gatherings—like parties with wine and books for sale—to meet readers where they are.

Managing Dual Book Launches

[52:30-53:58]

• Nicole leverages her two recent books (a memoir and a craft book) together, depending on the audience.
• They often cross-promote organically: craft book references memoir writing, and memoir discussions can segue to craft techniques.

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Notable Quotes

• “This is the way I like to understand the puzzles of the universe... This is how I make sense of the world, is through writing.” – Nicole (21:18)
• “If you have this difficult subject and you’re like, I am shying away from it, you’re losing some of the opportunity to make connections.” – Nicole (23:34)
• “If you think of research as your companion... you have somebody to rely on, this other side of the story.” – Nicole (29:38)
• “We need to be able to see where you are... And dialogue is one of the best ways to literally get your body on the page.” – Nicole (32:24)
• “You’re alerting your reader, yes, this definitely is not exactly what happened, but this is how I recall it... a much more imaginative way of creating some of those scenes.” – Nicole (36:15)
• “The only person that’s really, really, really committed to your book is you.” – Nicole (49:47)

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Important Timestamps

• [19:05] Start of Interview with Nicole Walker
• [21:46] On intuition and trusting the urge to write
• [24:53] Braided essay exercise explained
• [28:37] The power of timed writing to process hard topics
• [33:41] Dialogue and truth in memoir writing
• [38:07] Reader expectations and the risk of crossing genre
• [48:49] Nicole's top marketing strategy: pairing up for live events
• [52:30] Managing multiple books, cross-promotion at events
• [54:07] Where to find Nicole and her books

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Further Resources

• Nicole’s Substack: substack.nickwalk.com
• Nicole’s Website: nikwalk.com
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Sample Book: Writing the Hard Stuff and How to Plant a Billion Trees

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Memorable Moments

• Joanna's appreciation for the Cat’s Cradle metaphor and discussion about different ways of imagining trauma.
• The practical walkthrough of timed writing and the “braided essay” as accessible, gentle ways to approach hard content.
• Nicole’s candid remarks about academic versus creative writing and about the evolving realities of book marketing in the post-social media age.
• The lighthearted acknowledgment that, even for experienced authors, marketing is an ongoing, self-driven challenge.

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Takeaways for Writers

• Begin untangling complex personal material by pairing it with another, less emotional topic and writing in short, alternating bursts.
• Use specificity, sensory detail, and dialogue to ground memoir and make the universal particular.
• Be transparent with readers about what in your memoir is speculation, memory, or recreation—this builds trust while allowing creative freedom.
• For book marketing, prioritize in-person events with collaborators over relying solely on digital channels.
• Write what calls to you, commit deeply, and trust your readers will find your work—genre boundaries can be navigated with clear communication.

