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127 - Using magic as a metaphor for mental health with Ruth McKell · Story Magic

• 2:27
  Ruth McKell: Hey, writers.
• 2:28
  Rachel: Welcome back to Story Magic, the podcast that will help you write a book you're damn proud of.
• 2:32
  Emily: I'm Emily.
• 2:33
  Rachel: And I'm Rachel.
• 2:34
  Emily: And today we are talking about using magic as a metaphor for mental health with special guest Ruth McKell.
• 2:41
  Emily: Hi, Mikel.
• 2:42
  Ruth McKell: Hi.
• 2:42
  Emily: Hi. Welcome.
• 2:43
  Emily: We're so excited to have you.
• 2:46
  Ruth McKell: I'm so excited to be here.
• 2:48
  Emily: Yeah, it's going to be.
• 2:49
  Emily: I'm really excited to talk about this because I know that you do this in all of your books, or most of them, at least, that I've read.
• 2:56
  Emily: And so I'm really excited to talk about how you do this and why you do this and all that.
• 3:00
  Emily: But first and foremost, for folks who don't know who Mikhail is, Ruth McKell is the author of the upcoming fantasy romance.
• 3:06
  Emily: Do you call it a fantasy romance?
• 3:08
  Ruth McKell: That's what I. It kind of sits on like a genre of Crossroads, so I've heard it described as a Romanasy or contemporary fantasy.
• 3:16
  Emily: Yeah, yeah, it's wonderful.
• 3:19
  Emily: It's the perfect kind of genre blend that I love.
• 3:21
  Emily: And it's called Honey in Her Veins, which comes out on April 7th.
• 3:24
  Emily: So if you're listening to this episode in the future, it's already been out for two days, which is amazing.
• 3:30
  Emily: Go buy it.
• 3:32
  Emily: And Mikael is also a member of our tenacious writing community, so she's a great friend of ours.
• 3:37
  Emily: Um, Mikel, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about Honey?
• 3:41
  Ruth McKell: Yeah, absolutely.
• 3:43
  Ruth McKell: Um, I started writing.
• 3:46
  Ruth McKell: Well, okay, I'll tell you about me.
• 3:48
  Ruth McKell: I guess I instantly go blank.
• 3:54
  Ruth McKell: Who am I?
• 3:56
  Ruth McKell: Um, so I'm living in Utah right now with my husband and son and very much grew up in the mountains kind of person.
• 4:04
  Ruth McKell: We've moved around quite a bit.
• 4:05
  Ruth McKell: And it was during one of these moves that I realized that I really missed reading.
• 4:11
  Ruth McKell: You know, like, when you hit that point when you're like, I've been to college, I have kids.
• 4:17
  Ruth McKell: Covid has now struck, and I don't know what I'm doing anymore.
• 4:22
  Ruth McKell: I remember hitting that point and just really missing reading.
• 4:28
  Ruth McKell: And about a month after picking up fiction again, after being burned out of a lot of nonfiction with my degree, I started really missing writing.
• 4:36
  Ruth McKell: And I came back to it in 2021, and that was the summer that I wrote the first seed of what was going to be Honey in Her Veins, though it looks absolutely nothing like it did.
• 4:48
  Ruth McKell: Like, not genre wise characters have the same names and the same personalities, and that is the only similarity.
• 4:54
  Ruth McKell: Everything else possible that could change about that story and the structure of it changed, but I.
• 5:04
  Ruth McKell: It also changed how I was writing as a writer, and it kind of taught me how to write again and led into a lot of what we wanted to talk today about the mental health.
• 5:13
  Ruth McKell: And so, yeah, I got lost a little bit there in the descriptions.
• 5:18
  Ruth McKell: But honey itself, as the book, it's a contemporary fantasy.
• 5:21
  Ruth McKell: It's a cottagecore fantasy about a magical beekeeper with volatile magic and the death touch man who broke her heart coming back together on a mythical quest to find the healing honey needed to save her father in the foothills of Southern Pennsylvania.
• 5:38
  Ruth McKell: And it is very yearney, very.
• 5:41
  Ruth McKell: A little sad, a little, very sexy and very fun.
• 5:45
  Ruth McKell: And it's.
