One of the reasons I decided to heed my spirit guides and create Will I Ever Finish This F#@king Book? is because I wanted to talk about a pet theory of mine:
I’m convinced the unconscious sets up sneaky little laboratories inside our creative projects.
I’ve stopped keeping count of how many times I’ve grappled with a craft issue, only to realize that the exact skills I’m developing on the page are precisely what I need to navigate some speed bump in the rest of my life.
Coincidence? Methinks not.
This week, we’re talking about the totally fake podcast I wrote inside my book, which ended up being a secret trial run for…you guessed it: my actual podcast.
Thanks, Unconscious!
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Episode 7 Transcript
[00:00:00] What if the fix to your story problems is hiding in plain sight? And what does that have to do with the almighty cat god?
[00:00:11] If you’ve ever devoted yourself to a creative project that ended up consuming your entire fucking life, this one’s for you. I’m Aven Winslow, romance writer and Jungian witch. Join me in the final stretch of writing my second romantasy novel. Craft breakthroughs, perfectionism spirals, and all the eerie little ways that fiction can start bleeding into real life.
[00:00:33] Welcome back, friends. We’re starting with our fire segment where we ask, what is our craft issue for the week?
[00:00:41]
[00:00:43] So I’ve mentioned on this show before how I believe that the unconscious sets up little laboratories in our creative work. In my case, things that unfold in my novels. And in working through these craft issues, I realize, often quite belatedly, that they were basically a practice round for something in my real life.
[00:01:02] And I couldn’t pick a better example of this than this week’s craft problem. So, let’s get into it. My current work in progress, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, follows Ev Knox, a young writer whose debut novel is being adapted to the big screen. During filming, Ev has to spend a month in the extremely haunted Harrowfell Hall with the leading man, Matt Byrne, who happens to be her very inconvenient celebrity crush.
[00:01:28] This week’s craft problem relates to the book within the book, meaning the novel Ev wrote that’s being adapted into a movie. That book is called The Chalice and the Gates of Dawn, which I’ll henceforth refer to as CATGOD to save my voice, and because that’s the best acronym ever. And no, I did not plan that.
[00:01:45] It was a very happy accident. So, as I was working through draft six, it became very clear that the story would be stronger if I found a better way to weave the story of Ev’s book into my story. There are reasons why this is important, reasons that would be a big spoiler. But suffice it to say, my task was, how do I convey what Ev’s book is about in a way that’s engaging and that ties into my plot at the most relevant moments?
[00:02:12] As in, I didn’t wanna just dump the plot line of her book in a confusing prologue or have Ev tell it to another character in one long info dumpy dialogue chunk. So what else could I do? Last week, I mentioned that I occasionally get story-related insomnia, and the solution to this problem landed on an unsuspecting Wednesday at three AM.
[00:02:34] I’d been toying that week with the idea of writing excerpts from CATGOD and using those as chapter epigraphs, and I actually gave that idea a shot. It worked okay, but it didn’t have that zingy aliveness I look for in a winning idea. It just sorta sat there on the page. And what I realized is that it was really tricky to write an excerpt from Ev’s book that conveyed the information I needed in a very short amount of space, but without feeling info dumpy.
[00:03:02] So that’s our craft issue for this week. The solution? For that, I’ll see you in the next segment.
[00:03:08]
[00:03:10] Air asks, “What tools did I bring to help solve this week’s craft issue?” In this case, I didn’t really bring shit. The unconscious basically delivered a complete solution right to my doorstep, which man, is it ever cool when that happens.
[00:03:24] But I can guess where the inspiration came from. So in my work in progress, The Magician in the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, I mentioned in the last episode that parasocial relationships play a big role. In a nutshell, Ev has to negotiate the fantasy version of Matt Byrne that she sees online, with the very sweet, very nerdy guy that she’s actually getting to know.
[00:03:45] And one of the ways I show this on the page is through Ev’s internet stalking. So she’s reading comments online, looking up the Byrne Baby Byrne fan page, reading fanfic, and all kinds of stuff. So I already had this idea for what I’m calling a visual prologue, and I was going to put that at the beginning of the book.
[00:04:03] Basically, I created a fake social media post, and originally, this post was about Matt, a sort of teaser to show how famous he is and how Ev is very much aware of his abundant hotness before she ever meets him. But that social media post morphed into something very different midway through draft six.
[00:04:20] All right, let’s set the scene. I wake up to go pee at 3:00 AM, and I’m already back cozying under the blankets when suddenly my brain bursts into flames. I rush into the other room, and I’m barely able to scribble notes fast enough. Instead of a social media post about Matt, it turned into a post about Ev’s book, Cat God, and in the comments, two fans decide they want to start a podcast about the book.
