Kat (00:14)
Welcome to the Pencils and Lipstick Podcast.
Kat (00:16)
A weekly podcast for writers.
Kat (00:20)
Grab a cup of coffee.
Kat (00:21)
Perhaps some paper and pen.
Kat (00:23)
And enjoy an interview with an author.
Kat (00:25)
A chat with a writing tool creator, perhaps a conversation with an editor or other publishing experts, as well as cat’s thoughts on writing and her own creative journey. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.
Kat (00:38)
Well, hopefully not actually cry, but you will probably learn something.
Kat (00:43)
And I hope you’ll be inspired to write because as I always say, you have a story.
Kat (00:48)
You should write it down. This is Pencils and Lipstick.
Kat (00:56)
All right, everyone, we are back for another episode of the Pencils and Lipstick Podcast. I’m very excited for our guests today. Really excited. We’re going to talk about so many things, so I’m going to have her introduce herself. Hello. How are you doing?
Gail (01:08)
Hi, everybody. I’m Gail Carragher. I’m an author. Yeah, I guess it’s why I’m here. I write a lot of stuff. I’ve been writing fiction for twelve years now, and about ten of those. It’s been my full time job. I come out of academia. I know it’s great. It’s very unexpected. I did not ever anticipate or even really want to become a full time writer, but maybe we’ll talk about that.
Gail (01:33)
Yeah.
Gail (01:34)
I write science fiction, fantasy, romance and Young Adult, which I tend to just label as commercial genre fiction. And I have written one nonfiction book, which is for authors, which is called The Heroines Journey, which is basically a rebuttal to Justice Campbell’s hero with 1000 faces.
Kat (01:52)
Yes. And we are definitely going to talk about The Heroines Journey because I keep talking to people about this because as we talked on the show about getting better at our writing. This is definitely a book that can help us do that. But first, we want to talk about all the different things that you write, because first of all, how did you become a novelist? Because in your bio, you said that you were studying.
Gail (02:20)
Yeah.
Kat (02:20)
You out there with a brush in the desert or something.
Gail (02:23)
Yeah. Straight up. Yes, I have a laboratory, but I went to the lab pretty early, but I do work in field labs, which means we go out into the field and we’re Jason’s to the field. And so I have gone and looked at a ceramic pot and excavated it with a brush. Yes, that image in your head. You can imagine me doing it. That’s amazing. Okay.
Kat (02:43)
So that is what you went to school for.
Gail (02:45)
That’s what I went to school. Yes. I have two Masters degrees, one is an MS and an MA, both in archeology or archaeology, tangential fields. And I was two years out from my PhD when I stopped and became a full time writer instead. And I love it. I love both my careers. Still miss archaeology occasionally. Yeah. It was a hard decision to make, but I think we should all be so lucky as to get to pick between two careers that we genuinely love and are passionately about. So I don’t have any regrets, even as I miss it occasionally.
Gail (03:18)
Yeah. That’s my former identity, your former life.
Kat (03:22)
So were you just writing for fun while going out and digging? Like, between digs?
Gail (03:27)
Yeah. I’ve always written fiction. I wrote fiction for as long as I can remember, including when my mom would read me things when I was a kid. If I didn’t like the ending, I would like, make up a new ending for it, which should tell you something. If it didn’t end happily, I was going to make it end happily. I was like, you should have known. But yeah. So I’ve always written. But I also grew up kind of in a sort of hippy Dippy, communal kind of unincorporated small town and surrounded by poets and other artists.
Gail (03:56)
And I was like, Well, that’s not a smart life choice. So I was like, I’m never going to do that. Nothing to do with the creative endeavor. So I was like, Right, academia very lucrative.
Gail (04:07)
But yeah, as one does.
Gail (04:09)
They go and become an archaeologist as you do. But I’ve also always really been passionate about history. And I just love the idea of touching history. And I’m also a ceramicist by training. And so I probably have those two together. And my field of study and expertise is in ceramic analysis. Okay. Which basically meant I got to go lots of different places all around the world whenever they had something that was like tangential to my expertise, which happens to be a kiln transition technology. So when sites find something they think might be a kiln or whatever.
Gail (04:41)
I used to be one of the people that you think of to call in.
Kat (04:45)
Well, that’s smart if you like traveling, that’s a smart way to go.
Gail (04:48)
Yeah. I always say the thing I thought I would miss would be traveling. But I actually travel more as a writer than I ever did as an archaeologist. I would just stay longer in places when I was an archeologist.
Kat (05:01)
Right.
Gail (05:01)
And you choose, right. Well, sort of. I definitely pick and choose now for where I travel. I’ll get a couple of offers for an international event or something, and I’ll be like, shall we go to Poland or France this year? That kind of thing.
Kat (05:21)
That’s awesome. So in 2009, you wrote your first one that’s, like a published. Is that technically a fantasy? That’s my question is there all these giant genres, and then there’s smaller genre.
Gail (05:40)
I genuinely am one of those weirdos who did in everything but the kitchen sink book. I seriously thought it would never sell. So I’ve been in and out of fandom my whole life as well. I always went to scifi cons and stuff like that. So I kind of knew a lot about the book industry and how it worked in marketing and all that sort of thing and so when I wrote Solace, it was just like an itch I needed to scratch and get it over with. And I really thought nobody would want to buy it from me out of traditional publishing because it is everything that the kitchen thinks.
