Tessa Hadley, AFTER THE FUNERAL AND OTHER STORIES
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books.
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[1:03]Tessa Hadley is the author of After the Funeral and Other Stories.
[1:07]Tessa is a repeat guest here on the show and is just amazing.
[1:11]I am like obsessed with Tessa.
[1:13]Anyway, Tessa is the author of three previous collections of stories and eight novels.
[1:17]She was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, The Hawthorne Den Prize, and the
[1:21]Ed Till Short Story Prize.
[1:23]And it's been a finalist for the story prize.
[1:25]She contributes regularly to the New Yorker and reviews for the Guardian and the London
[1:29]Review of Books.
[1:30]She lives in Cardiff Wales.
[1:31]Welcome, Tessa.
[1:32]Thank you so much for coming back on Momstone of Time to read books the second time.
[1:36]This time to discuss After the Funeral Year Collection of Short Stories.
[1:40]It's lovely to be here, Zippy.
[1:42]Thank you.
[1:43]Well, as you know, I was such a huge fan of free love and so excited when this book
[1:46]came out.
[1:47]The way you write is just, it's like I actually was reading passages out loud to my
[1:52]kids at the breakfast table this morning because I was like, listen to how beautiful she
[1:56]writes.
[1:57]How beautiful she writes.
[1:58]And I was like, maybe I shouldn't be reading books.
[2:00]Anyway.
[2:01]So why don't you tell listeners about the collection, what inspired it, what some of
[2:07]the stories mean to you and all that?
[2:09]It doesn't really have a theme quite often I'm asked, what did you have a theme for these
[2:14]stories?
[2:15]Does it have a sort of strand going through it?
[2:18]And the truth is it's just the last 12 stories I wrote.
[2:22]There are themes in it, of course, but they're my themes, they're just the themes that
[2:26]would inevitably emerge whenever I wrote anything really.
[2:30]Yeah, I, what I tend to do in my rhythm of writing is to always have a novel on the
[2:37]go, but punctuate that with taking time out to write short stories.
[2:42]And I just, partly because that's just how my writing's developed, but it really works
[2:47]for me because I find, you know, I have said sometimes, writing novels a bit like being
[2:52]married, so kind of long term commitment with its ups and downs.
[2:58]And I suppose I'd have to go on to say then that short stories are like a fling, they're
[3:03]like in a fair, you kind of just take time out from this deep, long, difficult commitment
[3:10]to a novel.
[3:11]And it feels like a very free space when I'm writing something short, partly, partly
[3:17]it's just simple.
[3:18]If it goes wrong, all right, your heartbreak and, you know, if it doesn't work, you can't
[3:23]get the ending, you can't make it like you want it to be.
[3:27]It's horrible, but it's not like a novel not working.
[3:30]There's something careless about writing it and equally, it's to do with the length of
[3:35]a short story.
[3:36]That's careless.
[3:37]You can throw something in there, which is sort of hot and funny, exciting, and you don't
[3:44]need to follow through, whereas a novel, a novel is all about follow through.
[3:48]So what then, and what if you did that, then what, but a short story is play.
[3:54]So it's just my last 12 stories, and it felt like about time to have another collection.
[4:00]Your last 12 affairs, so speak.
[4:02]My last 12 affairs, I mean, that's where the analogy breaks down, that would be insane.
[4:09]That is one of the themes that you write about a lot, and that is in this book as well,
[4:13]and free love, and you know, exploring what it is when you don't, when you have something
[4:19]so steady, and then you fall into something else, or you change gears.
[4:24]I mean, even in the first story after the funeral, it's not from the point of view of the
[4:28]mom, but from her paramour, essentially, who makes this decision of what to do with his marriage.
[4:35]It's, I don't know.
[4:36]You're just obsessed with this whole thing.
[4:38]Me and me and every other writer, that's writing.
[4:42]What does fiction want to do?
