Latest / Show, don't Tell Writing with Suzy Vadori / 42. Writing as a Neurodivergent Author with Melanie Marttila

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42. Writing as a Neurodivergent Author with Melanie Marttila · Show, don't Tell Writing with Suzy Vadori

• 0:07
  Welcome to Show.
• 0:07
  Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction nonfiction that are gonna wow your readers broken down step by step.
• 0:18
  We're gonna explore writing techniques.
• 0:21
  I'm gonna show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers' careers that you wouldn't have access to otherwise.
• 0:27
  And I'm also gonna coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling.
• 0:33
  Whether you're just starting out, you're drafting your first book, you're editing, or you're currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show's gonna help you unlock the writing skills that you didn't even know you needed, but you definitely do.
• 0:48
  I'm so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers, so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams, and you're gonna also have some fun doing it.
• 1:02
  Let's dive in.
• 1:05
  Please join me in welcoming Melanie Marttila to the show today, who's been on the writing scene since the nineties with her poetry, fantasy, and science fiction.
• 1:13
  She said, works published in polar, borealis, polar starlight, and sulfur.
• 1:18
  And her debuted poetry collection.
• 1:20
  The Art of Floating was released in 2024 by Latitude 46, honor and privilege of working with Melanie on reality balm science fiction novel with a neurodivergent main character, which came about after Melanie's own diagnosis of autism.
• 1:35
  It unlocked a fascination with how she'd been writing characters her whole career.
• 1:39
  In this interview, she shares how this project came together, what it was like to work with me as a book coach, and how she overcame all the obstacles that slowed her down.
• 1:48
  Spoiler alert, the book is finished and she's about to dive into the query trenches with it.
• 1:53
  Melanie is a huge inspiration and I can't wait for this project to get into the hands of readers.
• 1:58
  Take a listen so you can cheer around with me.
• 2:01
  Welcome, Melanie.
• 2:02
  So great to have you here on the show.
• 2:04
  Don't Tell Podcast today.
• 2:07
  I'm so happy to be here.
• 2:10
  Okay, so the listeners have heard the introduction about all the things that you've done, and you've been part of the writing scene for a while.
• 2:18
  What made you tackle this novel reality bomb that we're gonna be talking about today at this particular moment in time?
• 2:27
  I'll give you hopefully a, an abbreviated version of the genesis.
• 2:32
  It actually started as a dream.
• 2:33
  And in the dream there was a scientist who went to another reality, another world, and in that other world, they discovered that they were not assigned to anymore, but they were a pastry chef.
• 2:51
  And I love that.
• 2:52
  Rest of the dream was just basically her trying to figure out how as a paint street sha, she was gonna get back into the science world and try and fix this problem.
• 3:02
  So I took that idea and I decided I, because I was a annual nano rold person in those days, yeah.
• 3:11
  That I was going to try it for that year's nano rmo.
• 3:15
  So I did a. I would call it like a free write kind of outline in my journal and did the thing I won that year.
• 3:26
  Yay.
• 3:27
  And the winning, just so that listeners know, if they're not familiar with Nano Rmo, national Novel Writing Month has been a thing in November.
• 3:34
  It's actually just been disbanded this year.
• 3:37
  Yes, like a couple of weeks ago.
• 3:39
  But basically the idea is to.
• 3:42
  Go, go, go for an entire month.
• 3:44
  And winning, as Melody said, is basically writing your entire draft or 50,000 words in one month, which is a huge feat.
• 3:53
  Congratulations on getting that first draft done.
• 3:55
  Sorry to interrupt.
• 3:56
  Keep going.
• 3:57
  Yep.
• 3:58
  Okay.
• 3:59
  And that first draft, I cleaned it up a little bit, but I presented it to my critique group at the time, and.
• 4:06
  It was a For Rankin draft, I was not aware of it because that was just not where my head was at the time.
• 4:14
  I got, or my four draft, I'll say, got a new in it.
• 4:19
  Yeah.
• 4:19
  And because it didn't really know what it wanted to be, I didn't know what it wanted to be.
• 4:26
  So I found a fully developed romance with all of the explicit stuff.
• 4:32
  I had a fully developed.
• 4:34
  Mean girls in university thing, going for alternate.
• 4:39
  Brenda Brenda's my protagonist by the way, and then Brenda herself.