• 5:47
  Ruth McKell: It's been the book of my heart for a lot of years, and I can't believe that I actually get to share it in like two seconds.
• 5:55
  Emily: Two seconds.
• 5:56
  Emily: It's so soon.
• 5:59
  Ruth McKell: Yeah.
• 5:59
  Emily: I love Honey.
• 6:00
  Emily: It hits all the right boxes for me in terms of, like, a unique fantasy with like, this immersive world.
• 6:06
  Emily: But I think the thing that I love the most about it is the way that you raise awareness for it and sort of talk about in, you know, theoretical ways, metaphorical ways, mental health issues and mental health awareness in this story and in your.
• 6:23
  Emily: So I, you know, I did a little research on you to like, figure out what your actual bio was, you know, because I'm like, you're my friend.
• 6:30
  Emily: I'm just gonna come on here, be like, Mikael, it's Miguel.
• 6:32
  Emily: But in your bio, I thought it was really interesting how you said your.
• 6:36
  Emily: Your bio says that you're passionate about channeling your passion for mental health awareness into magic touched worlds on the page.
• 6:44
  Emily: And I didn't realize that that was something that was like, going to be core to sort of your brand and your storytelling.
• 6:49
  Emily: Like, I knew it was very important to you for this specific book, but
• 6:53
  Ruth McKell: then I got to read a little
• 6:55
  Emily: bit of your next book and realize that it touches on mental health issues too.
• 7:00
  Emily: Different ones.
• 7:01
  Emily: And so, you know, seeing that in your bio, I'm just so curious.
• 7:04
  Emily: Can you tell us, like, why this is so important to you, why you think fiction is a place where we can explore these things in a magical way?
• 7:10
  Emily: Like.
• 7:11
  Emily: Like, why this?
• 7:11
  Emily: Why this as a focus for the stories that you're telling?
• 7:14
  Ruth McKell: Yeah. I feel like I can come by this from two directions.
• 7:17
  Ruth McKell: I could start with kind of my personal experience with Honey because it kind of snuck up on me or kind of what it's become since then.
• 7:26
  Ruth McKell: Do you have a preference?
• 7:28
  Emily: Do. Do it in order.
• 7:29
  Emily: Do the first and then the second.
• 7:31
  Ruth McKell: Okay, so like I was saying before, when I came to this story, I was kind of at a point in my life where I, I, I was missing writing, and I was picking it up again after years, and it was really bad.
• 7:42
  Ruth McKell: Like, I was so rusty and everything I wrote was trash and I loved it and it was so fun.
• 7:49
  Ruth McKell: But also it was, it was like, okay, I want to write again.
• 7:54
  Ruth McKell: I don't know what I want to write.
• 7:56
  Ruth McKell: And I was trying to write to the market, which, you know, is pretty soul sucking.
• 8:00
  Ruth McKell: And I was lost.
• 8:03
  Ruth McKell: I couldn't stick with any idea.
• 8:04
  Ruth McKell: I didn't love anything.
• 8:05
  Ruth McKell: I knew I wanted to be doing this.
• 8:07
  Ruth McKell: And I was personally going through a really rough patch for a lot of reasons.
• 8:12
  Ruth McKell: I was passing through, like, both some physical health, some mental health things.
• 8:18
  Ruth McKell: I was in a very, like, more geographically isolated place from, like, family and friends than I'd been before.
• 8:24
  Ruth McKell: And I was a young mom.
• 8:26
  Ruth McKell: Post Covid, was not yet diagnosed with OCD or anxiety, had not yet gone back to therapy.
• 8:33
  Ruth McKell: And there was a lot that was bubbling up inside me, and I began to really feel like my own mind and my own brain were my enemy.
• 8:44
  Ruth McKell: And they felt like this monster in my head that made everything very heavy and made everything very hard.
• 8:52
  Ruth McKell: And I felt like something was wrong with me.
• 8:55
  Ruth McKell: And I remember, and I'd been resisting therapy for a long time.
• 9:00
  Ruth McKell: Like, I knew, but I, I didn't want to, and I didn't.
• 9:03
  Ruth McKell: It felt like saying, something is wrong.
• 9:05
  Ruth McKell: If I have to go, then something is wrong.
• 9:07
  Ruth McKell: And I remember one day when I was.