[4:44]It wants to cluster around the places where life intensifies, the places where the marriage,
[4:52]if you like, or whatever steady state it is, is suddenly thrown into prominence.
[4:58]We suddenly see what otherwise is just our medium, like a fish in water, but when it's
[5:03]threatened, jeopardized, cut across, someone dies, someone falls in love with somebody else.
[5:13]Those fractures are when the steady state is shown for what it is.
[5:18]So I think naturally fiction chooses to sort of sit on those places of fracture, and one
[5:26]of them is absolutely where, you know, a marriage that can look pleasant, lovely,
[5:32]continuous, settled, suddenly stops looking like any of those things, but in a way becomes
[5:39]intensified, but by the threat.
[5:42]Wow.
[5:43]Even just how you talk about ordinary things is like, it's amazing.
[5:47]It's like, there's a room, and then when you come in the room becomes completely decorated
[5:52]with like all these bright colors and like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't describe
[5:58]it.
[5:59]It just changes the simple sentence into something very decorated.
[6:01]In a good way.
[6:02]Well, that's a lovely thing to say.
[6:03]And do you know, I think that is what I've always felt about writing about the writers
[6:08]I love is exactly what you've just described.
[6:11]I, life can seem drab, I mean, I have literally just spent the morning here booking
[6:17]trains, organizing, sending emails, and life can seem like that.
[6:23]What's for supper?
[6:24]I've got to do that.
[6:25]I've got to get it to you.
[6:26]And writing, good writing gives back to all that every day in us.
[6:31]It isn't that I want fairy tales or something about a princess or a, or for that matter,
[6:37]a war.
[6:38]It can bring to the most mundane details a kind of aligning, which turns them into gold.
[6:45]That's a, that's a mixed metaphor.
[6:47]It brings, it brings a magic to them, which spins straw into gold like in the fairy tale.
[6:52]I think.
[6:53]Wow.
[6:54]Well, reading it, and I guess writing it for you.
[6:57]I mean, it's both.
[6:58]I mean, what are some inspirational things that you've read or that like you are this,
[7:04]we'll do an analogy.
[7:05]You to me are who to you in terms of writing.
[7:11]One of my strong early writing memories is discovering Elizabeth Bowen, who's an Anglo-Irish
[7:18]writer of the mid 20th century, quite modernist, but at the same time always writing
[7:23]about real people doing real things, a little bit of kind of crazy supernatural round
[7:28]the edges.
[7:30]I can remember taking her books out from the library when I was probably 13 or 14 and
[7:34]I just decided maybe I was 12 or 13.
[7:36]I decided it was time to read that on books and I was, I came from a family that always
[7:41]had books, but they weren't intensely literary.
[7:45]So I had no idea.
[7:46]I really didn't know Henry James from Hugh Wallpole or Compton Mackenzie.
[7:52]We weren't even know those names.
[7:53]Nobody reads those people now.
[7:55]They are, and I think that Henry James, yes, the other two know, I just there I was confronted
[8:00]with all these names of unknown, mostly Edwardian writers.
[8:05]Where was I going?
[8:06]And I picked out Elizabeth Bowen because I liked the cover.
[8:09]It was as simple as that.
[8:11]She had a complete works and I loved the pictures on the covers.
[8:15]And I can remember reading, for instance, I think is her second novel, the last September,
[8:21]which is set in Ireland at the time of the troubles.
[8:23]It's a great favourite of mine now.
[8:25]And I literally didn't know anything about Ireland or Irish politics.
[8:30]I didn't know about the upper class people that the novel is mostly engaged with.
[8:36]I didn't know that you dressed for dinner.
[8:38]I can remember thinking were they not dressed before, were they, you know, split their
[8:42]pajamas.
[8:43]So in other words, I was reading in a code that I could hardly interpret.
[8:51]And I hardly knew at the end of the book what has happened.
[8:54]What was that about?
[8:56]But something in it communicated to me that that thing we're talking about.