• 4:45
  She was doing all kinds of Militaryesque, infiltration, exfiltration stuff herself, which she had no background in, so none, oh my goodness, sense none.
• 4:57
  None of it needs sense.
• 4:58
  I actually love this story.
• 5:00
  Melanie, I've never asked you a question before because that book that you described with the explicit romantic piece that said the mean girls and the military, none of that is the book that you ended up with, uh, or that we worked on.
• 5:14
  So where, okay.
• 5:16
  I don't know where this conversation is going, but I'm here for it.
• 5:19
  No.
• 5:20
  Okay.
• 5:20
  So how did that lead you to, you've written tons before you have other published works.
• 5:26
  So what was it about this project that led you to be like, oh my goodness, I wanna work with a coach?
• 5:31
  'cause we did end up working together on this project.
• 5:34
  Yeah.
• 5:35
  So before I reached out to you, I did do something that I had never done before and I co completely rewrote the book because I was trying to figure out revision on my own.
• 5:49
  And even though the book that I rewrote was basically the draft that you've got.
• 5:55
  It was late 2020 when I handed that draft off, not late 2019, so late 2020 when I handed that draft off to Gray ti me and they said I was getting the emotion on the page.
• 6:09
  The same time I started a new position at work in which I was in learning mode for the first time in 12 years.
• 6:16
  And between the two things, I had a double hit of imposter syndrome and I'm sort of bottom debt in early 2021.
• 6:25
  I ended up reaching on to my employee assistance program and through that counseling I actually started exploring the idea that I could be, because one of the things that sort of resonated with me from that critique saying I didn't get the emotional page, is that I lived in Longhead.
• 6:46
  Okay.
• 6:47
  And the lessons of my life have taught me that expressing my authentic emotion.
• 6:54
  Only ever gets me into trouble.
• 6:56
  It doesn't, it doesn't earn me friends.
• 6:58
  It doesn't make anybody feel good.
• 7:00
  It just caused all sorts of sort of relationship difficulties throughout my life.
• 7:05
  And so I was exploring, thought maybe I could be neuro divergent.
• 7:10
  The, it had been with me for a few years.
• 7:12
  I'd heard an interview on CDC with somebody who was neuro divergent and late diagnosed.
• 7:20
  And again, I resonated with that a lot, but it just sat in the back of my mind until Ms. Point.
• 7:28
  And then once I was in counseling and exploring the idea I, and this was a very fortunate thing because most people don't have this experience with diagnosis, but I got a referral to a local psychotherapist who specialized in autism diagnosis.
• 7:47
  And so.
• 7:49
  May of 2021, I was diagnosed as autistic.
• 7:55
  And And how did that change your whole view on what you were working on?
• 8:00
  'cause I know it did, right?
• 8:02
  Oh yeah.
• 8:02
  Oh yeah.
• 8:03
  So I mean, and I always say this about my diagnosis to anybody who will ask because I'm very open about it.
• 8:10
  Um, thank you for that.
• 8:11
  I think people need to hear it.
• 8:12
  You said you came to it through an interview that you heard, and thank you for giving back.
• 8:17
  Yeah.
• 8:18
  It was a relief because suddenly I had this explanation for everything that I had ever struggled with in my life.
• 8:29
  Hmm.
• 8:30
  And it was a revelation because it gave me a new context, a new way of understanding myself.
• 8:37
  It was a process I was researching in research mode on my own Neurotype for quite a while.
• 8:46
  I. So it, it was a revelation because it gave me a new context to understand my experiences and I was deep in re research mode to understand myself and my neurotype.
• 8:57
  So in that same year, I had sent it my poetry collection.
• 9:02
  I got things together and I sent it my poetry collection, and I started to consider my fiction writing in that I. I wanted to find a way to get in that emotionality page.
• 9:16
  I wanted to find a way to express what I needed to about the characters, and I made the decision.
• 9:23
  I, it was actually part of the revelation is that you write what you know.
• 9:29
  So I looked at all the characters that I have written, and they are all, to some degree Norberg because.
• 9:38
  I'm writing from my own experience.
• 9:40
  Amazing.
• 9:40
  And you didn't, you, you didn't know that.
• 9:43
  Right?
• 9:43
  And I more idea people are saying, oh, this is not what we expect from characters.