Gail (06:11)
Technically, it’s a comedy of manners, romance, chassis. But it is steampunk. But it was written like, very early on, in second ways steampunk. So my house actually acquired it without really knowing what Steampunk was, which is basically retrofuturism, which is an all history kind of thing. And then my stuff is very funny, usually, especially the first couple of series. Yeah. So it’s just, like, a little bit there’s a bit of a mystery. It’s just a little bit of everything.
Gail (06:42)
Yeah.
Gail (06:42)
It’s urban fantasy. There’s a bunch of stuff I love, just, like, thrown into this thing. And I was like, It’ll work or it won’t. And I just wrote it to amuse myself. And then I was trying to practice discipline and nonprofitness discipline as a writer, which is finish this thing and send it out into the world and then write a new thing rather than just keep trying to perfect the first couple of chapters of that one thing, which I know is a habit so many authors fall into.
Gail (07:09)
And so I wrote it, and I just sent it out, and I immediately got an offer on it. That is amazing. That’s insane. That’s not the offer we ended up picking, but it just goes to show that, like, and this is the thing I always tell people when they’re thinking about publishing and traditional is it really is like, Editors are like, oh, this will sell. There is a commercial eye on these sorts of things. And definitely the first editor was like, we’re not sure what this is, but it will sell.
Gail (07:36)
And then Orbit, who is my publisher that ends up purchasing the series or the first book and then a series from me off of the back of that book. They were like, we don’t know, but we think it will sell. So it made us laugh. Let’s do this thing. And they were very confused. And they remain mostly confused about me, my style and my career as a business. The publishing business is like, we don’t get Gail. Like, every time they send me a royalty report, they still make royalties on that first book, which twelve years on is quite unusual for anyone who knows the book industry.
Gail (08:12)
They’re like, Why are we still writing you royalty checks? I don’t understand anything about this.
Gail (08:18)
It just kind of shows, like, how strange the publishing industry is right now with Indy in 2009, that was still like, indie was still kind of.
Gail (08:28)
Like, didn’t really exist, actually.
Kat (08:30)
Or it was looked down upon.
Gail (08:32)
It was definitely looked down upon. It was not considered a viable option. I looked down upon it the self publishing dirty word. But I have to say, I at the gate from a career perspective, already was like it was clear that I could go Indian hybrid. One of the first signs was that my book now Orbit was relatively young when they acquired me. But Sola sold better in ebook than any other book that they had, which at the time was 25%. Which of my sales were ebook sales, which was a huge thing.
Gail (09:07)
Again, they were like, we don’t understand what’s going on here. And I think for me at that point, it was because the romance reader base had got a hold of me and jumped on that book, and they were early adopters of ebooks. And so they were already like, pretty voracious within the ebook arena, even in 2009. Yeah.
Kat (09:28)
I mean, the romance authors and readers, I guess, conjoinedly whether they didn’t know they were working. But that is around the time I lived in Europe, so I had a Kindle. So obviously all I was reading was e book, and I think they were one of the first that genre to have podcasts. They were the first to have the way that I would say.
Gail (09:48)
Technically speaking, I think scifi fantasy were the first podcasted, fiction and horror.
Kat (09:54)
Okay, that makes sense because they’re more techy than that.
Gail (09:58)
Yeah. But less future speaking, much slower adopters like technology is the scifi fantasy arena. Weirdly, much slower adopters of new or tech in terms of, like, distribution models and capitalizing, self publishing and stuff like that. But they were some of the very first fiction, at least in the United States that I know about. That went to podcast, chapter by chapter away. Interesting, romance, I think, adopted Ereaders first for a number of reasons, primarily because romance readers are incredibly voracious. They read more and faster than I think any other commercial genre.
Gail (10:32)
And so they were like, we don’t need to collect the physical books. That reader base is not one that is into the itemized collector objects, which again, scifi fantasy is.
Kat (10:43)
Yeah, that’s true.
Gail (10:45)
I think there are genres that really like the art of the physical book. Sci-fi and fantasy are in that they like the art of it. Romance is not suspense, and mystery is not. And so those categories transition to e reader faster. I also think romance readers really liked people on public transport, not being able to see what they were reading right there’s. The embarrassment of those covers and that stereotype of being associated with reading those books, which I hope we’re getting over now, but was definitely the key early on.
Gail (11:17)
And that’s why I think romance readers were early. They didn’t have to have Bodice rippers on there. They could just have on a Kindle.
Kat (11:26)
Yes. And what’s so funny about the covers that romance used to have? We’re getting off topic. But the covers that they used to have is there are some romance writers that understand their history. They understand literature. They have a well developed story. You can learn amazing things like through these stories, and people will snub their nose at them because of the cover is frustrating.