[9:02]It promised me that life was intensely rich, that every detail was packed with power.
[9:09]And that's such an important promise, especially when you're 12, 13, 14, and you don't
[9:15]know what life holds for you.
[9:18]And in a way, perhaps a lot of grown up discourse around you is quite dreary, much as
[9:23]I love my poetic, you know, pragmatic, is that all it is?
[9:28]And then books give you instead this sort of, it's like putting on a magic ring or something.
[9:34]The whole thing is charged with power.
[9:36]And although I could hardly understand her books, her sentence is something about the
[9:41]density of the writing just had that promise for me.
[9:45]Wow.
[9:46]That's amazing.
[9:47]Do you recognize that?
[9:48]Do you recognize that?
[9:49]Yes.
[9:50]I recognize it.
[9:51]I love what you said, just elevating the mundane, essentially, taking your every day and making
[9:58]the smallest thing.
[10:00]into a story. It's you're changing your life into art, which gives it meaning. Yeah, yeah,
[10:05]exactly that. It's amazing. You said that, you know, these are these were affairs from your
[10:10]novel. So which novel for were these multiple novels that you were like the interstitials or
[10:18]I think they are. I think I think I was writing some of them while I was writing free love,
[10:23]which we talked about last time. And then some of them I've been writing while I've been
[10:29]struggling actually struggling with my new novel, which is still only halfway through and I'm
[10:34]riven with doubts. But then I usually am, but that's not that I think, oh, that's all right,
[10:38]you usually are to be okay. And then but that isn't a guarantee. What if this time you're right,
[10:43]anyway, so I've been agonizing over this novel. What is this novel about it? Where are you running
[10:57]in trouble? It's quite a sprawling novel and I think that's part of the trouble. Whereas I felt
[11:02]that free love had a very kind of I did feel that while I was even rather writing it. I felt
[11:07]it was like shooting an arrow from a bone. It had a target and I knew where it was heading. This
[11:13]one is more sprawling and it's it's a sort of centered around an old woman, which I thought would
[11:20]be so interesting to write about. And I actually think it's hardest to write old people as I'm
[11:26]becoming one because we've all been children and we've all been adolescents. We can all tap into
[11:33]those experiences. But actually, you know, unless you are writing while you're in your 70s or 80s,
[11:41]you haven't been there. And I think the tendency to go back to cliche and sort of have a
[11:46]dear old greyhead grandmother on the rocking chair, you know, is strong and most of the old ladies I
[11:54]know, including my mother and my aunt who are around 90s, are just so nothing like that at all.
[12:00]And so my elderly lady who's in her early 80s is a big feminist character who was in her
[12:11]heyday having a crazy life difficult, extremely brilliant in the 60s, the 60s and the 70s.
[12:19]And now she's elderly and she's sort of living in the countryside in Somerset, in England,
[12:26]and her family and assistant and neighbours are gathered around her and it's sort of it's one of
[12:33]those stories. Quite classic in that it's a neighbourhood story. They're coming out of lockdown
[12:39]actually. That's not a that's not a big thing in the book. But the sense that lockdown did
[12:44]create old-fashioned scenarios where you were stuck with the people you were near to, both your
[12:51]own family and then maybe as things eased up, you know, people, a couple of people locally and
[12:57]almost Jane Austen like in the enforced intimacy, you had to find your neighbours interesting because
[13:04]they were what you had. So that that's that's sort of the core of it is my character.
[13:11]Then what's what's what's the hold up? Where are you struggling?
[13:14]I think one or two of the characters I'm trying to talk about class which I've always
[13:22]been interested in and I've made my young woman I've got yeah is it that it's her it's my heroine
[13:31]and I do think I've got her now. I'm getting hold of her took me a long time to to feel the
[13:36]dimensions of her. She's the young assistant who comes to help either the elderly lady with writing
[13:41]her memoir and she's falling in love with either son and just getting so it's a love story actually.