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For a deep dive into writing the hard stuff—and making meaningful prose from life’s challenges—Nicole Walker’s insights in this episode are invaluable for both new and seasoned writers aiming to transform the most tangled stories into compelling art.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Creative Pen 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 Joanna Penn and this is episode number 870 of the podcast. And it is Saturday 27th June 2026 as I record this at the end of a heatwave week here in the uk. It has been hot, hot, hot, that's for sure. In today's show I'm talking to Nicole Walker about writing the hard stuff, how to turn difficult subjects into meaningful prosecution. We discuss how you can write about painful experiences in your life without being overwhelmed and how timed writing and the idea of the braided story can help you untangle the most complicated situation you want to write about. So that's coming up in the interview section. In Writing and Publishing and Book Marketing things on the Self Publishing with Ally podcast, an episode about Pop Up Books, the production reality behind books that Move, fold and function with Kelly Anderson and interviewed by Anna Featherstone. In an age of AI generation and digital marketing, we talk a lot about doubling down on being human and investing in high quality print products. And this is taking it even further into hand assembly, specialist printers and minimum print runs that make the economics unlike anything in standard publishing. Now you may think, well, this has nothing to do with me. Well, I think it's really cool. Let's face it, Pop Up Books are just brilliant. And in this episode, graphic designer Kelly talks about building sculptural objects out of paper, like a record player, wedding invitation or her books. This book is a camera, which is an actual functioning pinhole camera, or this book is a planetarium and other extraordinary pop up contractions, which I just bought as evidence that podcasts sell books if you can light up something in someone's mind. And Kelly says, we live in this highly advanced technological society where no one expects anything from paper, but paper, like everything else, is undergirded by the laws of physics and you can build things out of paper that tap into that infrastructure. Kelly talks about doing a Kickstarter for one of her books when a publishing deal fell through and ended up raising over a quarter of a million dollars. So that's very cool. She also talks about the production process because this is not just a print on demand situation. Books are constructed by hand. She mentions the Movable Book Society which is an for collectors, artists and producers to share pop up book information and art. She mentions specific YouTubers who do it and just generally it's a fantastic discussion about something that made me smile and I think is something that I guess we don't pay that much attention to because we're so I guess obsessed with the ease I certainly am the ease of self publishing and print on demand. And while I love doing my Kickstarter special editions and all that kind of thing, this is something that really lights me up. And I do love pop up books. And when I go to London Book Fair which is almost every single year, they there is a stand of a company that does this kind of thing and I will often go over and have a look at what they've got. I love buying pop up books. I used to buy them for my nieces when they were a bit younger. And I remember when I was young there was a body book that you could open up layer by layer to get to the bones and yes, you'd expect that from me. And in another life I feel like I would have been an engineer or an architect or something and actually I. I haven't mentioned this before but I am getting into adult Lego and I am currently building Notre dame which has 21,000 pieces and you build it in the order that Notre Dame was built and I'm talking about the famous Notre Dame in Paris obviously. And I'm partly doing it because I want to build the Sagrada Familia which Gaudi's wonderful cathedral which recently finished in Barcelona. In fact there was a wonderful launch video on I guess it's all over the Internet where they lit up the cathedral and the Pope was there and it was awesome. But Lego are issuing a special edition but it is a massive build project so I thought I would have a go with Notre Dame first. Yes, I did try a few smaller builds, some of their botanicals range. But in terms back to pop up books I love the possibility and I of course talking about all of this doubling down on being human, doing more in person stuff, doing more physical stuff, doing more things with your hands. I just love this. So that is over on the self publishing with Ally podcast and then going back into the entirely digital in marketing things. BookBub have started a new promotional opportunity new in Kindle Unlimited and your book is eligible in the first 90 day period. It has to be full length, error free and well formatted which is some interesting language. It makes me think that maybe a whole load of error filled and not very well formatted books have been submitted, but yes has to be full length in ku. They say thousands of authors and publishers use Amazon's Kindle Unlimited to reach voracious readers who subscribe to the all you can read service. But with many millions of books in the program, getting your book into the hands of the right readers is an ever growing challenge. We're launching our new new in Kindle Unlimited email to help your book stand out. Newly enrolled books are hand picked by BookBub's team of expert editors and targeted by genre to BookBub Power readers who are subscribed to KU, maximizing conversions. Now obviously this is for books in KU. Not for wide authors, not for pop up books, not for print books, not for audiobooks, only KU ebooks. But another angle to consider given that new books essentially disappear in the market now unless you give them some kind of boost. But then on the other end of the spectrum, and I love this, I love the choices we have as authors. Over on the productive indie fiction writer Tracy Cooper Posey has a great series of articles about the solar sail theory of indie publishing. Eight articles about how you can build a solar sail for your author career. Using the science fiction analogy of a spaceship powered by the sun with a huge sail, it exposes a massive amount of surface area. It continuously captures tiny forces and those tiny forces compound over time. The metaphor essentially being that indie authors can build sustainable careers by maximizing discoverable surface area across the Internet and in real life, then channeling that attention toward owned reader relationships and direct infrastructure. And this is really what I've always done, to be honest. I think content marketing and content marketing that stays out there for a long time. This is sort of the DNA of those of us who started in the mid to late 2000s at the beginning of blogging and podcasting and before social media took off. And of course social media is ephemeral, that you post something and it disappears very, very quickly. Whereas, you know, I'm not saying that's all wrong. I'm just saying it's those of us who started before it have a kind of different approach. Tracy says your solar sale is every discoverable surface connected to your author ecosystem, which includes your books, but also other content that persists, like blogging or podcasting or videos on YouTube which stick around long term and stresses the importance of the email list, also personal relationships and how these things compound. Because the point is not immediate conversion. The point is expanding the size of the sail. Every piece of discoverable surface area increases the probability that readers encounter you somewhere, someday, through some path you cannot predict in advance. I agree with this, and you can obviously see it in action with this podcast, because while I do have an email list, most of you listening are not on it. And so I have no way of tracking how you found this show, show and me, or how long you've been listening or what episode you listen to. I don't have any way of linking an episode to whether someone bought a book once, maybe they never came back, maybe they bought everything I've ever put out there, maybe became a patron or bought a webinar, supported a Kickstarter, or used an affiliate link, or went to one of the podcast sponsors that I mention. But this show is certainly a form of solar sail, and it's part of the wind in my sails as an indie author. And so yes, love the analogy. And of course you might get a faster launch with targeted paid ads, more like a rocket launch, as Tracy says. But it's only sustainable by burning more fuel, by constantly putting dollars into the fire of meta ads or Amazon ads. And of course, now and again, a fiery boost might be worth