• 9:48
  And you didn't have a way to be like, but this is my experience, right?
• 9:52
  Yes.
• 9:53
  And so that's what that critique brought home.
• 9:55
  I love how it's true.
• 9:57
  We do write from our own experience.
• 9:59
  You don't have to only write from your experience, but everything is colored with how you see the world.
• 10:04
  And so that makes a lot of sense.
• 10:06
  And I love that you were able to work through that and your writing was mirroring that, that journey that you're also going on.
• 10:14
  Yeah.
• 10:16
  I reached out to you first in late 2022.
• 10:19
  Yeah.
• 10:20
  We had the working together.
• 10:22
  I looked it up October, 2022.
• 10:24
  That's right.
• 10:25
  And there's lots of reasons for that and we're gonna get into that as well.
• 10:29
  But yes, by then you knew that this novel that you had started as a nano rmo draft with Brenda going to a different world, she, Brenda was neuro divergent, and you were going to document that experience of her going to another world and finding that her person there or her equivalent in that other space was not right.
• 10:54
  Yeah.
• 10:54
  That was the germ of what you were gonna accomplish.
• 10:57
  Yeah.
• 10:58
  Yeah.
• 10:58
  And she was like, I was, for most of my life, not diagnosed, not even aware that she was.
• 11:06
  And so by being presented with an alternate version of herself who was none of the things that she was, but it really forced her to do that self-examination and self-discovery and realize that yes, she is, and.
• 11:24
  It's, I won't say it's a superpower'cause that's, it is one of the sort of miscon, but basically she's a perfectly valid person and of herself and the way she thinks is just different.
• 11:38
  Not less than not.
• 11:41
  It's just different.
• 11:43
  Yes.
• 11:43
  And so this was an amazing project.
• 11:46
  I was really blessed to be a part of it because there were some things technically.
• 11:51
  That we had to figure out, right?
• 11:53
  Mm-hmm.
• 11:53
  Because you had this construct where Brenda lived in her head a lot, and so what did that look like and what physically, and I could, you guys can't see Melanie.
• 12:02
  I wish you could see her smiling because she's all that, that was really hard.
• 12:06
  We had to play with something.
• 12:07
  There's not a lot of.
• 12:08
  Rules.
• 12:09
  People come to an editor or a book coach, they expect us to be like, oh, if you have a neurodivergent character who's also trapped in the mind of a non neurodivergent character, we could punctuate it like that.
• 12:19
  Like we had to play with it and see how it felt and see what it looked like and it.
• 12:25
  It took a minute to figure out this amazing construct.
• 12:28
  It's a science fiction book by the way, but it's based on a lot of reality and it's, it was really a neat challenge.
• 12:36
  And once you got that construct, then you just ran with it, right?
• 12:40
  Yeah.
• 12:40
  Once you figured out how to document that on the page, then it was like it all fell into place.
• 12:46
  Yeah.
• 12:47
  And one of the other things, because we're on the show Don't Tell podcast.
• 12:51
  Yes, yes, please.
• 12:52
  Is that I. In my previous craft learnings, I think I had taken, should dont tell quite literally in that I could never tell anything.
• 13:07
  And so I tried to show everything.
• 13:10
  And the way that knew how to do that was by visceral re reactions.
• 13:17
  Yes.
• 13:17
  Uh, and I didn't know how to do interiority.
• 13:22
  And I was missing the fact that interiority and the physical reactions and dialogue and whatever's happening in the setting, it all ties together.
• 13:33
  And then it's not really Never tell it is.
• 13:37
  No, not at all.
• 13:38
  No.
• 13:38
  When to tell and how to tell and what we started to work on.
• 13:44
  Yeah.
• 13:44
  Because I think it, it is true.
• 13:46
  It's the reason I have this podcast.
• 13:48
  It's the reason I could talk about show on tell all day.
• 13:50
  Is because it is really misunderstood, and I think especially for beginner writers, and you're not a beginner writer, but when you were a beginner writer, I'm sure this was hammered home into your brain show.
• 14:02
  Don't tell.
• 14:03
  And that's because our natural instinct is to tell or to just summarize things, and it is a little bit more difficult to get into those other things.
• 14:13
  When a writer gets to the point where I'm like, okay, you can actually tell this.
• 14:17
  You're showing too much.