Gail (11:51)
It’s so true. And honestly, especially now, especially modern romance, which has really changed, like the scope of breadth, representation. Everything about modern romance is so forward thinking, and a lot of that has to do with having been like the forerunners, technologically speaking and very savvy businesswomen in particular, within the romance genre. One of the things that I always challenge people is I think humor is one of the hardest things to write, and a good sex scene is one of the hardest things to write. And I don’t think you can write a good sex scene.
Gail (12:21)
If you haven’t read some romance, they just do it better than anybody else. I’m sorry, this is true.
Kat (12:29)
This is true. So if you are a writer who’s trying to write something that you don’t read in general, but romance don’t do that.
Gail (12:37)
I have to say a lot of, like, mystery writers, literary writers or memoirist whatever will have sex scenes or emotional resonance intimacy scenes in their stuff. And if they haven’t done a little bit of legwork and read some of the best romances, it’s going to be winci. It’s going to make your readers cringe. And I don’t know about you, but that’s the last thing I want to do.
Kat (13:01)
It’s so true. So do you consider yourself a romance writer or do you consider yourself top more fantasy theme?
Gail (13:09)
This is very interesting because I’ve waived over twelve years. So I went through a phase where I was like, I really want to own romance and writing romance because a lot of my books are on what I would call like a romance chassis, like, the beats are very much like a romance in terms of when intimacy levels hit and stuff like that. But I’m learning more and more that my reader base is not a lot. I have quite a few romance readers, but most of them wouldn’t identify primarily as romance readers.
Gail (13:36)
And so in a strange way, I haven’t really earned the romance writer moniker because my readers don’t see me that way. And I am kind of very much in an intimate back and forth with my reader base. So I think I don’t get to have that. I think some of my books are romances without question, and nobody would challenge me on that. But one of the examples they gave us, there was a point where I was like, I would really like to try to write straight up small town contemporary romance, and I started to write it, and it became an urban fantasy.
Gail (14:10)
It became paranormal romance. I was like, oh, I cannot, like, there must be fantastical elements in my stuff. I can’t leave that. So because it’s what I read. It’s what I grew up on. It’s the fandom that I interfaced with primarily. I think if you forced me to pick a genre, it would be science fiction and fantasy. But I think I mostly just behave kind of like a Ya author in that. There’s this category that I play in that really mostly kind of encompasses all of these tropes that are endemic to both science fiction, fantasy and romance, and even a little bit of, like, cozy mysteries and stuff like that.
Gail (14:47)
I’ll pick up and use them if I feel like they serve the story. And I’m at the point in my career where I don’t really need to care about niche into any specific subgenres. And frankly, I never really did because I debuted into Trad. I did really well in trade, and I did really well with an uncategorizeable book that to this day, people are like, what is Solace? And I’m like, I don’t know, read it. And you tell me you tell me.
Kat (15:13)
Which breaks some of the rules that everyone tries to tell many writers. Right. I think on Amazon right now you’re under Gas lamp fantasy.
Gail (15:22)
That’s a good category. I get steampunk a lot, which I think the steampunk if you want me to subgenre. And those books are steampunk, but they’re very light hearted. They’re not very hard. Sci-fi is steampunk. They’re on the sort of fantasy end of steampunk. Right.
Kat (15:45)
I think one of the reasons that you probably got picked up really quickly is you have a really unique voice, and I think you own your voice, your writing voice very well. When you start reading your books, you are, like, sucked in right away to what is going on. You can see it and you’re very funny. You’re very witty, like, sarcastic the woman. Well, I’m reading it now because you have other main characters, obviously, but you can hear the main characters voice very quickly.
Gail (16:18)
I get that a lot, and I would call it sort of breezy, witty kind of. That stuff is very Victoriana, like I use purple pros. I break third wall, fourth wall. Occasionally I head hop. Even in that first book, there’s a lot of stuff I do in those earlier books in particular. And in that universe in which there are 21 books at this juncture, where I very much have informed by Victorian stuff by Gaskell to a certain extent, Austin Dickens in particular, also sort of late Victorian and in the 1920s PG Woodhouse.
Gail (16:52)
So that style of writing very much informs it because I really love those kinds of books. I grew up on them listening to audiobooks, so that’s the voice kind of in my head. And I sort of coincidentally, early on in my career, it became very clear that that’s what people like for me, but also that’s like, for example, my publisher wrote the backcover copy for Solace and then asked me to write the back cover copy for Solace as well. And this was way back in the old days, and Orbit was very young, so they had a lot more communication with me as an author.
Gail (17:30)
And also, like I said, they picked up this weird book, and they have no idea what it is. So I had unprecedented influence over things that cover and cover copy. And so we were back and forth thinking about which one was better. And I’m also not very precious about my stuff. So I’m like, if you think yours is better, go with yours. I don’t really care. But we put it up to the boat just on my life Journal back in the live Journal days. Like, which cover copy do you like better?
Gail (17:53)
We don’t know what to do. And it was almost 50 50. But most of the target demographic or what I believed at the time was going to be my target demographic, which was women readers. This is very simple demos in Western day. Okay. They liked the copy that I had written. Okay. And so to this day, I’ve written my own backcover copy for my publisher. They were just like, fine, we don’t have to pay you. You just write your own freaking copy. And I was like, fine.