it. Which is kind of how I do ads in general, occasional targeted campaigns. But the sustainable career needs a much wider base. As Tracey says, the Internet is entering a period of fragmentation. Search is changing, social media is changing, retail discovery is changing, AI content saturation is changing everything. In that environment, discoverability becomes less about dominating one platform and more about existing everywhere readers might encounter you, which requires a different mindset. There's little reason to obsess about virality, hacks, launch spikes, and algorithm chasing. Instead, you can focus upon far less stressful strategies like persistence, distribution, discoverability, ownership, and accumulated surface area of your solar sail. And actually talking about the far less stressful Remember my book with Mark Leslie Lefebvre, the relaxed author? Take the pressure off your art and enjoy the creative journey, which essentially has a pretty similar approach to book marketing. But yes, that is a great series of articles [e-mail] I'll link to it in the show notes. And in fact, one of the articles in that series is on People are part of your sale and the importance of connecting with other humans, readers and writers and the whole ecosystem to keep your career going for the long term. And in fact, as proof of this, I read Tracy's blog because I met Tracey Cooper Posey and her husband Mark on the Oregon coast at a writers conference with Dean Wesley Smith and Christine Catherine Rush a decade ago, back in 2016. That's also how I met Tee Thorne Coyle, Kevin J. Anderson, J. Daniel Sawyer who's actually on the show next week and I got to know Mark Leslie Lefebvre more there and hung out with Lindsey Barroca and so many others. And those in person connections persist years later. And my closest friends in real life are all writers now as well. So yes, go check out Tracy's articles on the solar sail and see if that really connects with you. In personal news, it was probably partly to do with the heat this week, but I decided to put my master's thesis on hiatus. I just need to do something else for a few weeks. Write something you might find useful and that might actually make me some money. Also, there is only so long I can tolerate the dense academic writing without wanting to free my normal writing voice and write more freely and just generally write something more useful. Because of course with most with most of my academic stuff only one person reads it and that is my professor. So I am so desperate to write something more useful. But anyway it's been great and I will of course circle back to it. Obviously I need to finish the degree. Yes, I am pretty good at finishing things so I will finish it. I know what my argument is. I've written a lot of it already. But I am now into the draft of how to write, publish and market short stories. I started this last year after I did a webinar on the topic after I did the Buried and the Drowned, that collection I learned so much about short story collection doing that collection and also everything I've learned in more than a decade I guess my first short story was 2014. So yeah, more than a decade now of writing shorts, publishing them in different ways, licensing them, repurposing them and we always get obsessed with full length books. But shorts are creatively wonderful. They can make multiple streams of income and be great for marketing. So I have started that it's going to be a short non fiction, probably 30,000 words because I don't want to repeat myself from how to write a Novel and successful self publishing and all that. So it is to be a short non fiction. Super useful. I've booked Kristen for edit so I'm going to be done with that in July and that'll probably be out August, September sometime. I will human narrate it and it will be a useful craft and business book. And yeah, so I'm really pleased about that. I just feel so much more happy when I get words down on books. I'm actually going to be useful to people. But as I said I will finish that Masters now on Bones of the Deep. I've heard from lots of people who've now received the sign hardback and the ebooks and audiobooks went out over a month ago so that Kickstarter is completely fulfilled with just a couple of consulting sessions to go. And if you missed it, Bones of the Deep is coming soon in the usual formats in the usual places. And of course my store jfpenbooks.com if you have read it and enjoyed it, a review would be much appreciated on Goodreads if you review there or my store or whatever you usually review. This week I'm off on a research trip to Brussels and Bruges in Belgium, so keep an eye on Instagram fpenauthor or Facebook fpen Author if you want to follow along. I worked in Brussels in the late 90s and so it has some memories, but of course I was in my twenties back then. Very different life. I'm also a finalist in the Selfie awards for Best self published novel for Death Valley. The prize giving is at the Groucho Club in London this week. I'm in the last five people now if anyone knows the city and the Groucho Club. That should be quite fun. If I win, you will know about it. If I lose I'll probably tell you too. But yeah, it'd be nice to win that. I won that award for Non fiction for Pilgrimage a few years back so it'd be nice to win it for fiction. Who knows. So thanks for your photos this week. Janet sent a photo listening to you while I set up my office in my friend's garden in Bavaria and a lovely picture of Janet's camp van with the dog curled up in a cute basket under the shade of a tree and her writing laptop and a chair. And I did actually think of you this week Janet as I was visiting some friends in Devon on the coast, went to their campsite and there were some very swanky camper vans with people sitting with cold drinks in the sun and looked pretty idyllic. But I'm not sure my cats would be as relaxed as your dog. No other comments this week, so please leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes atthecreative pen.com or on the YouTube channel. Or you can email me send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. JoannaTheCreativePenn.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. So today's show is sponsored by publisher Rocket, which helps you with keyword and category research on Amazon which you need for your metadata when self publishing, as well as generating lists of keywords for your Amazon ads. You can do this manually on Amazon, but it takes a lot more time and you have to think of all the different permutations to search for for. I found that Publisher Rocket saves me so much time and frustration that I use it for every book in every genre I publish. It makes the process easy, which, let's face it, is what we all need so we can get back to writing. Now some people have asked whether they could just use Claude or ChatGPT for this, and yes, they can give you lists of categories and keywords, but they cannot give you the detailed analysis that Rocket can as it pulls directly from Amazon. So for example, you can use the reverse ASIN search, put in the asin the Amazon identifier of a book that is similar to yours and get the categories and keywords that they rank in. Yes you can actually look at where your comparison titles and comparison authors sit and what they are ranking for and then it also gives you the number of searches per month for the keywords and how competitive they are in terms of pricing so you can find some good little niches there to advertise your book. You can also search separately across different Amazon stores for us, uk, Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia, France, Spain as well as ebooks, audiobooks or print and in different languages English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. So it's super useful if you're doing translations too. So yes, I still use Publisher Rocket for my books and in fact I just used it for Bones of the Deep which is out soon. It is a one time payment and you get 30 days money back guarantee and you can start researching for your keywords, categories and competition right away. Publisher Rocket is one of my must use tools as part of my publishing process and it is very reasonably priced priced. So go check it [e-mail] that's publisherrocket.com 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] TheCreativePen thanks to the seven new patrons who've joined this 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, writing, craft, author, business and AI tutorials. This week I shared how to create audio and video snippets with AI and schedule them so you don't have to do them manually. 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, 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. You. Nicole Walker is a non fiction author, essayist, poet and editor, as well as a creative writing teacher. Her latest book is Writing the Hard Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose. So welcome to the show, Nicole.