• 9:11
  Ruth McKell: I was starting to experience panic attacks.
• 9:16
  Ruth McKell: And I remember one day sitting down kind of as one was building and bubbling, and I just started writing what was going on in my head and started writing.
• 9:25
  Ruth McKell: Instead of writing like the story that I'd been working on, I just started writing.
• 9:28
  Ruth McKell: And what I wrote down actually is a line that is still in the book where I wrote down, I feel like something's wrong with me, but I don't know how to fix it.
• 9:34
  Ruth McKell: I don't even know how to start.
• 9:36
  Ruth McKell: And something shifted in my brain where I realized I'm like, I. I need to write about a character who feels like their own mind is working against them.
• 9:47
  Ruth McKell: And even though honey, like the plot wise has changed so much since that moment, that was the moment that something like, shifted in my brain that I didn't want to just be seeking out.
• 10:00
  Ruth McKell: Like, what are some fun.
• 10:01
  Ruth McKell: I love writing fun tropes.
• 10:02
  Ruth McKell: They're awesome.
• 10:03
  Ruth McKell: But I wanted to be using writing as a tool for my own healing.
• 10:10
  Ruth McKell: And I, I, and I didn't even necessarily have the words for that at the time, but I just realized, like, whatever just happened, I need to do it again, and I want to do it again.
• 10:21
  Ruth McKell: And it took me down a path of following this story about a man who has a literal monster.
• 10:26
  Ruth McKell: I call him his depression monster.
• 10:28
  Ruth McKell: Literal monster in his brain that is speaking to him, that is seeming, who points his.
• 10:35
  Ruth McKell: The monster's moral compass is completely centered around what it thinks is good for Arthur, not which Arthur acknowledges in the story.
• 10:43
  Ruth McKell: He's like, that's a terrible moral compass, your moral compass.
• 10:49
  Ruth McKell: But it was really interesting because that was in 2021, it's 2026.
• 10:56
  Ruth McKell: And in the first few iterations, once the monster came to be, which took a bit of time in the story for it to manifest in that strong of a way, but once the monst to be, the story ended in a very different way than it did now because I, I remember being like, well, yes, we have to vanquish this horrible thing.
• 11:15
  Ruth McKell: And at the same time that I was starting to realize that all these things that were happening in my brain were not a reflection of something bad.
• 11:24
  Ruth McKell: They were a reflection of something in me trying to protect myself that I wasn't aware of or educated on or, or compassionate towards either.
• 11:36
  Ruth McKell: You know, I was very unkind to my own brain, and it was, it was unkind back to me.
• 11:41
  Ruth McKell: And as I healed, I realized I wanted to do something different with the story.
• 11:47
  Ruth McKell: And I say healed, but I think we're always in a constant state of healing.
• 11:51
  Ruth McKell: You know, we go back to these touch point points of pain, but with bigger tools that help us, you know, return to the person that we're trying to be.
• 12:00
  Ruth McKell: But as I, I was changing and gaining those tools, I realized that the story needed to change and that vanquishing the monster in the end was a more on the surface type of story that actually I, I didn't think was going to serve this concept of self love and self acceptance and coming to a place of befriending those darker parts of you that you wish were not a part of you at all, but they are.
• 12:25
  Ruth McKell: And there's something that you're not gonna vanquish.
• 12:26
  Ruth McKell: You're not gonna, you're not gonna take an anxiety pill and then everything's just gone.
• 12:31
  Ruth McKell: They might help, but you're not gonna like, take a yoga class, you're not gonna take therapy and everything be gone.
• 12:36
  Ruth McKell: But it will be better.
• 12:37
  Ruth McKell: Like, it will help, but you have to Befriend that part of you that you wish you could just get rid of.
• 12:43
  Ruth McKell: And that shifted.
• 12:45
  Ruth McKell: Specifically, I realized this is a different kind of book than what I thought.
• 12:49
  Ruth McKell: I wanted to write that.
• 12:50
  Ruth McKell: I wanted to write a story that, at its core, it has a big romance, it has magic, it has all these things.
• 12:55
  Ruth McKell: But at its core of the story is Arthur and his monster and their relationship.
• 13:02
  Rachel: I love that.