Gail (18:21)
But they gave me the skill set to transition to being hybrid and being a self published author because I learned how to write my own cover copy really early on. And I do it kind of as I’m writing the book, the cover copy kind of slowly materializes as I’m writing the book. And that’s to say that that cover copy is also very much in my voice, but in copy version of my voice. And that was a training mechanism for me. So my tweets are in my voice, like my blog posts are in my voice.
Gail (18:48)
It just carries over. And partly that’s because it’s me. You’re listening to me. It’s a little bit how I talk, but also, I don’t know, it just became this very kind of comfortable fear for me to write in. And also it means because I have this very clear voice that the wrong readers get turned off real fast. And I want that. And I think most authors should learn to love that I have a blog post or a saying which basically is you should learn to love your one star reviews because they are telling both you and the world that they’re the wrong reader for your book, and you can learn why.
Gail (19:27)
And then you don’t target those people, right? You want to turn off the wrong readers with your cover art and your copy almost as much as you want to turn on the right readers. That’s what kind of the marketing side of this business is all about. And I got early lessons in how to do that. And one of the lessons I got was how to transmit my voice in such a way that makes it so that the readers I don’t want don’t follow me on social media, they don’t interface with me, they don’t join my group, and then they don’t read my stuff and that’s good.
Kat (20:01)
I don’t want that. Yes.
Gail (20:03)
Exactly. Because you’ll waste your time trying to get people to buy your book who aren’t going to buy your book or they’ll buy it and then they’ll hate it and then they’ll hate it and then they get mad at you or like.
Gail (20:14)
Miss advertising to them. Or what have you that’s a really interesting idea.
Kat (20:20)
Though, what I think a lot of readers should take away is to accept their voice how it is and to start being fully themselves on their blogs, on their social media, in their books and to just go with it.
Gail (20:35)
Yes. Lean into it. Not to use a catchy phrase.
Kat (20:41)
Instead of being generic. I think for some reason we always want 80% of the people to like our book. We might expect that not everyone will like it, but we want, like, 80 90%, and that’s just not going to happen.
Gail (20:53)
It’s not going to happen. I think writers cultivating a code switch between their writers and their reader name is really healthy. But you as a reader, don’t like everything you read and everything you write. I as a reader don’t like stuff. My friends, like my best friends who are writers, right? I don’t read so and so stuff like, I love them. I don’t like their stuff. I’m not their reader. That’s not me. We are very picky. Writers can be more picky than anybody else. You have to expect that readers are exactly the same way.
Gail (21:29)
And the way I put it is like, I get that people love Stephen King. I cannot read Stephen King. I cannot stand Stephen King. I agree with you. But that’s me. There’s nothing wrong with Stephen King’s writing, not his audience. Clearly right. Like the greatest writers of the world, right? Yes. Or the Jack Rachel books or something. I just don’t read books like that. I don’t like them. I’m not interested in them. It’s not going to work for everybody. And so we, as writers, have to accept that similarly, they’re not going to work for everybody.
Kat (22:03)
In fact, we shouldn’t. And we don’t want to. Or at least that’s my attitude. Yes.
Gail (22:08)
And so leaning into the voice of how you want to write, how you want your books to be. You’re pretty unique in that it got picked up and it’s pretty quickly and all that. So that is unique. But I do think that readers are always looking for what is authentic, and they can tell right away. They might not be able to say it in so many words that they might not want to use an author not being authentic. But when you don’t like a book, it’s kind of like there’s something off about this book.
Kat (22:37)
Maybe it’s that they can feel that this writer isn’t being fully or fully using their voice. They’re not fully developed in that writing skill yet.
Gail (22:48)
Yeah. And my voice has changed and evolved over the years, bound to but I also think the kind of dirty secret of the craft side of writing, which I don’t love talking about all that much because I think everybody approaches and actually conducts themselves and does writing differently is that it’s your voice and readers will unless they’re also writers are never going to be able to identify that to you. But it’s your voice that gives you your career. Like when I get an email from a new fan who basically says I will read anything you write, what they are saying is your voice resonates with something deep inside of me.
Gail (23:30)
That’s a career. Enough of those is a career because they are going to follow you if you want to experiment with a new genre, that sort of a thing, right. And there are always also going to be readers who are like, when I started writing ya, I got a number of emails which are very nice because I’m very nice readers. They’re all very like key swilling, polite readers as they roll. And they were all like, you know, I just don’t read why I’m so sorry, but I’ll pick up the next one that’s for adults.
Gail (23:57)
And I’ve just been like, you know, I’m going to say you should give it a try anyway because it’s still my voice, but it’s alright. And then countless times somebody has been written to me three or four years later. I don’t know why I waited so long to reach your Sci-Fi. I usually don’t like Sci-Fi, but I read this one and it’s still just as good as your other stuff or whatever. That’s because it’s my voice. What you’re responding to is my voice.
Kat (24:21)
Yeah, that’s why you can have the different genres, which is another rule that you’ve broken. You know, we’ll just add this to your list because so many people say, stop writing in separate genres. I don’t know how many times people told this to me, and I just like, I just want to walk away. How can I say this? I don’t want to just write one thing. I want to write what I want to write. And so you have cross genres. And I think you have the key there is to write in your voice and people will follow you.
