Friday, Feb. 14, 2025
Promotional support is brought to you by the Power of Narrative Conference, celebrating its 26th year on the last weekend of March 28 and 29. 300-400 journalists from around the world are coming. Keynote speakers Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, Dan Zak and Connie Chung will deliver the knowledge. Listeners of this podcast can get 15% off your enrollment fee by using the code CNF15. To learn more visit combeyond.bu.edu … and use that CNF15 code.
Become a Patron!When Lindsay Jill Roth (@lindsayjillroth) described her latest book as beach read meets system, that was pretty spot-on. There’s a breezy, conversational tone to Romances & Practicalities: A Love Story (Maybe Yours?) in 250 Questions (William Morrow). It weaves the research and interviews Lindsay did along with her personal story of finding her partner.
Lindsay is an award-winning television producer and writer, with novel under her belt as well, What Pretty Girls Are Made Of (Simon & Schuster). She has worked events like The Grammys, The TONYs, and The Masters.
Naturally, she has a knack for story, so we talk a lot about the process of writing this latest book and how she goes about the work. We don’t really pull on the threads of the book’s content that much, mainly because I wanted to keep this on the rails of craft.1 I understand that in Lindsay’s myriad appearances on high-profile, traditional talk shows that predictably talk about the “love” angle of things, the “partnering” angle of things, I thought it refreshing — as did Lindsay — to talk about the writing.
She really came to play ball, so this was a fun chat about the ins and outs of writing this book, which could just as well be overlayed onto your book project.
This episode pairs will with:
Parting Shot: The Funk
Oh, yes, the funk, the book funk, the post-book funk, hard to believe that just over two years ago to the day it was announced that I’d be working on a biography about Steve Prefontaine and it consumed my every waking — and at times non-waking — thoughts.
For a while now, it’s been a challenge to drum up motivation to proceed with the next project. The agent likes my next project and she’s like, get something together, make some inroads, prove you’ve got some momentum and we’ll make a pitch. No need to do anything as expansive as a book proposal because the Prefontaine book is, for now, proof that I can do the job. You’d think that would be motivation enough.
I have the time.
It’s not like I have to thread it around a day job right now.
I can’t say I’m burned out.
I’m just floating along, in a funk.
I obsessively tidy up the house, clean the floors, the bathrooms, make the bed, put the clean dishes away. You could say I’m procrastinating and you wouldn’t be wrong, but you wouldn’t be correct either. It’s a bit like having completed a marathon. The last thing you want to do is start training for another one, but since I turned in my final final final draft a couple weeks ago, I’m slowly starting to get into the groove. OK, the idea is solid, now we need to start making the calls, writing the soft email intros.
You start in the outer-most orbit, not so far that there’s no gravity. And then you get a little bit closer, a little bit closer, and then you’ve amassed maybe a couple dozen calls, and the tape is filling up, and the spreadsheet is expanding, and you’ve got enough proof of concept to write the movie trailer.
This is no new concept, but it’s Newtonian in that a creative project in motion wants to stay in motion, and a creative project that has no movement is very hard to get moving. Seth Wickesham says the worst thing you can do is stop. I’m in this latter phase, while also trying to come up with creative ways to expand the CNF Pod universe into compelling and entertaining and fulfilling YouTube content. Like, it won’t be just clips and podcasts, it’ll be more akin to what the gamers of YouTube do, but I’m unsure how to pull that off. YouTube is the next frontier in the expansion, of taking my taste and sensibility and making something that is like a neighboring city in the same county. Thing is, I have a hard enough time having to listen to my stupid voice that the idea of having to look and edit my even more stupid face gives me the heebie jeebies … no matter … this is all part and parcel of the funk. How will we emege from the funk? Tune in next week on the creative nonfiction podcast … ugh … stay wild CNFErs, and if you can’t do, interview, see ya!
- The cynic would say that’s because you didn’t read the book, right? Fuck off, I read it. I always read the books. Sorry, not in a sunny mood and these imaginary conversations are really triggering me today. ↩︎