• 14:18
  And that we did get to that point, right.
• 14:20
  Where we're like, okay, there's a balance and that's amazing.
• 14:23
  And then the writers are like, what?
• 14:24
  But it's because you often hear it's out of balance.
• 14:28
  That what you were just talking about, that interiority or that reaction and that inner thoughts and the dialogue and the all the five elements need to be balanced on the page for it to feel approachable and accessible to the reader and for it to feel three dimensional.
• 14:42
  And if you're leaning on any one of those.
• 14:45
  Too long, or if you describe a really boring situation for too long, I always love it when writers come to me with a scene where they wanna show that their character is really bored.
• 14:57
  I should, they write this three pages and let me tell you, they, they succeed.
• 15:02
  They let me feel that boredom, but that's not where you wanna necessarily be.
• 15:06
  So you gotta pick and choose where you skip ahead or summarize and where you show it.
• 15:10
  And you were able to find that balance.
• 15:12
  It was more difficult because of the construct, because you did, you had.
• 15:16
  Characters that were living inside the same brain and you had it for a full of different characters that were trying to battle that out as they shifted through different realities in different worlds.
• 15:26
  And it was really cool challenge, I think it turned out amazing, but it wasn't your typical, it wasn't standard.
• 15:33
  So I loved it.
• 15:35
  I loved it.
• 15:36
  Okay, so thank you for so much for trusting me with this deep work and this book.
• 15:40
  It was amazing.
• 15:42
  So October, 2022 was when we started working together, and this book has taken you on a journey and it's been a little over two years, but there were lots of reasons for that, right?
• 15:54
  Life happens and we can get into that or not, but it's okay.
• 15:59
  Like a book takes as long as it.
• 16:03
  Thanks.
• 16:04
  And you even launched another book in there.
• 16:06
  Can you tell us about the book that you launched while you were also writing this other book?
• 16:10
  Yeah, I did mention it before because in 2021 when I was sorting out my, my diagnosis and everything, I also was like, I really wanted to.
• 16:22
  Get something out in the world, and I had been publishing poetry in little anthologies and things like that since the mid nineties, and so I wanted to get that and in the world as well, I reached out to a friend of mine, Kim Bonner, she's actually, she's the former poet laureate of Sudbury, and she was the.
• 16:49
  Vice president of the Raiders Union of Canada, and now she's moving into the President's role.
• 16:54
  So she's, she's in there.
• 16:55
  She knows.
• 16:56
  Amazing.
• 16:56
  That's gonna be so amazing.
• 16:58
  Yeah.
• 16:59
  And so she looked at what I had collected and made some suggestions, editing and placement and that kind of thing.
• 17:08
  And I submitted it to a couple of different places, which has, again, un unfortunately folded.
• 17:15
  Or how are they back?
• 17:16
  I can't even remember.
• 17:18
  That's been such a tough year for Canadian, for publishers in general, but Canadian publishers.
• 17:22
  Yeah.
• 17:23
  Tough couple of years, I should say.
• 17:25
  Yeah.
• 17:25
  Yeah.
• 17:26
  And then to a local publisher, latitude 46.
• 17:31
  And I'd heard in actually the spring of 2022 that they were interested, so it was a long sort of progress.
• 17:40
  But this is one of the lessons of publishing is that.
• 17:43
  It is a long, it is.
• 17:46
  It takes a long time.
• 17:47
  And despite the fact that we started working on this book in 2022, you kept coming back to it.
• 17:53
  Right.
• 17:54
  And I love, I was never in any doubt that you were gonna finish it because you were really clear and updating me on what was happening and why it was happening.
• 18:03
  And okay, I gotta go launch this other book and then I'm coming back to it.
• 18:07
  So yeah, when Latitude accepted, they signed me in 2022 for a launch in 2024.
• 18:15
  And so in between I was, I got a I love you photo shoot.
• 18:19
  I got all sorts of, like I got, I worked with an editor to the lovely tennis McDonald's GU professor at Wilford Law University.
• 18:28
  That's amazing.
• 18:29
  She was awesome.
• 18:30
  We worked together on that and choosing the cover, which was actually done by my second cousin.
• 18:36
  I was a local textile artist and she does very group of 70 work I'll say, because she does go out hiking, canoe camping, and she gets a lot of inspiration from the landscape.