• 13:05
  Rachel: This is, like, a poor comparison, but have you ever seen the horror movie the Babadook?
• 13:10
  Ruth McKell: No, I haven't, actually.
• 13:11
  Ruth McKell: Okay.
• 13:12
  Rachel: It's very scary.
• 13:13
  Rachel: I don't like horror movies.
• 13:14
  Rachel: I'm not like, a scare.
• 13:15
  Rachel: I don't want to be scared.
• 13:17
  Rachel: But I watched this movie, and I'm going to spoil it now because it's important.
• 13:23
  Rachel: Sorry, but.
• 13:24
  Rachel: But if you've never seen the Babadook, like, this monster is terrify, and it's.
• 13:29
  Rachel: It, you know, it's a creature, and at the end of the movie, they don't kill it.
• 13:35
  Rachel: They, like, chain it up in the basement, and then they end up, like, feeding it and kind of taking care of it.
• 13:41
  Rachel: And it.
• 13:42
  Rachel: And, like, this movie is terrifying, and it centers around, like, a mother and a son, and the Babadook haunts the son, and they don't get rid of it, and they, like, keep it.
• 13:53
  Rachel: And.
• 13:53
  Rachel: And, like, I have never forgotten about this movie, and I've never forgotten about, like, how terrifying it was, but it's a very similar metaphor of, like, you don't vanquish these things and, like, approaching.
• 14:06
  Rachel: Approaching a mental health struggle, as if you're broken and you need to be fixed and it needs to be eliminated so that you can move on and finally be happy.
• 14:15
  Rachel: Like, never ends up making your life better.
• 14:18
  Rachel: It doesn't.
• 14:19
  Rachel: So you have to learn how to manage it and move through it and continue life with it.
• 14:27
  Rachel: And I really appreciated that about the Babadook movie, which I can't believe.
• 14:33
  Rachel: I'm talking about the Babadook now on the podcast, and I know it's a slight comparison to Honey, but I just think that that's, as you've said, is part of the healing journey.
• 14:50
  Rachel: And once I think you get to a place where you can accept that part of you and, like, love that part of you and be kind to that part of you, that's when the real healing comes.
• 15:00
  Rachel: And that's similar to why we don't say that you can get rid of perfectionism and why we don't say that your inner critic voices are something you get over and you move on from, like, you don't you just learn how to love those parts of you and then they're not as loud, and suddenly it's easier to live with them?
• 15:21
  Ruth McKell: Yeah, absolutely.
• 15:22
  Emily: Yeah.
• 15:23
  Rachel: I love that.
• 15:24
  Emily: The thing that struck me because, you know, when I was thinking about this episode and thinking about what we would talk about, I was thinking a lot about, you know, the importance of seeing, like, the awareness part of it.
• 15:35
  Emily: Right?
• 15:36
  Emily: The, like, seeing these things depicted in fiction in a way that, you know, you can process yourself in as a reader, all of that.
• 15:44
  Emily: But I feel like there's something really powerful in what you're saying or the story that you've told about how writing Arthur's story, like, helped you.
• 15:54
  Emily: It was, like, part of your healing process.
• 15:55
  Emily: Obviously, fiction, you know, writing a novel is not gonna heal you the way that, like, we need therapy.
• 16:01
  Emily: We need all the other things, but it's so powerful.
• 16:04
  Ruth McKell: Yeah, like, therapy is therapy, but writing is a big secondary arm.
• 16:09
  Ruth McKell: At least it is for me.
• 16:11
  Emily: Yeah. And I think that that is something, you know, we talk a lot about how.
• 16:16
  Emily: Yes, we write to be published.
• 16:17
  Emily: Right.
• 16:18
  Emily: Because we want people to read our stories, whatever that path looks like most of us, you know, there are some people who don't, but I do think there's.
• 16:24
  Emily: There's that important piece of, like, we put ourselves into our stories, and to lean into that, to, like, look at that, to not sort of ignore that can be a very powerful healing, you know, method.
• 16:37
  Emily: And so I'm curious, like, was there something.
• 16:40
  Emily: Because there's.
• 16:41
  Emily: There's a scenario, right, A situation in which somebody similar to you at that point in time could write a story about, you know, a contemporary story about somebody who's struggling with those similar types of mental health issues.