[13:50]She's a love story. Somebody else is in love with him too. It's going to be a classic love triangle
[13:56]and especially I found it much easier to make the the bad girl the sort of dangerous beautiful girl
[14:03]somehow she was much more fun and easy to do get to get my serious girl I've been struggling
[14:09]and I think I might have got hold of her she's begun to feel more multi-dimensional to me in the
[14:14]last few chapters. Well maybe you should have the older lady having just passed away or something.
[14:21]Yeah you did that so well in this book you know and what happened after math. Yeah yeah I actually
[14:27]funny you should say that that's uncanny because it does begin with or the intimations that somebody's
[14:34]dying and then it's that but it's it's an old lover of hers. The news comes from Italy that one of
[14:38]her old lovers is very ill and it's going to fender a letter and then the news comes so that
[14:44]a death sort of frames the book a little bit but it's off stage enough for it not to feel too
[14:50]tragic. Interesting. Well I can't wait for that. It sounds like it's going well. I think you
[14:56]I think it's all in your head. I think it's going to be just crazy. Yeah I'm rooting for you.
[15:02]That's great. Tell me what writing I know this is and this is going to sound like a crazy question
[15:09]but when I sit down to write a sentence I don't think a lot about well tell me what it's like
[15:14]writing the sentences that you do and how it is you get all of the details like even when you
[15:19]describe maybe even talk about how you write your descriptions of people because even like the
[15:25]doctor with his long legs that he has to fold up and like all the references that you like
[15:29]scattered through of his size and like the way you use words like even to describe colors like
[15:37]Skylark blue or whatever you said like do you do that on first glance do you go back and
[15:44]and sort of add more details when you go back or is everything does it all come out fully formed?
[15:51]That was a rambling question but I hope you know what I mean. No that's really interesting
[15:54]question. That's what writers are all so interested in isn't it and I'm so interested in
[15:58]in other writers. It's interesting I think it kind of depends which bit of the writing you're doing.
[16:05]Skylark I think definitely often first time through I'm not getting that quite right and that
[16:11]can really thicken up and get better the more I reread I seem to hear. He says more than that
[16:19]it's funnier than that. The has what she would say in response to that so that often comes in bits
[16:25]and then for the kind of narration of the story you just have to you can hear that in your head
[16:32]when you start the story particularly with the short story particularly with the beginning of
[16:37]that story you're talking about the title story after the funeral you know I could I could see
[16:42]those those those little girls and I could hear myself telling the tale of them. The physical
[16:48]description of people is I almost do it slightly different it's so important to me to get
[16:54]the presence of the individual I think it matters in my life so it matters to me that we can
[17:02]see him or her and that can take a while and I often have my note I'm writing on the computer but
[17:09]I'll have my notebook open beside me and when I come to the place where I think that I want
[17:14]them to see him they've got to see him. I'll really make a mental effort it is like stretching
[17:23]your muscles in your mind in your imagination and I can see him and how am I going to make that in
[17:30]words and I'll chop down lots and lots sometimes but I don't want lots and lots in the final
[17:36]version you don't want to read a paragraph of he was like this like this he had a nose like
[17:42]you don't want to read that in fact the more there is sometimes the less powerful it is you then
[17:49]sort of select the crucial things that the the the the core dots of description which will
[17:57]between them in your reader evoke him it's very quite it's a very fascinating thing psychologically
[18:05]I've actually when I used to teach I've done workshops on describe the person sitting opposite
[18:11]you and the first thing you have to say in those workshops is there will be no reading out
[18:15]nobody is going to see what you've written about them we're not going to hear it you're just going
[18:19]to do it now try and get the presence of that person not not every writer wants or needs to do that
[18:27]not all writing works like that but I love it and funnily enough Elizabeth Bowen who I was just
[18:33]talking about she's brilliant I think and I it isn't like a painting with a painting a brilliant
[18:40]painting you really can see the person as if you were in the room with them writing will never
[18:46]do that you know you can you can actually read down a corinola and think she's blonde all the way
[18:51]through and scove as she has done I don't actually know she blonde or black hair or my goodness
[18:57]I don't even know which of those is true and yet I feel as if I know under corinola's
[19:04]physique there's a marvelous Henry James thing about Charlotte Stanton the golden bow where he
[19:10]says she has a waist that is like one of those soft purses where you have a ring around the purse
[19:17]which gathers the leather in and I see her all from that we see it I think she's probably
[19:25]corset it isn't she because people don't naturally have waist like that women were in those days
[19:30]and I see the looseness of the body in that concentrated waist and it's very sexy and
[19:36]he says other things about her too which which you can which give her to you so you just have
[19:42]to find the the triangulation points that will that will direct your reader to the right type
[19:50]yeah it's a mystery it's a fascinating really fascinating study in itself quite a little bit
[19:55]apart from other things that one does in writing yeah you
[20:00]to teach, we offer these divvy classes,
[20:02]whatever, or just classes from divvy media.