• 18:50
  So it was very Northern Ontario, very new, and so we got all that together.
• 18:55
  Launch was last April 6th, so we're just past the anniversary date, the launch of the Art of floating.
• 19:01
  And I've been, for the last year, I've been doing all sorts of things, like going to Woodstock here in Sudbury.
• 19:09
  I went to a conspiracy tree reading in Marks Bay and it was summer, did a local book, fair summer.
• 19:17
  I am trying to get out, but it's really hard with a debut, particularly debut poetry to get a lot of of traction because even if your publisher and my publisher did.
• 19:29
  Send out my name to all of the literary festivals and even if you have a PR company, as my publisher did and you know, was promoting the work, yeah, it's tough.
• 19:40
  You can't get invited unless the venue thinks that you're worthwhile.
• 19:46
  And with debut it's very difficult to get that traction.
• 19:50
  So that was another line.
• 19:52
  Moving back to reality bomb then.
• 19:56
  Yeah, so it's been a really weird.
• 19:59
  Jury because after we had our first, and I think it was just like your introductory package that we, yeah.
• 20:05
  Well, we mapped it out and we made some decisions about, or you made the decisions and they looked at the whole project.
• 20:12
  We figured out what the plan was.
• 20:14
  Yeah.
• 20:14
  And my first draft of the inside outline and all that wonder stuff, and then there was issues with my employments.
• 20:23
  I didn't have the salary that I had before.
• 20:28
  I didn't have the disposable income that I had before, so I had to claw, and that spring of 2023, my husband broke his shoulder and I was in caregiver mode for the period of his recovery and working full time and taking care of him and doing all the grocery shopping and all the housework and all that kinda stuff.
• 20:51
  I did not have the spoons left over to, to do anything else, unfortunately.
• 20:56
  Absolutely.
• 20:58
  You also found I takes a lot of time and also energy and resources to, to get this sort of collaborative coaching as well about such creative ways to keep going on that even when you know, you were at the end of what your resources were and then you found.
• 21:18
  Grants and you found other subsidies and ways to actually get, keep going and get more coaching and get more programs.
• 21:26
  And can you talk a little bit about that?
• 21:28
  'cause I just love that, that you weren't ready to let it go.
• 21:31
  Mm-hmm.
• 21:31
  And there are actually many creative ways that you can get your creative supports funded.
• 21:39
  I did find the time to submit some grant applications.
• 21:46
  Including to the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association were their first professional development grants.
• 21:57
  And I was successful.
• 21:58
  I had I, when I, once I got the news about that and I got that grant, I got in touch with you and said, Hey, let's do it.
• 22:07
  Let's continue on.
• 22:09
  Yeah.
• 22:10
  And so that was good.
• 22:11
  And we were moving through that.
• 22:15
  Then last year we had another significant pause because both my husband and I have mothers who are in their eighties.
• 22:25
  And unfortunately we are, fortunately for them, unfortunately for us, I go, but we're moving into caregiver zone.
• 22:32
  Yeah.
• 22:34
  And there were some health issues and some hospitalizations and so some things that we had to deal with.
• 22:41
  And so starting about, I. Last July, I took a brief hiatus there, got back to it as soon as issue was resolved.
• 22:52
  But then shortly on the tails of that, there was another one and then another one, and then another one.
• 23:01
  And I just, and you did keep me in the loop and I was just sending you like every bit of strength.
• 23:07
  'cause it was a hard year.
• 23:08
  It was a hard year.
• 23:09
  But you're an amazing.
• 23:12
  Daughter and daughter-in-law and did what you had to do, right?
• 23:14
  Yeah.
• 23:15
  Yeah.
• 23:15
  So we took care of what we needed to take care of, and then Christmas came and things seemed to be resolved to the point where I was confident in finishing this thing.
• 23:28
  And so we still had a couple of sessions left.
• 23:32
  Yeah.
• 23:32
  And we finished the thing.
• 23:34
  Heard it.
• 23:35
  Yeah, I, I was just so happy.
• 23:38
  It was like Snoopy happy dancing, and it was amazing to have that project come back into my life at that time as well.
• 23:46
  Just, it was like a missing child or a missing friend that had come back and we got to see it through to the end.
• 23:53
  And I just love Melanie throughout all of that.
• 23:56
  I just wanna say that I love that you.
