[SPEAKER_00]: and welcome to our show.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shit no one tells you about writing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm best selling author Bianca Marie, and I'm joined by CC Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates and Carly Waters of PS Literary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi everyone, I'm really excited about today's special guest who scared the crap out of me as she hopped on because I was looking at another screen and I feel like this is an appropriate way for her night to have met considering the books she writes.
[SPEAKER_00]: She is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning author, her books have been published in over 30 languages and have been voted best of the year for topics by the today's show, Good Morning America, Entertainment Weekly, and others.
[SPEAKER_00]: She lives on the west coast of Florida with her family.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's my pleasure to welcome Lisa Anger.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lisa, welcome to the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Bianca, thank you so much for having me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm so excited to be here.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I get a lot of hiccups.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I feel like you and I need to hang around each other a lot because getting skid takes the hiccups away.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And ever, for you having like a hiccup jag, just schedule an interview on our hop on why you're busy with emails.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna have you on speed up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so for everybody who's not watching on the YouTube channel, I'm holding up the book week discussing today, served him right, done, done, done.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna link to it on our bookshop.org affiliate page.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you get the book there, you support an independent bookstore and the podcast at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lisa, you have had a phenomenal career.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, is this your 23rd book?
[SPEAKER_00]: Have I lost track?
[SPEAKER_00]: It is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you lost track?
[SPEAKER_01]: I sometimes do lose track, but I know that it's my 23rd because I've turned in my 24th and I'm writing my 25th book right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, my first novel published in 2002, you know, back in the
[SPEAKER_01]: Stone ages and I've been pretty much doing a book a year since then in addition to, you know, novella's in short fiction and some nonfiction essays and such.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, you know, head down, notes to the keyboard for like 25 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: for sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean that fascinates me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's longevity in an industry that does not make longevity easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Agents go this way, it just goes this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly the whole industry wants this, then suddenly this is no longer fashionable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then they want this.
[SPEAKER_00]: then they want you to write in your lane, then they want you to stay out of your lane.
[SPEAKER_00]: So whenever I come across a writer such as you, I really want to pick your brain about advice in terms of the longevity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it really just rolling with the punches?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it being versatile?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's your advice for that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it's such a great question because I think it's funny like when you, you know, I travel all the time and I'm always at conferences and I think there's always like this perception of people, you know, they sprung from the head of Zeus and full armor, right, you know, and they're like, people who are luminaries or people who are warbiners or whatever, you know, you kind of only see them in that moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think most people are a lot of people, I should say,
[SPEAKER_01]: about what a road it is, like, what a journey it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, I mean, in my case, you know, I was, I started writing my first novel and I was 19 years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't publish that novel until I was 29.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then once I started writing, I have, you know, I have, as I mentioned, written a book a year.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the industry has, I mean, if you think about it, 2002, at that stage, at that time, there wasn't any social media, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't even have smartphones.
[SPEAKER_01]: at that point in time.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was a different game altogether.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the industry, and I've been in the industry since I was 22 years old, I started in publishing.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was my first job.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have seen the industry just change dramatically in terms of formats.
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, the
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the ebook came along and changed publishing, the audio book is right now having a huge moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mass market has just completely gone away.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's gone now for most publishing programs, which is crazy to me, because it was always such a backbone of the industry.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I've seen the industry change a lot and trends, of course, change and all of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, what I will say is what doesn't change,
[SPEAKER_01]: is that people still read, people still want stories like in whatever format, they're getting them at this time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think that changes because it's the human impulse to narrate, to embody character, to narrate, to create story.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the human impulse to hear and to read those stories and to learn about life, not necessarily to escape life, although certainly yes, sometimes that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That what I care about every day when I wake up is I care about what I do on the page every day I believe that I can be a better writer than I was yesterday and I firmly believe that because it's the only thing that has.
[SPEAKER_01]: driven me through my career.
[SPEAKER_01]: So of course, I actually wrote about this for a couple of years weekly that there's this long career.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, there are these dizzying highs and these crushing lows of an agent passed away, of an editor left, all of the things that can happen in your career have happened to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet every day I get up and I write and the same thing is true on the amazing days, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The days where you get a great review or you win an award or you're nominated for a award, it's the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: I sit down and I write.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it reminds me of that old like the Zen Buddhist added, which is like, what do you do before enlightenment?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, chocolate, carry water.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you do after enlightenment?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, chocolate, carry water.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what do you do on the worst day?
[SPEAKER_01]: Hopefully you write.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you do in the best day?
[SPEAKER_01]: You better sit down and write.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what sustain me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think through my career.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so what do you do before?
[SPEAKER_00]: You make shit up and what do you do?