[B]

Hi Joanna. It's so nice to be here.

[A]

I've lots to talk about, but first up, tell us a bit more about you and your journey into writing and publishing.

[B]

Yeah, so you know, I was always a writer, as all writers say. I was writing since I was five. I had kept little journals and things like that, but I was on the high school literary magazine. I was an English major in college. But that was always tempered with some serious commitment too, to sciences, to English literature, to German, to Spanish. You know, I had a wide variety of interest. But there was always something that tugged at me about writing that made me feel like this. This is where I feel most at home. And this is the way that I like to understand the puzzles of the universe. This is how I make sense of the world, is through writing. And so even though I got my BA in English at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and I stuck around Portland for a few years because I loved Portland and I worked for various nonprofits and that was great. But at some point I said, I really want to take this seriously. So I went ahead and applied to graduate school and ended up in the University of Utah's PhD program, where I stayed for eight very lovely years. I always recommend to my own students, never graduate, stay in graduate school forever because it's such a beautiful place where people support your writing. You have professors who support it, but more importantly, you have your cohort. And to this day I have so many great friends. Again, you make a lot of friends if you stick around for eight years. And that sort of community building is, I think, the other part of why I became a writer. Writing by myself, obviously that's a lonely business and there's a lot of internal struggle that happens with that. But to have found a literary community, both at the University of Utah and then growing from there, doing as president of the Nonfiction Now Writers Conference, to teaching my own graduate students, to serving as the series editor for Crux, then imprint at the University of Georgia Press. I feel like my world has expanded because of my writing, and so that's been a true gift.

[A]

Oh, I love that. I love that you said you understand the puzzles of the universe through writing and that you felt that this tugged at you. I wonder if you could maybe talk about that a bit more, because a lot of listeners, I think, sometimes mistrust that feeling, and they think, oh, maybe I should not necessarily lean into that intuition. But it feels like you. You leaned very strongly into an intuition that this was the way.

[B]

Yes. And this book in particular, Writing the Hard Stuff, takes that to heart. So, for example, I think about writing the hard stuff as writing all kinds of tricky things, things that are really hard to communicate. And it begins to the. The book begins revolving around personal trauma, things that happen in my childhood, as well as subjects that happen, you know, that happen to us when we're growing up. But it also includes things like environmental issues and political issues, things that are really hard to talk about and are philosophically difficult to express and can be controversial, and you can put people off by talking about them. One of the goals of the book, one of my own philosophies, is that by looking deeply into the sort of ball of string, knotted ball of string, that is a kind of trauma or a kind of difficulty, and beginning to pull those strings out, that's where you start to not only make meaning out of what happened to you or what this particular problem is, but those strings itself become connections. You know, I talk about Donna Haraway's books, Staying with the Trouble. And this is definitely a book primarily about how we can overcome our political differences regarding climate change. And one of her examples is to change the way we think about narrative. You know, and in Western thought, we think often there's a beginning, middle, and end. And she brings up the Navajo game called that we all know as Cat's Cradle. And so if you think of that ball of knot that you have, your trauma, your difficult subject, you start pulling out the strings, and then you start playing with. With it. You start making, you know, cat's cradle. You make one design with your hands, and then a friend pulls it around and turns it into another design. To me, that's how reading and writing work is that we share and we come up with each other's ideas, but we're always connected by those strings. So if you have this difficult subject and you're like, I am shying away from it, you're losing, I think, some of the opportunity to make connections and to make sense of what that that nest of string sits around in your stomach and is.

[A]

I love that metaphor. I think that's brilliant. And I've never heard it described that way, and I think that's fantastic. But in my mind now, so I have. And I also. What's interesting is, of course, some people don't have a mind's eye. I know several listeners who don't have a mind's eye. So while in my mind I'm picturing the ball of string and then I'm picturing the cat's cradle, some people won't be able to do that. Which is also fascinating, right, in terms of how people's brains work. But it's in terms of how, perhaps you would recommend people think about it. This ball of string that we want to turn into a design like a cat's cradle, that ball of string is a total mess. So where do we even start? Like, how do we know where to start pulling on the threads? Because it might just feel like it's out of control.