• 23:58
  Still put, you couldn't always put yourself first, and that's sometimes life, right?
• 24:03
  You only have so many spoons, but you still had your creativity and yourself in mind, and you were making those choices.
• 24:11
  I'm just wondering, like I think sometimes we think that we should be able to do everything through in a straight line, and that's the most efficient path, but I think that even having that time and space and the time away from it, you came at it with.
• 24:25
  Different renewed energy, and so putting a project away for a few months is the best thing for it.
• 24:31
  Mm-hmm.
• 24:31
  Do you think that this book would be different if you'd have been able to drop everything, your job and everything and just focus on it and get it done in six months?
• 24:41
  The project would different.
• 24:41
  It may have been different, but it would not have been the book that it is.
• 24:45
  Yeah, I agree.
• 24:46
  And I'm much happier with what we did together.
• 24:49
  Yeah.
• 24:49
  And everything that I learned, and actually I, I can't remember whether it was.
• 24:55
  I think it was spring of, or late winter 2023.
• 25:01
  You, when you did the month long revision mentorship, developmental editing, mentorship.
• 25:08
  Yeah, I, I did that in 2020.
• 25:11
  2020, yeah.
• 25:13
  February 20, yeah.
• 25:15
  February, 2024.
• 25:17
  That I did another one in September.
• 25:18
  But you were in the February group.
• 25:20
  Yeah.
• 25:21
  And, but that was.
• 25:23
  Because even while we've been working together for a while and I was learning, that's brought a lot of your lessons and methodology home, so it actually allowed me to be a little more interpretive with your comments.
• 25:38
  It was like I. He's asking this for a reason.
• 25:40
  What reason is it?
• 25:41
  And then I dig into the draft to figure out, okay, so what is it that I'm missing?
• 25:46
  Yeah.
• 25:47
  And we talk about this too, sometimes as a coach and an editor, I have to be a bit brave and be like, because, and, and I used to be looked two or three times before I throw up my hands and say, it's not on the page.
• 25:59
  But yeah, sometimes it's helpful because it's obvious too, and every writer does this.
• 26:04
  We think it's there, but yours was such a complex subject.
• 26:08
  Sometimes it wasn't even obvious which character was there because they're living in the same brain and yeah.
• 26:14
  So sometimes I had to ask, and I love that we were able to get to that point where you're like, okay, if Susie doesn't understand it, something's missing.
• 26:22
  What's missing?
• 26:23
  How do, like, how do I fix it?
• 26:25
  We work through a few of those together, so that was a lot of fun.
• 26:28
  Awesome.
• 26:29
  Also, getting a lot more comfortable with saying, okay, so is this something that I really wanna spend time and energy fixing, or do I just cut it?
• 26:38
  Yeah.
• 26:39
  Do I just cut it?
• 26:40
  Exactly.
• 26:40
  Do I just be ruthless?
• 26:42
  That's a hard lesson, right?
• 26:44
  And the up thing is, especially when I am working with writers, I will comment on a lot of things.
• 26:49
  But at the end of the day, it's your book.
• 26:52
  And again, there's only so many things that you can fix.
• 26:56
  And if you get 10 comments and you fix three of them, the writing's still better.
• 27:02
  So it's not like one of those things where it has to be absolutely everything.
• 27:05
  I will give you every bit of critique, and most of my writers don't want me to hold back or send that and just say, oh, gimme the top things.
• 27:14
  No, give it all right.
• 27:15
  It is most of the people who wanna work with me.
• 27:17
  But again, you can't fix everything.
• 27:19
  It's not about achieving perfection at the end of the day.
• 27:23
  It's about, we spent a lot of time on this throughout the project.
• 27:27
  What is it that you want to convey, which was really clear right from the get go, at least once I was involved.
• 27:33
  And is it working right?
• 27:35
  Is the reader gonna get it?
• 27:37
  And so I think one of the biggest things that you expressed was, I want to share just what you talked about at the beginning of this interview, what it feels in, what my experience is and how that, how my brain works, right?
• 27:50
  And how that all works.
• 27:51
  And my character's gonna be.
• 27:53
  Bit of that.
• 27:54
  Obviously it's not you, but it's somebody else that's having a similar experience.
• 27:58
  And so that was really fun to bring to life.