[20:04]But I feel like you should teach how to write,
[20:06]how to describe, how to describe people,
[20:10]or something, you should do another workshop
[20:13]because it is fascinating.
[20:15]And I think it's an area that's so hard
[20:17]and that I think reading, you can tell
[20:19]like when people have a gift for it,
[20:21]and when they don't.
[20:23]And yeah, it is that crazy thing
[20:25]because essentially you're just trying to get people
[20:27]to conjure it up in their own minds and whatever shape.
[20:30]And they will conjure it up, not in words.
[20:33]And that's, it's that, isn't it?
[20:35]If you've conjured it, you've got it.
[20:38]Now, find the words that will somehow make
[20:41]the same conjuring in the person who reads your words.
[20:45]Yeah.
[20:46]I know, it is, it's really interesting and mysterious.
[20:49]Like a sorcery, and I did have time to teach you.
[20:51]It's sorcery.
[20:52]It's sorcery.
[20:53]It is sorcery.
[20:55]Wow, amazing.
[20:56]What do you think about how hard it is
[20:59]to get books into the world these days?
[21:01]And like, even you, this master elegant perfect.
[21:04]I mean, you're such a pro,
[21:06]but you still have to jump into the water of swimming fish,
[21:10]with everybody having a book out every two seconds.
[21:12]Like what do you make of what the sort of culture
[21:16]of book releases like and what you do
[21:18]with literature coming out and versus, you know,
[21:21]everything's just coming out into this big funnel
[21:23]of information that people have to quickly,
[21:26]like sort of pick something out of.
[21:27]What do you, how do you feel about that?
[21:28]Where do you make of it?
[21:30]I think partly I think keep faith
[21:33]because when I was first published 23 years ago,
[21:38]whatever it was, I think everybody was very anxious
[21:41]about the future of books and whether anyone would have time
[21:45]anymore for a slow read and a subtle read.
[21:49]And I think in the end with all the cacophony of noise
[21:53]that surround us just as you describe
[21:55]and all the claims on our attention,
[21:59]the truth is that people love reading.
[22:03]And almost they are learning now to love it very deliberately
[22:07]as a different kind of attentiveness
[22:10]to the, you know, watching what's on Twitter
[22:13]and what's on the news and what's on the podcast.
[22:15]And, you know, instead just take yourself away
[22:20]and one sentence at a time, follow what a writer
[22:24]is putting on the page and let them challenge you
[22:28]and take your imagination there.
[22:30]So I've got a kind of faith that if somebody writes a good book,
[22:36]it isn't easy to get it published.
[22:39]But I know enough really discriminating publishers
[22:43]who are in it because they love good writing.
[22:45]And I believe that books will get published
[22:49]and will get out there and maybe won't be best sellers,
[22:53]but you can build an audience.
[22:55]There are enough reviewers out there.
[22:57]I mean, for that fewer and fewer, that's quite a sad thing.
