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Jennifer with Coffee - Episode 28 - Why genre writing? (Solo Episode) · Jennifer with Coffee

• 0:00
  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Jennifer with Coffee, a mindset podcast for people who are looking for real change.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jennifer Lauer, writer, yogi, and fitness fanatic.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Lately, I've been having lots of coffee meetups, long,
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  SPEAKER_00: honest conversations that delve into mindset,
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  SPEAKER_00: identity, choices, and habits that shape our lives.
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  SPEAKER_00: I kept thinking how I wanted to share these conversations.
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  SPEAKER_00: So here we are.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Each episode moves in three beats.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: An inspirational story,
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  SPEAKER_00: an interview with thinkers,
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  SPEAKER_00: builders, athletes, and artists, people who want to share their own transformations.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we'll end with a brief meditation to practice calming the nervous system.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today's inspo is about The Delicate Papers.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So my newsletter on Substack is called The Delicate Papers.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I've been asked before, what does that mean?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: What does The Delicate Papers refer to?
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  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean by it?
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  SPEAKER_00: And so I took to the newsletter this last week.
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  SPEAKER_00: My paid subscribers got it first,
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  SPEAKER_00: but it will be open to everybody next week where I kind of wrote a little poem
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  SPEAKER_00: about what The Delicate Papers mean to me.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of a complicated thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Something I talk about a lot is paradox in life,
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  SPEAKER_00: about how sometimes things can be vulnerable and strong as hell all at
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  SPEAKER_00: the same time.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of how I feel about the title, The Delicate Papers.
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  SPEAKER_00: And here it is.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paper is a thing, fragile, delicate.
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  SPEAKER_00: It can rip and tear, collect tears, be dissolved.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paper is crumpled and folded.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's where words come to be born, where words go to be written and erased.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paper is the place contracts are forged,
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  SPEAKER_00: businesses, marriages, promises, secrets, births, deaths are certified.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tendering both the words of God and the oaths of men.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paper carries our greatest works of art and heralds the governments that rule the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: Harvested trees milled from lumbering strength, beaten to a pulp.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paper is fragile, delicate, yet holds powerful words.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not unlike the human spirit, paper holds vulnerability and significance as equals.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so we continue to balance our words on delicate paper.
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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Today I wanted to talk a little bit about genre writing.
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  SPEAKER_00: I typically write dystopia, sci-fi, paranormal, fantasy, and I love a genre story.
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  SPEAKER_00: Genre has some unique things that it offers a writer.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so I just wanted to talk a little bit about that today.
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  SPEAKER_00: When you think of genre,
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  SPEAKER_00: often the stories, they can be plot driven, they can be About the world building.
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  SPEAKER_00: It offers this really great opportunity for escape from the everyday world.
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  SPEAKER_00: I find it fun to include in the world you're building parts of our world.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think what writing in genre does for a writer is it gives us the opportunity
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  SPEAKER_00: to be completely imaginative and Let our minds just completely,
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  SPEAKER_00: fully go in deep on a place that we maybe only hold in our mind.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I know that people have different ways of writing.
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  SPEAKER_00: For example, I see a lot of my worlds visually.
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  SPEAKER_00: I can see them in my mind's eye and I can feel myself.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I know some writers don't see the world at all.
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  SPEAKER_00: They only see words or they think in words.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I find that really fascinating that all of our brains kind of operate differently.
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  SPEAKER_00: But I do have a visual component to how I write.
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  SPEAKER_00: So I can see The story I see and the story I feel.
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  SPEAKER_00: I am able to kind of inhabit a character.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe this is part of my acting training is when you are in a character,
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  SPEAKER_00: you can kind of look around the world and see it from their perspective.
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  SPEAKER_00: I feel like that's one of the things that writers are really good at is observing
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  SPEAKER_00: the world in this kind of unique way.
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  SPEAKER_00: We all perceive the world in a unique way.
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  SPEAKER_00: Artists are just expressing their version of how they see the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's just so incredible to me how we all do it so differently.