[B]

Oh, I deeply appreciate both the idea that some people don't have that mind's eye or just think differently, right? We all have different ways of imagining what we call our trauma, what we call this nest of problems that we call this ball of string. And of course, a metaphor does oversimplify in some ways, right? I'm like, well, you just take one of the ends of string and start pooling. But practically, right, what does that really mean to do? There's a couple of things that I suggest in the book and do. I offer workshops is I offer this exercise called Writing the Braided Essence. Say, and I asked the workshoppy, right, the writer to sit down and to think about some scene that was difficult in their lives, something that had a lot of tension that they really were still struggling with, that they don't love thinking about. But I'm going to ask them to go there for just a couple of minutes. And then the other side of the braided essay is for them. I asked them to think about something completely different, completely off topic. Perhaps a walk they took in the aspen grove, or perhaps what they were making for dinner last night. Or perhaps they're deeply invested in the networks of the blood of the human body, right? Anything that they're sort of fascinated with and obsessed with. And I say, okay, so I want you to write about your difficult subject for two minutes, but then I'm going to give you a break and you're going to pop over and talk about how you spent all. All day weeding Your garden, and yet there's still weeds. And then I'm going to ask people to go back and talk about their difficult subject and then go back and talk about their obsession with weeds. And they write about each of these things for two minutes. And what happens, which is, I think, pretty. Pretty compelling experiment from my point of view and from theirs, is that they write back and forth, and they're able to take a break from that, from the hard thing, but they are also tempted to go back to it once they have that break, once they've taken that break in their research. The other thing that happens, and I think this is, you know, every book in nonfiction has to have a colon. So of course, it's called writing the hard stuff, Turning difficult subjects into meaningful prose. That these people are. That they take this story and they. By going back and forth, you'll see these connections that they make. They make connections with word choice, with verbs, with colors, and different kinds of imagery. And what happens is they start to make meaning between those two ideas. And so what happened to the writer then is. And to me, when I'm doing it is I have now something that is constructed, right? So it is not just this, not in my stomach. It is not just my interest in research now. I put these things together, and then I get to play, and we get to the cat's cradle part of the metaphor where I really start thinking about craft issues. Well, why. Why did I happen to bring these two ideas together? What might they have in common? What does it mean that I am telling the story of my parents divorce in my personal trauma and in the research. Research part, talking about weeds? Well, maybe I felt in the weeds, right? You come up with some sort of overarching understanding of why you chose that research story, and it lets you go deeper into. Into that personal trauma now with some of the techniques of craft, which I think help shield you from some of the trauma and pain of that original hard story.

[A]

Again, I really love that idea. And do you also think that the timed writing actually helps people almost go deep and then withdraw a bit, which psychologically may help them write about these difficult subjects, which, you know, because people are like, oh, well, I need to sit down for two hours and write about this deeply traumatic thing, which of course you feel like this is going to be too hard. So perhaps that two minute, two minute sort of process actually releases people from that.

[B]

Oh, absolutely. What a great way to think about it is that it is prohibitive to sit down and think, okay, I'm going to go into the worst thing that ever happened to me. And sit with it for two hours. I think. Yeah, going back and forth, you do get. And you create energy, too, and tension. But also, nobody wants to sit with something by themselves for two hours. If you think of research as your companion, like, I'm going. I'm coming in there with you, buddy. That you have somebody to rely on, something to rely on this other side of the story. It also gives you that space and it also. The timed writing, the two minutes. Two minutes. Two minutes. That that process reminds you, too, that you don't have to write for two hours straight any day. Right. I have a goal where I write 500 words a day, which is mostly true, unless I'm really in the weeds to. We will use two metaphors for today. We will use both string. And now we will be using weeds. But whatever. Really in the weeds, teaching or going around the country talking about books. I really do write 500 words a day. But I often try not to write too much more because I feel it sometimes loses freshness and it can be overwhelming. And so I really appreciate your saying that having that timed writing is important, but also having that balance of deep emotional investigation with this more cerebral informational crutch can really help you get into that subject and to go deeper.

[A]

Yeah. And also perhaps it anchors the writing in something concrete, because with memoir, particularly, having also written one, it can be too easy to lean on big words like pain or trauma, but that actually is meaningless in a book. Right. So why is it so important to be specific and concrete around our writing in order to display these. These bigger topics?

[B]

Well, you know, I think we. We know our own trauma. We know how it feels in our bodies, and. And we've been living with it for a long time. And so I think it's pretty hard to communicate it to others. Why does it matter to other people? People, of course it matters to you. Right. But how are you going to convey that breadth of that trouble with words that are not rooted into the physical world? And the nice thing about rooting things in the physical world is every one of us has a body. Right. We have different bodies, but we share that in common. And so it's the old trope of using yourself senses first. What did it feel like? And if you can't think of what part of your body it particularly hurts in, you have the availability of metaphor to describe how that might have felt in your body. You have the opportunity to create scene. And this is really, I think, particularly difficult for memoir writers because we Imagine that it's the fiction folks, right, that have to use dialogue, that have to have a setting, put our bodies in a place. Place. But that's one of my mantras that I. That when I teach, I say we need to be able to see where you are. We need to see what is physically happening, how the interactions work. And dialogue, I think, is one of the best ways to literally get your body on the page and to get your other characters, subjects on the page is to put them in dialogue. Because to speak, you have to have a body. And once you start having dialogue, you can picture the way. Way the speaker's face moves, the way they cross their legs. You can even picture the color of the paint behind them or the kind of chair they're sitting in. So dialogue is one of the first ways I think you can say, I must have a scene here. I cannot, you know, I can't go on telling people it was so traumatic. I was. I suffered so much. It was terrible. I felt so much pain. Right. You could say that sometimes you. You.

[A]

That's.