[23:01]I don't know what it's like in the States,
[23:03]but here definitely are reviewed pages
[23:06]as squeezed and squeezed and there's less room for reviewing.
[23:10]So that's a shame because I do think reviewing
[23:12]is an important part of the culture.
[23:13]But still we have, well, we have podcasts like yours,
[23:17]in fact, so we have, we have here in the UK
[23:21]to lively young women who wish to dedicate their time
[23:28]as you do to talking about books and comparing them
[23:32]and discussing them and going into how it's done.
[23:35]And yeah, I mean, what's not to like, I have faith.
[23:39]I think one could have been doubtful,
[23:42]but all the evidences that reading
[23:44]is a very, very special part of our culture
[23:47]and that people are valuing it almost more rather than less.
[23:54]Does that make sense to you?
[23:55]I mean, you're better positioned than me
[23:57]to kind of know whether that's true.
[23:59]I love that.
[24:00]It's encouraging and yeah, I feel that people,
[24:05]because it's now gotten to a point of complete overwhelm,
[24:08]like then there is just like,
[24:10]factually too much, too much information
[24:13]and it's coming in so quickly that people have had
[24:16]to take stock and make decisions more consciously
[24:18]than they used to.
[24:20]Versus, as opposed to, I'm just gonna pick up a book
[24:22]this afternoon, yeah, the summer Sunday or whatever.
[24:26]Now it's, you know, people have,
[24:29]I think the whole culture of making it into lists
[24:31]and sharing something about it and posting it and, you know,
[24:36]somebody was just saying to me that what they love
[24:38]about writing is that it's the only thing you do completely
[24:40]alone, but yeah, you're never alone in it.
[24:43]It's something that connects you to others
[24:45]without being with others and that may ever feel
[24:48]such a part of things, even when she was alone or, you know,
[24:51]so, yeah, yeah, you're right, it's, it's,
[24:55]I mean, I often, one feels that when you're writing,
[24:59]you feel I can be clearer and more exact
[25:04]about what I mean, of course I can hear at leisure
[25:07]that even chatting with, you know,
[25:10]with one's most intimate friends and not,
[25:12]I'm not, it isn't an either or situation.
[25:14]One desperately needs to chat with one's intimate friends,
[25:17]but there's something about the personal discipline
[25:21]of thought that goes into writing and that goes into reading,
[25:25]which I don't know, it seems that it doesn't want
[25:28]to be pretentious about it, but it is some kind of spiritual
[25:32]exercise actually and some intensification of awareness
[25:38]that is so precious and so valuable.
[25:41]Yeah, and I think, and you're, you're right,
[25:44]this contradiction of its solideness,
[25:46]but yet in its very essence, it's, if you're writing,
[25:51]it's to communicate and if you're reading,
[25:53]you are communicating with that person who wrote it.
[25:55]You, you feel, when I think it's almost odd
[25:58]when you've read somebody's book and then you meet them,
[26:00]you actually think, oh, but I know you,
[26:03]I know you more than any amount of having a coffee together
[26:07]can do, I know you deep down from the way you make
[26:11]your sentences and new pictures.
[26:13]So it is a fascinating way of humans
[26:16]speaking to one of that actually.
[26:18]Oh, yeah.
[26:19]When every, every stuff and if someone says that to me
[26:21]or they read, I remember or they follow me in Instagram
[26:23]or whatever, and they're like, this is so funny.
[26:25]I feel like I know you.
[26:26]I usually say, I usually say you do know me,
[26:29]like you know me very well.
[26:30]I just don't know you, you know, like let's fit,
[26:34]like now, tell me about you, like you,
[26:37]I already laid all my cards in the table.
[26:38]So what's up with you these days?
[26:41]Well, anyway, amazing.
[26:44]Well, are you reading anything amazing
[26:46]and where are you going on these trains
[26:47]and everything that you're planning
[26:48]and what are you going to pack it to go?