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  SPEAKER_00: One person can think up a story in a very literal way.
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  SPEAKER_00: Very linear way and someone else more my style of making art is dream up a world or
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  SPEAKER_00: an idea and then just kind of follow it to where it leads.
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  SPEAKER_00: Once I'm inside the world it's real to me.
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  SPEAKER_00: I can add to it.
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  SPEAKER_00: I can go deeper.
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  SPEAKER_00: I can describe details.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes that world is so clear, it is hard to articulate it.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've discussed before on this podcast how I am an underwriter,
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  SPEAKER_00: so I often need to pull out those details purposefully
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  SPEAKER_00: because it doesn't naturally come forth.
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  SPEAKER_00: One of the ways that I helped be more deliberate in my writing with my first book,
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  SPEAKER_00: The Girl in the Zoo,
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  SPEAKER_00: I created a map Pretty early on,
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  SPEAKER_00: I spend a lot of time at the LA Zoo with the primates at the zoo,
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  SPEAKER_00: the monkeys and orangutans and chimpanzees and the gorillas,
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  SPEAKER_00: particularly the gorillas.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're such a human kind of connection.
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  SPEAKER_00: I was watching the gorillas themselves and how they behaved and also the people
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  SPEAKER_00: who were going to see the exhibits.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it was just a very fascinating thing to watch,
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  SPEAKER_00: like how children behaved around them,
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  SPEAKER_00: how some people didn't see the gorillas as these other souls.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think some people just saw them as objects to just point at.
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  SPEAKER_00: That was interesting to me.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then some people were really having a moment.
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  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I had many moments just kind of sitting quietly with the gorillas and praying.
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  SPEAKER_00: Making eye contact when you could and thinking about what it must be like for them
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  SPEAKER_00: to live in that habitat.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've spoken about this before but I have very conflicting views on zoos
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  SPEAKER_00: in general starting from when I was very young.
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  SPEAKER_00: For a long time I just hated them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Like when I was a kid I didn't like a zoo or an aquarium.
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  SPEAKER_00: I thought the animals were amazing but I always felt like they were not
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  SPEAKER_00: where they were supposed to be.
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  SPEAKER_00: They weren't in their natural habitat.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to free all the animals from the zoo and the aquarium.
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  SPEAKER_00: However,
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  SPEAKER_00: I came to learn how a lot of the animals that are kept in zoos are born in captivity
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  SPEAKER_00: or they are injured or sick and they come to these zoos to be rehabilitated.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the zoo offers a way to make money to take care of them in the best way possible.
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  SPEAKER_00: A lot of times these animals could not survive in their natural habitat.
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  SPEAKER_00: But of course, as a child, I didn't think about this.
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  SPEAKER_00: I took a little tangent off on the zoo section,
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  SPEAKER_00: but that was a huge part of my research for the girl in the zoo.
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  SPEAKER_00: I really empathized with the animals and some of the behaviors that they do.
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  SPEAKER_00: Do being held in captivity and I tried to translate that into Mirren
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  SPEAKER_00: and her experience in my fictionalized version.
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  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I think about genre,
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  SPEAKER_00: you can express how you feel about things that are actually happening.
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  SPEAKER_00: It lends itself to being both creative and expressing things that are actually going on.
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  SPEAKER_00: It kind of creates this safety for the writer between reality and your imagination.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've been asked why I write genre.
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  SPEAKER_00: Why are you drawn to writing other worlds?
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  SPEAKER_00: Because I think that it's really fun to create A whole new world.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some of the worlds that live inside my head.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm always imagining new worlds and things and places.
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  SPEAKER_00: When I'm in a regular place,
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  SPEAKER_00: let's say I'm in a coffee shop because I do spend a fair amount of time
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  SPEAKER_00: in coffee shops.
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  SPEAKER_00: So say I'm in a coffee shop.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone walks in with a dog with a funny little haircut, for example.