[B]

That's totally fair. But you have to pair it with those that physical, as you said, concrete imagery, so other people can begin to understand what it felt like. You like what it felt like for you and your body, so they can feel it in their body.

[A]

Interesting, though, you bring up dialogue, because one of the issues with memoir is I've had people compare it to truth with a small T and truth with a. With a big T. So you're sort of telling some kind of big truth about your life. But if you're writing dialogue about something that actually happened to you in memory, it's very, very unlikely that that actually happened in that way. So it's not necessarily small T. True. So on a practical note, around writing this kind of thing, what are your thoughts and tips on truth and how do we tell our own story, even if others don't see it that way?

[B]

Yeah. This is a subject that I'm deeply invested in right now, because when I first started teaching creative nonfiction, it was at the height of the John de Gata and David Shields big questions. What is truth? Big T, little T. What am I obligated to do as a creative nonfiction writer? Writer. And I had this great friend, Angie Chuang, who came to teach one of my classes, and she said, you know, nonfiction is a pretty big spectrum. You have journalism on one end, and then you have the lyric essay on the other end, and you imagine the lyric essay is full of metaphors and things like that. So you can approach truth. Right? You're like, this is what it felt like. This is what it seemed like. But check out my newest favorite thing. It's called speculative nonfiction. And I use a little bit of this in my book how to Plant a Billion Trees, which writing the heart stuff is. Is somewhat based on. I wrote them in tandem, which is a very strange interest. It was a very interesting and fun thing to do. But in how to Plant a Billion Trees, I use this thing called speculative nonfiction, which goes then even further on the spectrum past lyric essay to this. This opportunity to use language like perhaps, maybe I imagined. So I have sections in my book where. Where I can't remember the dialogue Right. Exactly. But I know that the dialogue in some sense matters. Right. That what might have been said will do much more to convey what was happening than my exposition over the matter. And so by using those turns of phrases. Right. That you're alerting your reader. Dear reader, yes, this definitely is not exactly what happened, but this is how I recall it. Then you're being not only honest to the. The story and honest to your reader, but you're also conveying the feeling and the mood of the event, that kind of. That other kind of truth that memoir is really trying to get at. Right. Was. It was like this for me, which is why I think this way now. And it's. It's kind of a fledgling genre. I just read a book by Lorraine Herring called A Constellation of Ghosts, a spectacular speculative memoir with ravens. It's brilliant. It's an amazing book that pairs her fear with her actual colonoscopy and then discovery of colon cancer with the story of her dad, who has passed already and comes back as a raven and helps her through it. So you're pulling on some of the tools of fiction, which creative nonfiction already has. Has been doing, but it does so in this bright and, I feel like, incredibly ethical way. You're alerting your reader, yeah, my dad is not really a raven. But you're saying, oh, my gosh, I sensed he was with me. I sense every time a raven approached that I had somebody's hand on my shoulder. And that, to me, has been a great. A lot of fun and a much more imaginative way of creating some of those scenes than doing something like, well, I don't remember the dialogue. Or even worse, we know people have been unethical in their approach, is recreating the dialogue as if they had a tape recorder with them when they were 17 years old. So I offer that as an option to your listeners, as something to experiment with, Allow yourself to have that imaginative opportunity to show the reader what it might have been like. Like.

[A]

Yeah, I love that. And it's interesting you kind of talk there about the. The spectrum of, let's say, non fiction, which, yeah, is ridiculously big, as is fiction, obviously. These are very, very big. But I wonder if we do get hemmed in by genre. I love the idea of a speculative memoir. I'm gonna have to go read that book because I can't even imagine what that really means, because I feel hemmed in by my expectations of a memoir. But then from a business and marketing perspective, you know, because we're all trying to sell our books, do. Do we risk not meeting the expectations of a reader of a genre that way?

[B]

Right. I mean, so one of the good and bad things about my. My literary career is that I've spanned a lot of genres. My PhD is actually in poetry. Nobody expects the full truth from poetry. Or if they do. One of my poetry professors once said she wrote this really sad poem about her father's death, and the audience was moved. And then her real father stood up and said, good job, daughter. And someone in the audience was just shocked. Like, you just read a poem about your dead dad, and here he is. You know, we have absolute expectations of genre and expectations of truth in everything that we read. If you label it fiction, Right. You're kind of off the. Even though, of course, fiction uses so many elements of nonfiction. Right. So much research, so much information, so much personal memory to create these fantastic landscapes. So when I think about how one sells one's memoir. Right. I do think you also have to acknowledge what you expect your audience to be. So Lorraine Herrings, A Consolation of Ghosts, her book. By putting a speculative memoir, you're alerting your reader to that possibility. And because it's a pretty far out way of thinking right now, it does probably curtail some of the sales. But on the other hand, you imagine think of memoirs that are written for celebrities and how many of them are ghosts or written with other people, and that ghostwriter is not even part of the thing. But it comes across as the most legit of all memoirs because it's a celebrity and we know them, and so we associate their lives with their story, and their story must therefore be true. So I think with all levels of creative nonfiction, that it is incumbent upon the writer to, right off the bat, suggest what kind of nonfiction they're reading. Right. Are they reading journalism? Are they reading lyric essays? Are they reading speculative nonfiction? And I think a lot Too about as an editor for a literary series for nonfiction books, what do I look for in those? In memoir is something that that takes the personal story and connects it into the larger conversation. Right? And even if the larger conversation is directly about what the main subject is about, it's still to me about the crux of the matter. Why does your story make an impact on the world in this bigger way? How do you let the world inform your story? How does your past and your trauma or your difficulties connect to a larger world? To me, that's something that some memoirs are capable of doing right? And some memoirs are truly invested only in that personal story, which I think is totally legitimate too, because I love learning how people think. I love understanding. This is just how my brain works. But in terms of sales, I don't know. Again, as the series editor and seller of my own books, I started sort of think you can't determine it in advance. So you should probably write what you want to write and what feels right to you using as many, of course, craft techniques as you can hone. But the market to me feels is very, very non negotiable.