[26:51]I'm going this afternoon just across to Bath,
[26:53]which is only an hour and 15 minutes away on the train
[26:56]to do something.
[26:57]It's a lovely, lovely bookshop there called Topings and Co
[27:00]where I used to, that's where I used to teach in Bath.
[27:03]So I know the beautiful Georgian town very well
[27:07]and I know that bookshop.
[27:08]So that'll be very nice.
[27:09]I expect there'll be probably some of my ex-students there.
[27:12]I'm hoping I'll be with my colleagues.
[27:15]Then my husband and I going up to Edinburgh
[27:18]for partly going to Glasgow first to see my brother
[27:21]and then Edinburgh and Scotland as of course you know,
[27:24]for that literature festival up there,
[27:26]that'll be lovely.
[27:28]And then I'm going to a super book festival in Denmark
[27:33]called the Louisiana festival.
[27:35]So I keep thinking I'm coming across to the southern states,
[27:38]but it's a beautiful art museum,
[27:40]north of Copenhagen.
[27:42]Apparently it's a very special festival.
[27:44]So I'm looking forward to that.
[27:45]So that's what I was booking this morning.
[27:47]Oh, fun.
[27:48]Yeah, that's great.
[27:49]Amazing.
[27:51]Okay, well you've given so much advice already
[27:54]but for the person who's listening today
[27:57]and is in a similar spot when stuck in their own writing,
[28:01]the way you seem to be, what is your advice to them?
[28:06]Probably, I mean, not necessarily keep going
[28:11]because of course here and there there's a story
[28:13]or a novel which one shouldn't, which one gives up.
[28:16]But so what is it?
[28:17]I think the best thing is to train your brain
[28:22]and I did use to so go on about this to my students
[28:26]in reading your own workers if it wasn't yours.
[28:29]You never can 100% of course you can't
[28:32]but you have to actually make your headache
[28:35]with looking back over that chapter again and again
[28:39]and trying to get some distance on it.
[28:41]Sometimes I have play tricks on myself
[28:43]like changing the appearance of the thing on the screen
[28:46]and then changing it back again.
[28:48]Just to jolt it into unfamiliarity.
[28:50]I know a lot of people printed out
[28:52]which I don't do but that seems another way of jolting it
[28:56]so that you're reading it as if it were a book
[28:59]not words by you.
[29:02]And actually I feel as if learning how to do that
[29:06]even though it really does make your mind ache
[29:09]is an essential part of being self-critical.
[29:12]And there's a juggling act which there is no,
[29:16]well never learns to get quite right.
[29:18]There's a juggling act between the criticism
[29:20]that is absolutely necessary where you think,
[29:24]oh, I'm not doing that well enough.
[29:25]I can make that better.
[29:26]That's too long, take some out.
[29:29]And then there's the criticism which is just,
[29:32]it's no good throw it away
[29:34]and somewhere between those two,
[29:38]you have to find your path of believing in yourself
[29:41]but doubt in yourself.
[29:42]And I do not have an answer to that part.
[29:45]It's a thicket and you just have to machete your way
[29:49]through one way or another.
[29:51]And maybe at the end of it asks,
[29:54]finally when the moment comes,
[29:57]you need somebody else's eyes on the work.
[29:59]And maybe.
[30:00]all the way through. When I was an apprentice writer and I did, I needed other people to read me
[30:06]at the right moments as I was going along and I don't do that so much now, but it was precious at
[30:12]the time. That's it. Thank you. This has been so amazing. I feel like I've just gotten a private
[30:17]masterclass and I really appreciate all of your time and I have just so much respect for you. Thank
[30:23]you so much. It's lovely to talk to you again. What fun. Have fun on your trip.
[30:30]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't
[30:35]forget to follow me on Instagram at zebiowans and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[30:40]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowans.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots
[30:45]of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact, texture sound for
[30:50]the sound editing and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and
[30:54]outro music.