[SPEAKER_00]: Off do what?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you make shit up?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to show you that some way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something you said was something that I wanted to ask because this person comes to this is one you have hugely loyal fans.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know this because every time I go on a cruise or if I go to resort somewhere, where there's a lot of people crowded together reading, I will always check what they're reading.
[SPEAKER_00]: And your books are everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it shows, and it's not just the latest one, it's a whole bunch of them, which shows a really loyal, faithful following.
[SPEAKER_00]: And something that I've noticed about you just from seeing you on social media is that you're a really good literary citizen.
[SPEAKER_00]: you highlight other writers, you show up for other writers, you know, you do a lot of conferences etc and readers nowadays through socials want to have a kind of parasocial relationship with you right today they want to ask you questions why did you do this on this page why did you do this on this page and of course you want to engage with with your readers but it comes a point at which especially
[SPEAKER_00]: So how do you balance that authentic engagements with a community who wants to engage with you with getting the next book art, which is also what they want?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a really interesting balancing act and, you know, especially for somebody who's been doing this work as long as I have, you know, it's relatively new, like I remember a time before social.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a time where there wasn't really any social media and certainly it wasn't to the, it hasn't evolved to, it had only, I think, only in the last couple of years
[SPEAKER_01]: distraction and need and all of it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's only recently become that for my perspective, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I mean, I really, I have really tried because I, you know, I consider it, you know, and I'll just be really honest, like at first of all, I consider it the enemy of creativity, really, really.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet it's also a way to connect with other authors, booksellers, readers,
[SPEAKER_01]: and that's important as well, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's an inauthentic platform, but I've worked to try to find a way to be authentic within that platform, but truly no, it's not possible to engage personally with every single person who wants to engage with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the way I feel about it is that, you know, I write a book, I spend a year writing a book and I before all of myself into it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's my book.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's everything that I did that year.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like what I thought about the most is the pinnacle of my ability.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the best that I can do at the time of its writing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I put it out into the world, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it becomes the reader's book.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's where my
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have been writing for a long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have people, and even though my books are all a little bit different, they're definitely layered and not the same thing time after time.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I feel very, really grateful that the people who have been reading me all along, come along for the ride.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's my true engagement with my reader.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've provided you with this book,
[SPEAKER_01]: And you take it and you read it and when you read it, it becomes yours, you bring yourself to the book and it becomes something different to something utterly different from what I what I created is what it is in your hands and so I feel like that's an important as the most important way.
[SPEAKER_01]: that I engage with my readers.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do also engage in real-time in social media.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have helped, you know, all content comes from me, all content flows from me have been really careful that there's no one else creating content.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somebody else might post all that stuff and also I keep a really, I try to say really strict in my schedule.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is something that I got from Cow Neaport.
[SPEAKER_01]: He wrote a book called Deep Work.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you've ever read it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's an important book.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think every writer should read it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the work of writing, that is my deep work.
[SPEAKER_01]: The creation of my novels and my stories, that is my deep work.
[SPEAKER_01]: My marketing and engagement work, that is my shallow work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, according to Cal Newport.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the deep work always comes first.
[SPEAKER_01]: My golden creative hours are the morning by the aim to noon.
[SPEAKER_01]: I try to honor that as much as I can.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where I'm closest to my dream brain.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where, you know, there's like a little pocket of time before the sun comes up or nobody else is interested in what you and what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I try to really stay there and then bring myself to the other work of marketing and engagement in the afternoon.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that process and something you said earlier about layering your work and people who read your work, find that layering.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to read two small excerpts just for our readers to show what you know Lisa means here.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it says, I've seen enough going my life and career that I could be one of those who resorts to gallows humor to cope.
[SPEAKER_00]: It still gets me every time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know too much about the human body and how it comes apart, breaks down, comes unden.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mainly these days I see overdose.
[SPEAKER_00]: Faint and all is a scourge, especially in semi-rural communities like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: A thousand people lost your dad in this county alone, all kinds of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Last month, a wealthy doctor, the month before that, a waitress, offered a night up with their friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two college students found in the library.
[SPEAKER_00]: They thought, according to friends, that what they were taking was ederal, died over their textbooks.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've been co-accidents, suicides, assaults, domestic violence,
[SPEAKER_00]: But in my five years on the Little Valley PD, this is only my fourth murder.
[SPEAKER_00]: The three others were open and shut, domestic violence turned deadly.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the truth of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Overdoses and men killing women who they supposedly loved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the flower he hadn't meant to pick or the bug he hadn't meant to stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why I heard one man well, why did you make me do it?
[SPEAKER_00]: The rage and I got goosebumps there and then I was full of so much rage.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was everyone.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I got it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got it.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of rage in that book.
[SPEAKER_01]: For sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm loving the rage and I'm no exactly where it's coming from.