[A]

Right.

[B]

In that, I mean, you'd never know exactly how things are going to turn out. So I believe, yeah, I deeply believe, write the best well crafted book you can. And I do think your readers will find you.

[A]

Well, we'll come back to marketing in a minute, but just returning to your own writing practice. I've got your book page up in front of me and you've written all kinds of things. Your essays, your memoirs, some fiction and some poetry, as you mentioned. And you've got all kinds of things. And so I wondered, how do you know when you're coming up with you're researching something or you've got a feeling about wanting to write? How do you choose the type of book that you turn it into? Or a poem or an essay, or you pitch it as some kind of external work or turning it into a workshop, or how do you turn an idea into what it will be eventually?

[B]

I love that question because it is somewhat of a mystery to me, but I think getting close to understanding it really is in those first few words, that first sentence that I'm like, okay, I know which direction this is going. For example, the other day I woke up in the morning, like, all right, I'm writing this poem about how man took over for God and that's how the planet ended up to be such a mess. And so I started writing it and it was pretty lyrical at the beginning, but Then I started making full sentences and I started explaining things a little bit more. And I was like, okay, this is not a poem. It's going to be an editing essay. And then when I start writing fiction, it is, I pull on something I think a little further, a little more distant from my experience, and then I pull it back into something more character driven. So for example, in a novel I'm writing, I begin with this whole story about McDonald's and Ravens, and then I pull it back into the character. But really, if I were to diagram the sentences between a poem and the nonfiction and the fiction, I think I would see fundamental differences between the three.

[A]

And do you work on multiple projects at the same time or do you start once you commit to something, that's what you finish? I mean, personally, I have lots of things, lots of little things happening, and then it's like a moment comes and I commit to a book and then I will not stop until I have finished that book. And the rest of them will have to wait. But it's sort of that decision moment. How does it work for you?

[B]

You? Yeah, my, my, my process is pretty similar to yours. I have a number of projects ongoing. They're like percolating here and there. And some days I'll be all right. This today feels like a fiction day. But for the most part, you're absolutely right. Like there's a bunch of little things I'm writing or these things I'm dabbling in. But once there's a critical mass, right, which I would think is around, I'm gonna say 20,000 words or something, like I'm all in and I've got to focus on, on this project. Plus, even though whatever multitasking I think I can do, really, it's important to try to try to maintain some sort of through line in whatever project I'm working on. And if I do that too much with too many projects, I, I, I lose that through line. I also worry sometimes too that the projects start to sound too similar. So say I'm writing a nonfiction collection and writing a non novel, that if I write, you know, if I go back and forth every other day, that those sentence differences that I'm talking about might start to collapse and they become too similar. And then what the heck would I be writing? I don't even know.

[A]

Yeah, and then it's interesting because you span academic publishing and I guess trade publishing, whatever you want to call it, when non academics read books. And I'm just finishing up a month masters myself at the moment. And so writing academic stuff is completely different to writing my other books. And I wondered, so when you're deciding on these books, are you aiming for a specific publication market, as in, you want an academic publisher or you want a trade publisher, or how do you think about publishing in the process?

[B]

I think that for. I mean, I. I would say that as much as I once really wanted to find some ground as a. As a scholarly and academic writer, and I've really do love to write reviews of other people's books, and the writing, the Hard stuff is a textbook that relies tremendously on so many other people's books. That's really important to me because again, that goes back to how one both creates and thanks one's community for creating this literary world that we live in. But I feel like there's a smaller audience for that sort of academic writing. But something that we should do. We really, you know, as. As generous as you are here, for example, reaching out to other people about other people's books is probably the kindest thing you. You can do. So I hope to continue to take time to do that and make that part of my, my repertoire. But it's. It is not as fun, I would say, as the imaginative elements of writing creative nonfiction or fiction or. And that's when I really, you know, I really, I love to groove and get in that mode of just like, oh, the words are coming. Oh, I never thought about it that way. And academic writing, I feel sometimes I write in a little bit more stilted voice. My friend Andrew Munson, who teaches at University of Arizona, he's done this really great job of writing, whether it's his personal essays or critical essays where he maintains his same voice. He doesn't move into that super formal academic speak. He literally will say things like, you know, or. Or that's a banger of a sentence in the middle of an academic essay. And I really admire him for that and feel like maybe if academic writing was more receptive to people writing in their unique voices, then maybe more people would read it.