• 16:54
  Emily: But you chose to sort of, you know, this fantasy route of.
• 16:57
  Emily: Of building that mental health metaphor and that exploration into a magical part of this story.
• 17:05
  Emily: Can you talk about, like, I'm sure that wasn't, like, a. An intentional choice, you know, that you were like, I'm gonna make this magical for some specific reason, but do you think that there was a power in that?
• 17:15
  Emily: Like, can you tell us a little bit more about the.
• 17:17
  Emily: The process of deciding to do that?
• 17:17
  Emily: And I know for future stories, you're Some.
• 17:20
  Emily: You're planning to do similar things.
• 17:22
  Emily: And so can you kind of tell us about why that is helpful?
• 17:26
  Ruth McKell: Yes, I think the very first thing is we have this inner resistance to certain things in our brains, and it.
• 17:33
  Ruth McKell: It makes sense.
• 17:34
  Ruth McKell: Right.
• 17:34
  Ruth McKell: Like, we're hardwired to protect ourselves, to not go there, depending on how you're raised in different family cultures.
• 17:41
  Ruth McKell: Maybe you are or are not willing to look at certain emotions, such as shame or anger or sadness.
• 17:49
  Ruth McKell: Maybe you do or don't permit yourself to cry.
• 17:52
  Ruth McKell: Maybe you do or don't permit yourself to think about traumatic events or, you know, there's.
• 17:58
  Ruth McKell: We have all these walls in our brain, and I think we have walls we're aware of, and we have walls that we're not aware of.
• 18:04
  Ruth McKell: And similarly to, like, when you.
• 18:07
  Ruth McKell: I start a project, there are some projects that I'm like, oh, that's gonna be a grief.
• 18:11
  Ruth McKell: But they're all grief books for me.
• 18:12
  Ruth McKell: I don't know why I gravitate to it, but I do.
• 18:16
  Ruth McKell: But, like, I'll be like, oh, I know I'm gonna have to deal with this issue when I write this book.
• 18:20
  Ruth McKell: And that's.
• 18:20
  Ruth McKell: That's good.
• 18:21
  Ruth McKell: Like, I. I want to, you know, but there's always things that come up that I'm like, oh, I didn't know this was gonna poke the bear this way.
• 18:30
  Ruth McKell: Like, there's walls that break down when we have the safety of something fictional.
• 18:38
  Ruth McKell: And I think magic gives us another layer of fiction, because it's not just like, if you're writing about someone who has some similarities to you, but they live in, like, contemporary New York City or something like that.
• 18:48
  Ruth McKell: That's.
• 18:49
  Ruth McKell: For me, that's too close.
• 18:50
  Ruth McKell: I can move there.
• 18:51
  Ruth McKell: That could be.
• 18:52
  Ruth McKell: But when there's magic, it's this layer of safety, I feel, that allows our brains to explore and talk to ourselves in a way that we just won't talk to ourselves outside fiction.
• 19:04
  Ruth McKell: At least for me, that's really been the experience that, honestly, for someone who has a lot of words inside them, like hundreds and thousands of words across multiple books, I feel like I have a hard time with precision of language for myself, which is why it takes me a whole book to say what I'm saying.
• 19:20
  Emily: Yeah.
• 19:21
  Ruth McKell: And to be willing to say or acknowledge.
• 19:25
  Ruth McKell: And sometimes the feelings that I think we need to experience are more than just a sentence we need to say to a therapist.
• 19:32
  Ruth McKell: They're a feeling that you only get through a character arc.
• 19:36
  Ruth McKell: They're a feeling recognition of pain or desire or something that.
• 19:42
  Ruth McKell: That needs to be felt in your heart that you can only get through the experience of an actual story.
• 19:50
  Ruth McKell: It's not just a bullet point.
• 19:51
  Ruth McKell: It's a. It's a whole thing.
• 19:52
  Ruth McKell: And magic, like, crafting mental health into the magic, I think helps us approach it in a way that is very.
• 20:02
  Ruth McKell: Feels safer for us than it does in other ways.
• 20:05
  Ruth McKell: I can give an example that's not honey.
• 20:07
  Ruth McKell: That I thought was really interesting about this that I read last year.