Gail (24:54)
I did establish an ecosystem of trust really early on, though, because what I did was write five books relatively quickly for a traditional author in one genre with like, as a concise series that’s finished and finished. Well, one of my strengths as a writer is ending things. I love writing the ends of books, and I love writing the last books and series. I feel like that shows that love of it. I love the tidy bow. I like finishing things up. I think life doesn’t work that way and I’m writing fantasy, so I love that I still always get people being like, Why won’t there be more?
Gail (25:28)
But you want that like you want to leave the party when you’re still enjoying it. Right. But then I switched to Ya, but in the same universe and in the same tonality kind of with the same kind of, like tropes and approaches and stuff like that back the same backbone. And then I wrote a spin off from that first series. So I have, like, a consistent, solid number of books that are all series that are all linked together and that are all in the same world.
Gail (25:56)
That kind of really managed reader expectations. And there’s a lot of meat. And that gave trust to, like, my readers were like, oh, Gail does these sorts of things. She gives us happiness and comfort. She finishes her series. She does all of these things. And so now that really they will cut me a lot of slack with experimentation. Kind of my reader base will because they trust me because I’ve done proof of concept basically.
Kat (26:22)
That makes sense, though.
Gail (26:24)
But that just means when people come to me advice about starting out and wanting to genre hop, I always say, sure, but I would still recommend obeying the business rules of the genre first. So if you’re going to write a cozy mystery series, write a cozy mystery series, write at least three books in that series so that people know you can do that and you obey those rules of those kind of series worlds and how coding mysteries work or whatever. And then you can try contemporary romance or what have you.
Gail (27:00)
And that way, the readers are just a little bit more familiar with you and your voice and kind of willing to follow you. But you will always have retention issues. I absolutely have retention issues. In other words, you’re always going to have readers who are like, no, I only read Gale’s adult stuff, and there’s nothing I can do to persuade them to try anything else. But any time I write an adult steampunk book.
Kat (27:25)
So definitely build up your trust with the readers. I mean, that’s always a good thing. And I like how you say you like endings.
Gail (27:33)
I do.
Kat (27:34)
I find endings very difficult.
Gail (27:37)
I’m so sorry, but they are.
Kat (27:40)
I find them difficult in some places. Sometimes I know exactly where they’re going, but it’s funny because endings have come up in quite a few different writing groups that I’m part of. And we’re always talking about endings. So you have a non fiction book called The Heroines Journey that we’ve sort of hinted at. Do you think that your love of endings is because you understand how to storytell that you’re not just a writer because we’re all writers. We have this talent. We want to write. We have a story, right.
Kat (28:08)
But we don’t always know how to storytell. There’s, a difference. So let’s talk a little bit about what is narrative structure. Why did you write the Heroine journey? What is storytelling? How does it help us?
Gail (28:23)
Narrative structure can be talked about in lots of different ways, kind of like the beats sheets, that sort of principle. I think I believe it came out of the romance community, but also suspense and mysteries also have these sort of beats. It’s this sort of underlying pattern to narrative that’s very endemic to specifically different genres. So I’m going to put aside both memoirs and literary fiction because one of the hallmarks of both of those two is they tend to play with narrative. But when you’re writing in one of the commercial genres, so if you’re writing in horror, mystery, crime thriller, suspense, science fiction, fantasy, ya, which uses all of these things and romance, of course, there’s a certain structure which you might not necessarily be able to identify as a reader.
Gail (29:15)
But it is what in a way defines that genre. So tropes and narrative archetypes, those certain kinds of characters and certain kinds of situations and settings are kind of the surfaceness of this. But there’s also, like theming and messaging and this sort of general set of expectations. The different genres set up. And Campbell talks about one of these, which is the hero’s journey, and another one is the heroines journey. So Campbell’s hero’s journey is like with patterns of withdrawal and return, like moving into liminal spaces, quest narratives, general sort of solitary action, fighting the enemy, success and then return.
Gail (29:56)
I mean, these are patterns that you can think about for movies or anything that you consume, really. And so the heroine journey is just another one of these. It happens to be a chassis or a foundation that I really gravitate towards and have read, partly because I love a happy ending. That’s one of the hallmarks of a heroine journey is sort of unity and cohesion as part of a happy ending. And so I studied it when I was studying classical archeology and adjacent in undergraduate. And I was like, Why doesn’t anybody talk about this?
Gail (30:29)
I thought everyone kind of knew about it much in the same way that I assume everyone knows the hero’s journey. And then the more I did, like teaching and events and went to conventions and stuff like that, the more I realized that most of my day I was like, okay, I was just waiting for somebody to do a PhD thesis on it and then turn it into a bucket. Nobody ever did. There’s more in Murdoch, I should say, has a heroine’s journey and also Jung in self journey psychological approach, which I just wanted a beats layout and, like, a basic definition for writers.
Speaker 2 (31:03)
Okay. I guess I have to write that
Kat (31:05)
So you wrote it.