• 28:00
  And at the end of the day, to be able to reflect back and be like, Hey, this is what I'm getting out of this.
• 28:06
  Is this what you wanted?
• 28:07
  Right.
• 28:08
  And that's the end of the day.
• 28:09
  That's what matters.
• 28:11
  Yeah.
• 28:11
  So was there anything that you learned during this coaching project, during writing this novel?
• 28:17
  From everything.
• 28:19
  That was new or different from the writing that you've done before?
• 28:23
  We talked a little bit about the not be so literal about show don't tell.
• 28:26
  Was there anything else?
• 28:29
  It was really learning that balance of not just focusing on literally, which is an autistic thing, literally show and never doubt to learning how to balance the elements of story.
• 28:44
  So you have interiority and.
• 28:47
  I'm a, I'm like a, a craft writing craft junkie, and I have Love that about you, by the way.
• 28:55
  We love it.
• 28:55
  It's so fun.
• 28:56
  I'm like a, because it is one of my special interests and I have been signing up for some of CC Lyra's webinars and the most recent one was starting it, and I've also done her interiority course because I wanted to learn how to do it.
• 29:13
  Yeah.
• 29:14
  And so she's, that, that sort of taught me a lot about what interiority even gives, right?
• 29:22
  And that even though it is telling it is, it is coming from the character.
• 29:29
  So it's through that filter and you can do so much when you actually express things through that character's mindset to to give context without actually just.
• 29:43
  Clean out telling, you know?
• 29:46
  Absolutely.
• 29:47
  And you don't have to do the info dumps, you don't have to do the plot splaining or you don't have to, you don't have to spend a lot of words to actually make a big difference.
• 29:59
  And so that was one of the things that I really, it was that balance.
• 30:02
  It was the interiority plus a little bit of like physicality and setting and the visceral reactions and the dial alarm to try and get.
• 30:13
  So what is the most effective mode for conveying X?
• 30:18
  Yeah, and I love that you learn so much and that you're always consuming because there are a thousand different ways to convey writing rules.
• 30:28
  And at the end of the day, just like there are a thousand different ways that our brains work and interpreting those, and some things land and some things don't.
• 30:37
  You'll find that.
• 30:38
  Most people who talk about writing are probably trying to teach the same thing.
• 30:43
  At the end of the day, we wanna light up reader's brains, and there are some scientific ways that happens and something that I say might resonate something that someone else says might resonate.
• 30:52
  And I love that we could always have those back and forth discussions and you would bring up some other methodology and be like, oh yeah, that's the same thing, right?
• 31:01
  This is all the same thing, and we're just all trying to find different ways to get writers to figure that.
• 31:07
  Oh, it's a puzzle.
• 31:08
  It's so challenging.
• 31:10
  Writing is such a challenging, challenging pastime, really.
• 31:14
  Yeah.
• 31:14
  Your job.
• 31:15
  Okay.
• 31:16
  Amazing.
• 31:16
  Melanie, what is next for your poetry book and for reality bomb?
• 31:22
  What are we watching for next from you?
• 31:23
  What?
• 31:24
  What does this next iteration or year look like?
• 31:28
  New things?
• 31:29
  Yeah.
• 31:29
  We're just going to just.
• 31:31
  Branches of the Greater Sudbury Public Library and done readings.
• 31:35
  So we just did one last, last Saturday on the 12th and we had several members of the Sudbury Writers Guild come out, which people who knew both of us and also a couple of my former high school teachers came out and that was just lovely to see them again.
• 31:54
  That's terrific.
• 31:55
  I love that.
• 31:56
  Yeah.
• 31:56
  And so I'm gonna do a another reading at the Copper Cliff Branch.
• 31:59
  Spring time for Mother's Day.
• 32:01
  So I'm doing stuff.
• 32:02
  I'm just, I'm not, I'm doing what I can within the bounds that I absolutely, and Melanie, I'm never one to be saying do more.
• 32:12
  That is not, that's not the message.
• 32:14
  In fact, pick one thing is always the message, right?
• 32:17
  One thing that you enjoy doing and show up and doing it, do it regularly.
• 32:21
  So if that's in-person events.
• 32:23
  Then that's in person events that you enjoy.
• 32:26
  They're a little bit more difficult, but if that's something that is your strategy, then keep going.
• 32:31
  They will come back.