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  SPEAKER_00: I will then think about just this entire story about where that dog lives,
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  SPEAKER_00: how the haircut came to be,
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  SPEAKER_00: maybe that's their special species and they come from another planet,
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  SPEAKER_00: spying on their owner and reporting back to their dog planet.
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  SPEAKER_00: That will be a two-minute imagination burst that I will have.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's happening to me all the time.
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  SPEAKER_00: The mundane is always magical for me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Writing in genre offers the opportunity for me to express all of those little stories.
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  SPEAKER_00: But I will say because they're happening all the time,
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  SPEAKER_00: I have to focus when I am writing a longer piece where I have to stay in that world.
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  SPEAKER_00: I can't jump out and go to the little dog planet if I'm in Mirren's zoo or...
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  SPEAKER_00: Like right now I'm writing in a fantasy world that I made up.
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  SPEAKER_00: When you're creating geography you have to know where the mountains are and where
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  SPEAKER_00: the oceans are.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a lot to hold but also really fun to create.
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  SPEAKER_00: Genre not only creates this safety net for you to write about things
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  SPEAKER_00: that are difficult,
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  SPEAKER_00: it also gives you the autonomy to just create An entirely new place.
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  SPEAKER_00: It could be a place that you wish existed.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so that's kind of a little bit about why I like genre.
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  SPEAKER_00: Again, it's partly because it's a great way for me to express
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  SPEAKER_00: the imagination running around in my head and it's also a safe way to Write
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  SPEAKER_00: about big meta themes in the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I think what genre does is it allows you to talk about these themes in a way
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  SPEAKER_00: that you're not being held to like a journalistic standard.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you're,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know,
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  SPEAKER_00: in space,
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  SPEAKER_00: you can talk about these things and discuss them and think about them and be curious
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  SPEAKER_00: about the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: I truly enjoy the beauty and the fun of And the fantastical nature of genre.
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  SPEAKER_00: When you're reading what's your favorite genre, let me know.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can always contact me through my sub stack,
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  SPEAKER_00: The Delicate Papers, or on Instagram at jenniferlauer.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today's breaths are focused on releasing anxiety and calming the racing mind.
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  SPEAKER_00: On each breath, we're going to focus on a sense on sound, smell, and movement.
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  SPEAKER_00: As you inhale on the first breath, we're going to listen to whatever sounds are around us.
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  SPEAKER_00: No judgments, just listening.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let's focus on our sound.
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  SPEAKER_00: Take a deep inhale, listening for all of the sounds.
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  SPEAKER_00: Of my voice, what's outside my voice, what's outside of that.
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  SPEAKER_00: And exhale, listening to everything around you.
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  SPEAKER_00: The second breath, we're going to take a deep inhale through the nose.
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  SPEAKER_00: Smell, even if it's just the smell of the room you're in,
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  SPEAKER_00: Your car.
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  SPEAKER_00: And inhale,
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  SPEAKER_00: noticing
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  SPEAKER_00: the smell.
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  SPEAKER_00: Exhale, noticing the scent of the room you're in.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the final breath, we're going to focus on movement.
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  SPEAKER_00: So you can wiggle your toes on the inhale and wiggle your fingers on the exhale
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  SPEAKER_00: or whatever you choose to move.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let's take a deep inhale, wiggling the toes as we do.
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  SPEAKER_00: Wiggle those toes, focus on the toes.
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  SPEAKER_00: And exhale, wiggling the fingers, wiggling the fingers.
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  SPEAKER_00: Breathing all the air out.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes when we focus on one particular sense,
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  SPEAKER_00: it can help us alleviate anxiety and calm our mind.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the next time you feel anxious,
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  SPEAKER_00: focus on one of your senses and take a few breaths thinking about that sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: So whether you're seeing, smelling, sensing, listening.
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  SPEAKER_00: May your day be calm and intentional.
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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to Jennifer with Coffee.
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  SPEAKER_00: Follow us on Instagram at jenniferwithcoffee and on Substack.
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  SPEAKER_00: This has been a Kings of Content production.
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  SPEAKER_00: Music by Oreo CC.