Kat (31:06)
Yeah. I think we were talking about before, like writers. And I’ve talked about it with several people. They’re not always trained on how to write it’s kind of like so many guitarists and a lot of artists. They just pick up their art, their tools and they teach themselves and they might take a few classes or whatever. But like you said, not a lot of people talk about the heroines journey. I hadn’t even heard about specific the hero’s journey until maybe five years ago because I hadn’t thought it out.
Gail (31:34)
So that’s really some of it. We don’t really seek it out unless we’re looking to study it. But then it took forever to find the heroines journey, because not every story follows the hero’s journey.
Gail (31:46)
Not everybody works heroes. To be fair, not everybody fits heroines either. There’s, like, four act structure. There’s very interesting, like storytelling structures, particularly coming out of Asia right now on the hollow waves, like Korean dramas and things like that. So there’s tons of different story structures out there for you to access. Hero and heroin. Just happened to be two. And I should say that the hero doesn’t have to be biologically. Male hero doesn’t have to be biologically. It’s just the way we speak about the two journeys. They just have to be very common, particularly in Western media and particularly in the commercial genre fiction, the ones that I named earlier.
Gail (32:24)
And that has to do with the fact that those genres have Gothic literary roots in the Gothic literary movement of the Victorian era. Okay, yeah. So that’s very much informed, like some sort of feedback loop. I go into all of this in the book.
Kat (32:39)
In the book. So why do you think it is that even understanding a lot of these different genres, having that curiosity, as a writer, to understand the narrative structures of different cultures of the hero and the heroine, you have four acts, all these things. If you get onto plotter or you start going down that hall and you’ll be inundated with all these things, why do you think they should understand where they’re going in their story or understand that structure?
Gail (33:10)
I think if you have a basic understanding of some of these structures, it’s most helpful for writers because it allows us to get out of writer’s block, like first and foremost. But also, it allows us to control our readers experience and avoid the dreaded reader betrayal. So reader betrayal. We’ve all experienced it. I know if you’ve read a book, you’ve experienced it. It is that urge to scream and throw a book across the room. The book has betrayed you nine times out of ten. As a reader, we’re just like, I have no idea why, but I’m so mad about it.
Gail (33:45)
Usually that is a core foundational reader betrayal. And it can be as simple as the reader picked it up, thinking it was a hero’s journey. You as the writer wrote, it like it was a hero’s journey. And then slowly it turned into a heroine’s journey or vice versa. So you did something like establish a hero woman’s journey all about connection, family building, networking, adventure with others. Adventure in order to build a family together, and then you killed your main character. Your reading is going to be so mad at you and so if you are writing in order to get the creative beast out of you and you’re writing to entertain yourself and you’re writing just to get this out on the page.
Gail (34:25)
That’s one thing. But if you’re writing with the intent to publish, that means you want other people to read it, which means you want other people to enjoy it. And suddenly you’re in a sphere where, yes, I think you do have to take their wants and desires into account. Otherwise, you’re just going to make them mad. So knowing these chassis knows what the expectations are. It knows what readers of your genre at core really want from the basics of their narrative. So you then can manipulate that and the prizes into ascending.
Gail (35:01)
You can work yourself out of writers blocks if you’re like, oh, I’m on a heroine’s journey. I need to throw a new character into this. I’m on a hero’s journey. Something should probably float this juncture, right? Yeah, exactly. Those are basic toolkits, depending on which journey you’re on and all of that allow you to control the Reader’s suspension of disbelief, especially if you’re writing commercial genre. You want to bring them into your world and support them, and you want them to trust you to tell them a satisfying story.
Gail (35:32)
This is the thing. It’s almost all writers do know them. They’ve just never learned how to consciously articulate them. Like all of us. When we sit down to write an adventure story or a suspense thriller or a mystery or whatever, we know what that means. It’s a mystery. We know. Basically, you have to drop clues. You’re going to have a body like the body that’s going to appear in the first chapter. Like, all of these things, right. We kind of have most of them, but being able to articulate a little bit more about them really just helps you have a much stronger toolkit to provide not just a story, but a story that is very satisfying to read.
Gail (36:14)
And that’s why I think it’s kind of important to understand.
Kat (36:19)
The reason that you like the endings is because you understand the tropes that you’re using. The beats that you’re using. You understand what needs to come and go. It probably doesn’t hurt as much to cut because you’ll go back and say, oh, actually, I went off.
Gail (36:33)
I love editing you’re. So right. My favorite thing is cutting stuff out of the box. I love the red pen. I’m such a weirdo.
Kat (36:41)
Have you always been like that, though, or has it been a developed?
Gail (36:44)
Yeah. I like to say I’m some sort of psychological cutter, like bleeding. I like to bleed on the page. I used to print my stuff out and get as much red pen on that page as humanly possible. I’m a perfectionist as well. I sort of tied into that. But, yeah, I never thought about that as being linked to my love of ending. You’re totally right. I’m also one of those people who’s like, if the dessert is good, nobody remembers if you messed up any other store.
Kat (37:09)
That’s so true. Yeah. You have to nail the ending. There’s nothing worse than getting to the end of the book and wanting to throw it across the room, burn it, stab it a few more times.
Gail (37:21)
Stick the landing.