• 20:10
  Ruth McKell: I don't know if you.
• 20:11
  Ruth McKell: Have you heard of the book Shark Heart?
• 20:13
  Rachel: No.
• 20:14
  Ruth McKell: Super weird, super awesome.
• 20:16
  Ruth McKell: It's a story about a married couple and the man gets diagnosed with a mutation that turns him into a great white shark.
• 20:26
  Ruth McKell: And you learn as you read throughout the book, spoilers here that this is normalized.
• 20:31
  Ruth McKell: Everything else about our world is normal.
• 20:32
  Ruth McKell: It's, it's contemporary world, except that in this contemporary, speculative version of our world, people are sometimes diagnosed with mutations that will turn them into this or that animal.
• 20:43
  Ruth McKell: And it's a slow, hard, painful process that you can't stop.
• 20:45
  Ruth McKell: You have to adapt to.
• 20:46
  Ruth McKell: And the book really focuses on the caretakers and caregivers also impacted by that transformation.
• 20:52
  Ruth McKell: That change.
• 20:54
  Ruth McKell: Watching the person you love change.
• 20:56
  Ruth McKell: Before you.
• 20:57
  Ruth McKell: And I read this book, not really understanding or expecting how much it was going to talk about it felt like reading a book on the grief of, like, chronic illness or cancer or.
• 21:12
  Ruth McKell: I had a grandmother, my granny recently passed away from Alzheimer's.
• 21:15
  Ruth McKell: And that idea of watching your person who you love so much change and not being able to do anything about it.
• 21:22
  Ruth McKell: And it would have been an incredibly heavy, hard to read book without that magical element.
• 21:28
  Ruth McKell: It would have just been like a really heavy, like, medical book.
• 21:32
  Ruth McKell: But this element of magic.
• 21:34
  Ruth McKell: We were talking about birds, we were talking about.
• 21:38
  Emily: What was it?
• 21:39
  Ruth McKell: Was it a Komodo dragon?
• 21:39
  Ruth McKell: Komodo dragons.
• 21:41
  Ruth McKell: We were talking about this great white shark.
• 21:43
  Ruth McKell: And like, our brains can't compute that.
• 21:45
  Ruth McKell: We're like, well, that's not real.
• 21:46
  Ruth McKell: And so it's allowed for the safety of being able to go in and talk about the grief and the guilt of, like, resentment or frustration or like sorrow, all these really big feelings.
• 21:57
  Ruth McKell: It created the safe place, at least for me as a reader, to go to these places that otherwise I don't generally read a lot of books that touch on those themes.
• 22:07
  Ruth McKell: It's, it's, it's heavy, you know, but it took such a heavy thing and made it not only digestible, but interesting and humorous and incredibly human.
• 22:18
  Ruth McKell: And that's what I think we have power to do with magic and like magical elements, speculative elements, is take things that are hard to process and repaint them in a way that we can approach.
• 22:32
  Emily: What a fascinating premise.
• 22:35
  Ruth McKell: I know.
• 22:36
  Emily: I need to go pick that up.
• 22:38
  Emily: That is so interesting.
• 22:41
  Emily: Um, gosh, that's so cool.
• 22:43
  Emily: Okay. I'm like, totally sold on this.
• 22:46
  Emily: I think it's such a fascinating way to look at, like, the parts of yourself that you're putting into a story and why you're putting them there and, like, how to explore it.
• 22:54
  Emily: I'm curious when you start a new project, and I know you have, like, a thousand projects on the back burner, and so I know you.
• 23:02
  Emily: I know you have a lot of experience with the.
• 23:04
  Emily: Those initial stages of, like, figuring out what a story might be.
• 23:07
  Emily: Do you have a process for how you externalize or, you know, take those issues and bring them into magical metaphor?
• 23:16
  Emily: Like, is there a way that you think about that?
• 23:18
  Emily: Does it pop into your head fully formed?
• 23:18
  Emily: Just like, I'm thinking of listeners who are listening in going, oh, that sounds so cool.
• 23:24
  Emily: But, like, how do you come up with an idea like that?
• 23:26
  Ruth McKell: You know, how do I do it?
• 23:26
  Ruth McKell: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:28
  Emily: And maybe you don't have a good answer.