[A]

Yeah, I. One of the feedback on one of my earlier essays in my master's year was around my sentence structure and that it would be far more appropriate in a novel than in an academic essay. And. And I was saying to my husband, I can't believe this, but I'm just going to have to change my style. So, yeah, it's very interesting, but we're almost out of time. But I did also want to ask you. You have a blog post, a recent blog post on how to Try to get your forthcoming book attention in 4231 Simple Steps, which made me laugh. And so we all find book marketing a challenge. It's what have you found works best for you? And I should tell the listeners There are not 4,000 steps in your blog post, although I think people would want them.

[B]

Exactly. I stopped at 72, but I can go on. That was sort of the pre publishing process and there's been so many great things that have happened, but a lot of them have been driven by me. I have a publicist, but he works on a lot of other books and I have a marketing person at Bloomsbury, but they have to juggle a lot. The only person that's really, really, really committed to your book is you. And so I've written companion essays. I have not had any luck publishing them and that hasn't been true in the past. And so I wonder what's going on in that. You know, I'm going to write something for the Huffington Post or Newsweek that has tangentially related to my book. I also might just write too much in essay Voice instead of popular magazine Voice, as we were just talking about academic voice versus novelistic voice. So that might be part of the problem too. Reaching out to people who might invite me to podcasts has been really rewarding and very, very, again, very, very kind. I think the best thing I did though was to put myself on book tour and to pair myself with someone in that community. I've gone on book tour before by myself and there are occasions where there have been two to three people in the office audience and that can be really disheartening. And I think the problem was wasn't so much at the bookstore's fault or my book's fault. It's just that if you go to a bookstore in the, in a town where nobody knows you, they're not going to put a lot of effort into making the date right unless you're super famous. And so what I did is I found somebody in a community, a friend of mine, who would go with me and be part of the conversation with me and we would both, even if they their book was a couple of years old, we would still go and have a convers about each of our books. And this has worked tremendously well. People will come to see their friend and then they'll be introduced to you and they will ask you questions and buy your book and you will create new connections and new friends thanks to that friend in that place. So that's my number one recommendation of how to get the word out in the world. I did all the social media stuff. It doesn't work as well as it used to. It's. It's kind of a strange time. But what I. But because of what my suggestion about going to bookstores with people, you know, I think we're coming out of our Covid time where we're so used to just doing everything on our computers and just staying in our. In our. In our electronic universe, people are. Are hungry to get out. So one thing I want to do and haven't done yet is throw a big party, you know, go to weird places where you don't even do reading, who just offer people snacks and a glass of wine and say, hey, here's a book if you want to buy it. Right on to have these more informal gatherings that bring people together, because I do think there's a hankering for people to get out into the world again.

[A]

And just. Just on that, you've got these two books at the same time, the how to Plant a Billion Trees, which is the memoir, and then Writing the Hard Stuff as How to Book for Writers. When you do these events, are you choosing one or the other depending on the audience, or are you kind of selling both at the same time? Because they obviously, they're very different.

[B]

Yeah, I'm definitely selling both at the same time. Although how to Plant a Billion Trees is probably. I push that first because most of the people I'm pairing with are also writers of nonfiction or memoir. And the other thing is, is I can talk about. Talk about how to Plant a Billion Trees. And if people have a really deep question about, well, how did you write this section? I can say, well, if you refer to this book, Writing the Hard Stuff, you will see. So it's an easier segue way. For example, and I think people are not used to going to book events for books, craft books, but in the interview world, right, where people are reviewing books or interviewing me, definitely Writing the Hard Stuff has been the primary book I've been approached to speak about because people really do want techniques, right? So. So it depends on the context of which book, which book gets the spotlight. But it's been really fun. Fun to be able to talk about both in tandem. And I don't know. I don't know if they're competing against each other or if they're supporting each other. That's my hope, is that they're like, oh, I read this one book, I might as well read the other one. But that's asking a lot of people to buy two books. So I try not to overstate that hope.

[A]

Yeah. But no, they are very different and I love the idea of doing that. Absolutely. So where can people find you and your books online?

[B]

Well you can find me more at my substack which is substack.nickwalk.com Nik W or my website which is the same Nik W A L K. I might just start going as Nick Walk in the world so people can buy me more easily. And I really love to support Bloomsbury has really good deals on especially on the audiobook for Plant a Billion Trees and they also have good deals. If you buy both books you get free shipping. Ha. So Bloomsbury is probably the number one place to to get the books. But of course they're available on bookshop.com and Amazon.com and Amazon in the UK as well.

[A]

Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Nicole. That was great.

[B]

It was so fun to talk with you. Joanna. Thank you again so much for this opportunity.

[A]

I hope you found the interview with Nicole interesting and that you might try timed writing or the idea of the braided essay approach. Or for book marketing, you might consider pairing up with other local authors for in person events and double down on being human. You should probably just take a drink whenever I say that now. So let me know what resonated with you. Please leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes at the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel. Or email me joannatheivepen.com and send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery or churchyard next Monday. I'm talking about author voice mastery and rebooting an author business after a hypothetical hiatus with J. Daniel Sawyer. So 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 find me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook @JFPEN. Author happy writing and I'll see you next time.