[SPEAKER_00]: I always say put the rage on the page.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where it's listed.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the best place for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's all bunch of places for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But on the page up.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here it is as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's another one that goes, here we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our relationship to the natural world, to plants and trees, to the whole big spinning orb, is complicated.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a twist, a dance, a struggle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nature nourishes us and endlessly giving mother, but unchelted exposure to her whims and mood can end your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: The plants we used to hear ourselves in different doses become toxic.
[SPEAKER_00]: The substances we use for recreation can stop our hearts.
[SPEAKER_00]: irreparably at all our minds invade ourselves and change our behavior.
[SPEAKER_00]: Considered tobacco, one of the most dangerous plants on Earth, killing nearly 500,000 people a year, and yet some of us pick it up willingly and daily suck their poison into our lungs,
[SPEAKER_00]: because of the way it makes us feel.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the puppy, the beauty's red flower of misery and death, and told millions have died from the drug's concocted from her compounds, drawn over and over again to the promise of that state of euphoria, the blessed relief from the pain of living.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no such thing as an unnatural death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nature has devised a million ways for us to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: even if it's by way of human nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are some that believe humans have dominion over the earth, but it's not so.
[SPEAKER_00]: As we tremble and destroy her, so does she wreak her havoc upon us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually she will eradicate us like the virus we have proven ourselves to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I mean you pick up this book and you're expecting a murder mystery.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone's going to die, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: which I love, but then you get these moments where you read that and it just resonates and it's so true and gets you thinking about so much else.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's so much depth and layering in between the murder and the mystery element of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that come from years of writing was was your earlier work like this as well, or were you leaned into it later?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think so.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I definitely see a thread.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, for me, it's always every book, it begins and ends with character voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything begins with character for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then those characters reveal themselves to me on the page very much the way my reader will learn about them later.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have that very, like, sort of authentic,
[SPEAKER_01]: relationship to the page and to my characters where like I write for the same reason that I read, you know, because I want to know what's going to happen to these people who are living my head.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, and I think that I've always been as a reader.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have always been like this literary omnivore as a kid.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, my my mom is a librarian.
[SPEAKER_01]: My dad is an engineer and they're both big readers.
[SPEAKER_01]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: Every place we lived was like big bookshelves and there was no censorship right for me I could read if I could read it if I could reach it I could read it and so I I kind of grew up with this You know, and we traveled all over the world so I was always like the new kid It was always like the odd person out, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've had this but I always had a book, you know, or Anna notebook, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was always like a home for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I read everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I read
[SPEAKER_01]: things that were wildly inappropriate for my opinion.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do this read everything from the classics to science fiction to fantasy, to the popular fiction like VC Andrews and Sidney Selden and Stephen King, and so I've always had this really like large just appetite for fiction.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't discriminate, you know, to me like a literary novel, you know, like Jane ear, I
[SPEAKER_01]: something that stays with me my entire life, you know, is comparable to something I read, you know, from Robert Heinlein science fiction like back in the 80s or whatever, it's like, it doesn't matter to me, like so these stories have formed me, of course, as a writer.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if this deep sort of.
[SPEAKER_01]: connection to character.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then also, you know, these things that have come on that evolve on the page, it either is their perspective or is the, you know, whatever from a third person perspective, like it's very organic.
[SPEAKER_01]: I never sit down to write that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't sit down to write a book about Anna Blacksmith and her relationship with men and her relationship to plants and how layered and complicated that is.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't sit down to write that book.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've
[SPEAKER_01]: and what evolved.
[SPEAKER_01]: in that story evolved on the page.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's all very organic, but I think you'd see it if you read Angel Fire, which was my first book that published in 2002.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I started it when I was 19 when I was still in college.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you would still find a lot of those layers.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that it's, you know, as my learning, I mean, obviously it was 19 this year, I'm, you know, gonna be 56.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've been writing all that time.
[SPEAKER_01]: So hopefully I'm a better writer than I was when I was 19.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think you'll see it thread that runs through that it's not just, I mean, I didn't choose thriller, thriller kind of chose me, I just have this really dark imagination and it's where I metabolize darkness, the darkness that I perceive in the world and so I think that's part of it as well, but part of it is just, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: things are dark, you know, they're also light, they're also beautiful, but there's there's a there's a darkness and that's what I'm the most curious about.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's kind of that's the long answer or the short answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: love that answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we live in this constant duality.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not going to have time for much more, but something that I really wanted to get into was, you do multiple first person POVs so well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so I think you read a book.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, how many POV characters have a gotcha?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like,
[SPEAKER_00]: Seven, eight.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we, Anna, Vera, Coraline.
[SPEAKER_00]: Timothy, she perspective.
[SPEAKER_01]: Agnes, which is like a six.
[SPEAKER_01]: Causes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Six, seven.
[SPEAKER_00]: Six or seven.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And most of them are in the present day timeline.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got agnes that takes us into the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they're written in like first person POVs and the problem that often happens here
[SPEAKER_00]: and you forget who the person was.