• 32:32
  I think we're due for the next iteration of what these festivals and funding looks like.
• 32:38
  I think through the pandemic, some things limped through and lost some funding and lost some steam, and I'm seeing newer things coming.
• 32:46
  So I think it's just gonna be that turnover and that new.
• 32:51
  Resurgence because people still wanna talk about this.
• 32:55
  People still wanna get together and people still love literature and books.
• 32:59
  Okay, so reality bomb, you're, yeah, you're, you're done the draft or done the Polish draft and now trying to find a home.
• 33:10
  Yes.
• 33:10
  So that's what I was working on.
• 33:12
  Next I got a synopsis and a query sketched in, but I really need to go back.
• 33:19
  I. At least one more time and just go through and because I have to cut and I'm going to use those tools.
• 33:27
  So I constructed the synopsis using the inside outline.
• 33:31
  Perfect.
• 33:32
  And you may find this in interesting inside when I was assembling all these bits and pieces from the inside outline because it changed so much over the course of our work together.
• 33:42
  It just doesn't make sense.
• 33:43
  So I was like, okay, so this is why Susie had out of the questions, because I lefted it out of the inside the line.
• 33:52
  So I had to rewrite things just to get the synopsis together, and I'm gonna, it's really gonna be an a good guy because it's, yeah, this is gonna be a boring part.
• 34:02
  I can tell just from trying to do the synopsis, so I'm going You could see it, right?
• 34:07
  Yeah, exactly.
• 34:07
  You could see it.
• 34:08
  And that's why I love the inside outline that Melanie's talking about is the primary tool that I use for outlining with writers.
• 34:15
  It's by Jenny Nash of Author Accelerator and basically it's a three page summary of your entire book and it's got its own particulars about it.
• 34:23
  But I love it because it ends up being a living document.
• 34:26
  And because I can see, just like Melanie's saying, when she went back to it, she's, oh, wait a minute.
• 34:31
  You can see in those three pages you can auto, you can immediately see where there's gonna be a slow part.
• 34:37
  There's gonna be a problem where it's missing causation between the scenes where one scene isn't driving to another.
• 34:42
  So it's actually a brilliant tool.
• 34:43
  I'm so happy that you're still using that and that we worked on in October of 2022.
• 34:49
  It does.
• 34:49
  It changes.
• 34:50
  It doesn't mean outlining a book doesn't mean that you have to keep it exactly the same.
• 34:55
  And as we talked about a lot of things that Melanie worked on through this and wanting to incorporate her own experience, but it's also this science fictional world that isn't anything like her life.
• 35:07
  So there's these two really cool things that she's trying to incorporate.
• 35:10
  And yeah, the events in it changed as we went, but it's easier to update a three page document and yours was longer by the end, but it was easier to update that sort of succinct document than to take a story grid, for example, which is a really complex method, and to try to use it again, it's just too overwhelming.
• 35:30
  Okay, awesome.
• 35:31
  Where can readers find your.
• 35:34
  Presence on the interweb, your current publications, and follow you on your journey.
• 35:39
  Melanie, where should we send them?
• 35:41
  Hey, my home base is my website, which is melanie marlow.ca, and all you have to remember is that there are two Ts and one L in my name and you will find awesome.
• 35:54
  We'll drop the, we'll drop the link in the show notes so they won't be, I have the same problem where nobody can spell my name.
• 35:59
  Okay.
• 36:00
  Amazing.
• 36:00
  Thank you so much for coming on the show today, and we'll have you on again soon When Reality Bomb Finds a Home.
• 36:07
  Yes.
• 36:07
  Yes, I'd love to.
• 36:09
  Bye bye.
• 36:19
  Thanks for tuning in to show.
• 36:20
  No.
• 36:20
  Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori.
• 36:22
  I'll me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing or planning to write.
• 36:27
  Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening.
• 36:34
  Also visit susie Vadori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you'll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community.
• 36:49
  If you're feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page.
• 36:52
  If you're writing that isn't quite where you want it to be, yet for our show to tell page review.
• 36:57
  Episodes.
• 36:58
  Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven't even thought of yet, and I can't wait to help Make it the absolute best.
• 37:09
  You're feeling called to write that book.
• 37:11
  Keep going and I'm gonna be right here cheering you on.
• 37:14
  See you again next week.