Kat (37:22)
You’ll never pick up that author’s book again.
Kat (37:25)
I have a few of those I can just to remind me
Gail (37:29)
that’s the thing about the reader betrayal thing, that reader screaming urge to throw a book across the room, those people will never read you like, you’ve lost them. And that’s another ties back to what we started with, which is one of the reasons a strong Author voice can actually work in your favor is you want to lose those readers before they scream and throw your book across the room, right? You want them to not even pick up the book?
Kat (37:54)
Yes, this is true. I have to tell anyone who’s listening. This is a really interesting book, even if you’re not a writer because you’ll start understanding movies and even say, like, the fans of pop culture, you’ll understand sort of this Western storytelling way that we’re doing things like I was telling my kids the other day like, oh, yeah. This is going to happen in this movie because of this. And they were like, what? And then they were like, shut up.
Gail (38:22)
How do you, .
Kat (38:25)
You can do, like magic tricks if you want to. You really understand. I think this is key to a lot of especially young writers. And I say young in the sense, like, whatever age you are, you’re newer, right?
Gail (38:40)
Yeah.
Kat (38:41)
And you want to get your book out there and sometimes it gets out there and you think it’s really great. And the feedback is like, either really lukewarm, like, there’s nothing that’s almost worse than a one side, like, nobody because there’s something missing or, like you said, that writer’s block where you’re spending two years on a book because you’re like, something is not going right. Or it just keeps rambling forever. And I don’t know how to wrap this up.
Gail (39:07)
I had a bunch of people write to me after this book came out to be like, oh, my God. I’ve been blocked for two years because I thought I was writing a hero’s journey, and I kept trying to force it to be that. And the story is actually a heroine’s journey. And now I know exactly how I’m supposed to have this thing.
Kat (39:21)
Yes.
Gail (39:24)
Well, now I have proof that it does happen. That’s what I hoped when I wrote it would go out and tell people that way. But, yeah, my most exciting thing is people are like, hero heroine. And I’m like, oh, well, let’s talk about that. Could be what could be because that’s the other thing. It’s not everything we do love black and white as humans. But unfortunately, they don’t always comfortably fit into one spot or the other. So I also go into, like, what happens when a hero archetype is in a heroin’s journey and what happens with genres that kind of combine the two.
Kat (39:57)
But I think that you can push the limits of something better if you really understand what you’re doing. Not if you’re just like,
Gail (40:05)
absolutely.
Kat (40:06)
My story is so unique. No, it’s just a mess.
Gail (40:10)
It’s one of those where once you know the rules, then you get to break them. Right?
Kat (40:15)
Yes. And for anyone who doesn’t like reading nonfiction, because we all are fiction readers, this is written very much in your voice. It’s very funny. It’s very entertaining.
Gail (40:28)
Thank you. I went through a process with this book where my agent and I talked about whether to sell it to a traditional academic press or whatever, because I do think it is important enough to get that. But I ended up deciding not to go that route, partly because I wanted to write it in an incredibly accessible way. I really wanted people to just enjoy reading non fiction and having come out of academia as we previously talked about. One of the things I find most frustrating about academic papers is like, in order to be taken seriously, they have to be written very dry.
Gail (41:02)
And to me, that reads as boring and therefore bad. I don’t like to be bored when I’m reading things. That’s the big sin. That’s another thing, which I think probably comes across in this book as well, which is, I believe that writers of fiction are entertainers. That’s the categories we tend to fall in when you’re looking at market data and demographics and stuff. And so the biggest sin, the ultimate sin. I was like, you alluded to this when you write something that releases to crickets is what that’s telling you is that it’s just boring.
Gail (41:35)
And I would rather be awful.
Kat (41:39)
Yes, you need a reaction more than anything.
Gail (41:41)
Yeah. And if something is too messy and you don’t understand these chassis well enough and that’s coming across your readers, then they might just put it down on for them. Yeah.
Kat (41:51)
There’s nothing worse than getting on that never finish list on Goodreads.
Kat (41:57)
It would be terrible.
Kat (42:00)
I don’t think we’re taught a lot of this in high school. Unless you go get your MFA. You don’t always understand, like, Archetype and beat and POV and plot. And then there’s nothing worse than being that writer, that sort of newish writer in a group that’s like, what are we talking about?
Gail (42:19)
You’re alluding to the fact that I have a little semantic at the beginning where I’m basically like to find my terms. You want to use them, you know what I mean by them. And probably that’s because a lot of these literary terms, like Archetype or what have you have multiple definitions as well? So I was just like, this is what I mean when I say story theme. Okay.
Kat (42:37)
Absolutely. I will have the link in the show notes. Obviously, I really think that this is something that every writer should have on their shelf. It’s very easy to read, and then it’s easy to go back and sort of just review it. I don’t know. And I think even people who are not plotters the Pantsers out there that are very defensive about being Pantsers, it will still help you keep on track, especially.
Gail (43:03)
Yeah. And there’s a whole section at the end. So I laid it out because I come from teaching. I laid it out in such a way so you can use a table of contents just to jump to the section that’s most relevant to you as well. I hope. And the ending section is basically how to write like a heroine, and you can read that as a Panther and just be like, okay, you believe you’re writing a heroine’s journey, which some of you probably are. You can go into that section and be like, that’s what I need to do with that side character.