[SPEAKER_00]: You will be complete confused because you're like, okay, who the heck is this character?
[SPEAKER_00]: And people don't realise how much each of those first-person POVs have to be so different according to their person's experience, their knowledge of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of words they would use, their social demographic, their history.
[SPEAKER_00]: So how do you tackle that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you...
[SPEAKER_00]: come up with their character first because like you said, character voice comes to you first.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you try and form them out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you use vision boards at all to keep those separate or not?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I don't do anything like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I write in a word document that's all I've ever done.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've never used any of these.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's really nice software and stuff that you can get now.
[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't write like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't even be able to figure it out.
[SPEAKER_01]: I write in a, you know, I don't have a vision board.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have like a whiteboard with scenes
[SPEAKER_01]: Things get moved around.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, nothing like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: For me, it's really I mean, I really do just like authentically hear these voices and they're all really different to me like in the writing of them in the experience of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're all really different.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I've had people ask me don't you get confused between this character and that character and I'm like
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't understand that question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you get confused between your sister and your mother and your friend?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, there are different people to you, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, oh, I hate like whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that is authentically how I experience it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I mean, obviously, you know, they're just, they're, they're so vivid to me in my mind that hopefully they come that way on the page.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I start hearing them,
[SPEAKER_01]: I talk a lot about like writing is an organic process.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's an ev in a flow right to your days like you have that you we all know what to do in the flow days we write you know we write.
[SPEAKER_01]: But on the end days, you know, when you're just kind of like you run into the stone wall of what's going to happen here and what's next, I don't know, you know, like you do whatever you do you go to the gym, you throw the ball for the dog, bake cake, whatever, whatever you do to kind of get yourself out of that headspace and then you hear it for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like I hear it or I see it or there's a sentence and then I'm like, I'm back in right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's kind of how it works for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like so I don't like,
[SPEAKER_01]: Say, okay, here's Vera, here's Anna, here's Agnes, you know, I need to accomplish this with the plot.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this character's going to do this and then you need to do that with this character in that none of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely none of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all organic.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all from the inside out.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure there's an easier way.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: I've, I've interviewed so many authors and I sound like you because what I've always said is that if I know what's going to happen in the story, I have no desire to write it.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the point?
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm like you.
[SPEAKER_00]: A character titles up to me like in a barns, like I've got something to tell you and I'm like, tell me and I start writing it down to find out where the heck we're going to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it feels to me almost like channeling them, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's like having a psychic experience, you channel someone and your job is just to face really represent this person's story and that's how it feels to me as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: A hundred percent and I will say to you that there are some moments when you know research obviously there's a lot of moments where research needs to be done.
[SPEAKER_01]: Your research doesn't necessarily need to find your it's way into your book but you need to do it a lot of a lot more than you would imagine.
[SPEAKER_01]: to write authentically about anything, to write like a one-authentic sentence.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you need to have done like a couple months of research.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is something that's true for my book that's, we'll come out in 2027 where I had a character who just kind of showed up, you know, was getting, you know, realized that she was in a wheelchair.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I had to address my own ignorance in that area.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I started doing some reading.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I reached out to two people who teach writers how to write about things that are not their lived experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: To get that really right for her that show her that character.
[SPEAKER_01]: And somebody else who might be able to share the respect,
[SPEAKER_01]: that I don't have this live experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I'm going to do months of research trying to understand that experience so that I can portray it with love and authenticity on the page.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there is that piece to it as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it begins with the voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would never say, oh, I'm going to write about a character with a disability.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to write about a person with it like that would never happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't, I don't think in that way about story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: The character will come to you first and go, by the way, I'm a wheelchair user.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've had characters come up to me and be like, by the way, I have a parrot.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sings the King's greatest hits.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, sure, I'm going to have to learn some of us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I've never had birdsy this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to learn about African great parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, it's it's really interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the joy, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that's it is a joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Me and is discovery in having a character bringing people off and to believe the page tree people with respect so that when other people read
[SPEAKER_00]: which is how empathy is created.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are creators of empathy because yes, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cannot read a book and step into a character and feel what they feeling and go on that journey without developing some degree of empathy which the world needs to now more than ever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so we will end on that note, Lisa, thank you so much for joining us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm holding up the book again, thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Serve to him right.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going on at bookshop.org affiliate page and we wish you all the best with it, Lisa.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for joining us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I can thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a pleasure talking to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: CCLera is a literary agent at Wendy Sherman Associates.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you'd like to query CC, please refer to the Submission Guidelines at www.wshuman.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Calli Waters is a literary agent at PS Literary Agency.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a work on this podcast is not affiliated with the agency and the views expressed by Kali on this podcast are solely that of her as a podcast co-host and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of PS literary agency.