[00:04:45] This fake podcast ended up being my vehicle for conveying plot info about Cat God in a way that felt so energized, so sparkly. I sketched out the first four podcast transcripts, just snippets, mind you, because that’s all I need for these epigraphs, but I sketched them all out that night, and then I went back to bed and I slept like a dead rock.
[00:05:05] So thanks to this podcast within the book, I no longer have to come up with a short paragraph of prose that elegantly conveys the necessary plot details without sounding info dumpy. I can have these characters, my fake podcasters, talk about their favorite parts of Ev’s book in a way that’s funny and entertaining and never feels like a boring plot summary, even though that’s exactly the function it’s serving.
[00:05:28] And not only that, but it works thematically on multiple levels, including the aforementioned parasocial versus offline connection, because we have these podcasters discussing Ev’s book while you, the reader, are getting to know Ev for real, and there are other thematic tie-ins, but honestly, those would be hard for me to explain without spoilers.
[00:05:47] Point being, the podcast solution was thematic catnip for my brain, which is a sure sign of a winning idea.
[00:05:54]
[00:05:56] Water asks, “What do these craft insights reveal about me personally?” This is a two-parter actually, so we’re gonna revisit this in the next episode. But the reveal for this week is something that my conscious mind finds excruciatingly annoying because it goes against my brain’s entire operating manual, and that is sometimes when a problem refuses to budge, the answer isn’t to try harder.
[00:06:19] Sometimes it’s only when you stop trying to make the wrong solution work that the right one has the space to emerge. Because that’s what was happening with the Cat God experts. I had the right instinct. I knew Ev’s book needed to be threaded into mine. I knew it couldn’t just hover in the background as the supposedly important text that we never actually experience.
[00:06:40] But that material didn’t want to be crammed into polished little excerpts. It wanted to hang out with two nerds on a fake podcast spiraling over plot theories and their favorite moments of swoon. This is where I truly believe the unconscious is smarter than my conscious mind, because my conscious mind too often keeps trying to solve the problem inside the frame I already chose.
[00:07:01] It’ll say, “Well, the epigraphs aren’t working yet, so just, I don’t know, make the epigraphs better.” Yep, this is the part that feels uncomfortably personal because I can look back at so many places in my life where I’ve responded to friction by assuming I needed to become better at enduring the friction, more disciplined, more patient, more reasonable.
[00:07:24] And sometimes, sure, that’s true. Sometimes growth means developing the capacity to stay with something difficult. But sometimes difficulty is information. Sometimes the thing that feels dead feels dead because it is. A scene, a business strategy, a creative identity, a relationship. Which brings us to our final segment.
[00:07:46]
[00:07:48] Earth asks, “How did the fix go? And what do these insights ask of me in real life?” Let’s do this backward and start with the second question. My answer this week is, maybe you don’t need to make yourself smaller, calmer, more productive, more palatable, more willing to white-knuckle your way through the thing.
[00:08:06] Sometimes you just need to burn it all down and create a new container. That doesn’t mean the new container will make everything easy-peasy necessarily. Those fake podcast epigraphs still have a job to do. They still have to reveal the right information at the right moment. They still have to be funny enough, brief enough, and thematically relevant enough to justify their existence.
[00:08:28] So far, the hardest part of the process hasn’t been coming up with ideas for the fake podcast. It’s figuring out the right placement for those epigraphs within the larger narrative. But even though that’s tricky, it’s a really satisfying challenge. And that’s the point. Once I found the right container, the work had energy again.
[00:08:46] That’s the difference I’m trying to spot, hopefully a little bit earlier each time. Is this hard in a way that feels dynamic and alive? Or is this hard because I’m trying to resurrect something that never had a pulse in the first place? So let’s pinky swear before we go. Ready? No Franken-stories stitched together from dead ideas that we should have buried in the backyard.
[00:09:14] Thanks for listening to Will I Ever Finish This Fucking Book? Speaking of finishing, I’m getting so close to the finish line. So if you want to be the first to know when my book releases, head on over to twinflames.life/freebies. No matter which freebie you choose, you’ll be added to my list, and you won’t miss a thing.[00:09:35] Next week, in our season finale, we’re returning to the idea of perfectionism. We all know that perfectionism, if left to its own devices, will ravage the countryside and never let us finish a damn thing. But sometimes perfectionism is hiding an even sneakier creative roadblock, and it took receiving a nasty 14-page letter from one of my parents for me to uncover what that roadblock really is.