Gail (43:31)
So it can actually be a tool for you to just flip to. If you’re panting and you hit up against a roadblock of some kind, you can just flip to that little section and just like, read little bits, and it might help jumpstart and get things for Panthers. Although I have to say I am not a Panthers, so I try to help as much as I can, but I don’t understand how your mysterious mind works.
Kat (43:57)
I think they’re in that Lane where they could end up being those who take a really long time. And if they have an idea of getting more books out quicker than at least understanding that structure. And if they’re writing a heroine journey and who knows, this will probably give them hints onto other narrative structures, they’ll go find it and it will help them go faster if that’s needed.
Gail (44:22)
That’s what you want to help each other. Some of my best friends are fantastic, and we’ll have conversations occasionally, but I will say that I don’t have you the Panthers because I feel like one of the things that fathers tend to have to do is a lot more rewriting than those of us who are big outliners. But maybe that also kind of ties into what we said about how I love endings and how I love editing. Also, a lot of my pantser friends just hate editing, and I think that’s just because they face up to a lot more of it.
Kat (44:56)
There are probably people on both sides listening to this and being like, no, I will defend this with all my life.
Gail (45:03)
So honestly, though, speaking from twelve years of the future and strict outliner, who has become a much less strict outliner that’s the other thing is the more you write and the more you do it, the more you’re author things like these beats and chats and they just become an organic part of you, which makes them an organic part of your voice. And you start to instinctively learn how to lay them down and when they should be dropped or how to edit so that you self correct for the pacing issues and stuff like that that many newer authors have.
Gail (45:37)
So it does get easier in that regard. And also, if you’re a painter, you may become a little bit more of an outliner. And if you’re an outliner or a plotter, you might become a little bit more of a Panther as time goes on. So don’t faint your camp too hard because you might end up doing it. This is true.
Kat (45:55)
And I think what you’re saying is just keep writing.
Gail (45:58)
Keep writing. Absolutely. It’s the best thing you do. Yes.
Kat (46:02)
I was once told by a writer, I will never forget it. And it’s funny to me now. It’s like just write your next book. And I was like, easy for you to say. Then I looked at his backlog and I was like, you only have 35 books. Yes, it is easy for him to say because he took it its own advice.
Gail (46:22)
Yeah. That is if I had the one biggest piece of advice and this is speaking because I’m a perfectionist, I think it is stopped. Move on to the next one. Right. Something different, which I know is the thing that you’re not told to do. But until you know if what you’ve written is going to stick and people are going to enjoy it, try something new. Because one of the life lessons that I had to learn was that that voice that you complimented me on. Thank you. It wasn’t suited to what I initially wanted to write.
Gail (46:49)
I really wanted to write, like high fantasy and epic fantasy and stuff like that. Turns out, at least back then, I didn’t have the chops to translate that kind of breezy, witty bantering to epic fantasy. It just didn’t work, and I tended to overwork things and it was terrible. But I spent years writing that and it just didn’t suit me or my style. And that’s just like I had to try writing others. In my case, it was in short stories as well. Now we don’t really have that luxury.
Gail (47:24)
But the short stories that people would buy from me early on were always funny.
Kat (47:33)
Got to listen, especially if you want to be a full time. I mean, in the end, there are like, these pathways that we are destined to go down.
Gail (47:42)
I guess so. I’m still startled twelve years in. I’m still startled to be here talking to you.
Gail (47:48)
Well, if you want to find Gail, you just go to Gailcarriger.Com. But I’ll put the links in the show notes. And it is very true that your blog and your whole website is still in your voice, and it’s very entertaining.
Gail (48:02)
There’s also on my blog. There’s a tab for, like, resources and stuff like that. And there’s a whole thing there, which basically has resources, posts that I’ve written for newer writers and more established writers in terms of just basic stuff of toolkits, like how I write physically, like what devices I use and all those things, but also just quick tips and trips. So there is a little section where I talk about, but hopefully there’s over a decade of advice there.
Kat (48:30)
So we definitely need to go there.
Gail (48:32)
Yeah, that blog has been going all along.
Kat (48:34)
That’s excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been great chatting with you.
Gail (48:39)
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.
Kat (48:55)
Hey, you’re still listening since you are. Could you do me a favor and head over to the app that you’re listening to this episode on and hit the subscribe button and then rate and review the show? It would really help the Pencil Lipstick podcast get out into the world. And if you’re enjoying the podcast, well, then there might be more people out there who would enjoy it as well. If you want to find out more about me, you can head over to catcallbl. Com. I have my story over there.
Kat (49:24)
My books, my interactive journals, my one on one coaching information and information on my creative writing community membership group. If you’re looking to write a book or you are a writer and you just want to find out more about how to write, how to publish, how to format, how to market, and all the things that go into being an author these days, check out the membership group. There is a 14, three day trial that you can try it out. Get into the masterminds. Find out all the goodies that we are talking about in the group.
Kat (49:59)
I would love to see you there.
Kat (50:01)
Bye you.