• 23:30
  Emily: That's a hard question to ask.
• 23:31
  Emily: But I'm just curious if you.
• 23:32
  Emily: If you have any advice for someone who might be thinking about this.
• 23:35
  Ruth McKell: Well, I feel like it definitely, for me at least, doesn't happen, like, all at once.
• 23:39
  Ruth McKell: It's not like I go, oh, you know what I'm gonna write about X, Y, Z.
• 23:42
  Ruth McKell: And this is the personal part that's gonna go into it.
• 23:44
  Emily: That's.
• 23:46
  Ruth McKell: That would be lucky.
• 23:48
  Ruth McKell: But more often, it's like little drops in a bucket, you know, or like little pieces that slowly come together.
• 23:55
  Ruth McKell: I'll be like, well, I like this concept, but I know I've learned this about myself that I cannot write.
• 24:02
  Ruth McKell: I cannot sit down and write a book until I know what personal hook I have in that story.
• 24:07
  Ruth McKell: I've tried, and I just burn out at like, 20 or 30k.
• 24:10
  Ruth McKell: I get bored like a. Maybe I'm a little selfish with it, but I'm like, I want my own catharsis in this wreckage experience.
• 24:16
  Ruth McKell: And even it doesn't have to be big.
• 24:18
  Ruth McKell: Like, there are some that I have that I'm like, I don't know yet what mental health thing is going to come out in this one.
• 24:23
  Ruth McKell: But, like, I have a book that's a lot about environmental grief and rage and my feelings about that.
• 24:28
  Ruth McKell: And I'm like, okay, I can tell that's going to stir something.
• 24:31
  Ruth McKell: That's a really big hook for me when I write that book.
• 24:34
  Ruth McKell: That's going to bring out a lot for me in a different angle than these other things have brought out.
• 24:40
  Ruth McKell: But I.
• 24:42
  Ruth McKell: I know that I have to have something.
• 24:44
  Ruth McKell: I have to.
• 24:45
  Ruth McKell: It might change and grow, but I have to know, like, in this book, we're dealing with this issue.
• 24:50
  Ruth McKell: But I do think something that helps is what we were talking about, like magic as a metaphor for mental health.
• 24:56
  Ruth McKell: Right.
• 24:57
  Ruth McKell: I think I have a habit of thinking about life in a kind of a metaphorical way in that I like thinking about the connections between things and the way we are like other things.
• 25:15
  Ruth McKell: So like the way we are like other creatures in the world, the way we are similar, the way we are different, the way we experience different things in the world.
• 25:26
  Ruth McKell: And I think when you shift your mind from like, oh, I'm going to find the perfect metaphor for this from being like in the moment of like, oh, what is something that just does this, that sounds good, but you change it to a way of thinking, of saying, how am I similar to the more than human world, everything around me?
• 25:47
  Ruth McKell: It's, it's more than just like a. I need this metaphor in the moment while I'm writing.
• 25:51
  Ruth McKell: It's almost like a way of looking at the world, you know, where I start to see things in me.
• 25:58
  Rachel: I'll.
• 25:58
  Ruth McKell: I think about like, okay, I need to like back away from social media.
• 26:02
  Ruth McKell: You're like, I'm hibernating.
• 26:03
  Ruth McKell: Like I'm, I'm, I'm going into torpor, I'm doing something else.
• 26:07
  Ruth McKell: Or you see how someone else reacts to something and you're like, you know what this reminds me of?
• 26:16
  Ruth McKell: Like an animal species or a plant species or some, something else in the world.
• 26:22
  Ruth McKell: This feels very like vague and I'm trying to find like a good example of this.
• 26:26
  Ruth McKell: But I, I think when you start to try and draw connections like we are in period of time, that feels very divisive.
• 26:38
  Ruth McKell: Just full stop.
• 26:39
  Ruth McKell: It just, it just does.
• 26:41
  Ruth McKell: There's a lot of feeling very, I don't know, angry, impatient, frustrated, burnt out, othered on a separate team.
• 26:56
  Ruth McKell: And I feel like it can be really healing to try to see yourself as similar to and belonging to.
• 27:03
  Ruth McKell: And if you can't find that with other people, if you can, that's wonderful.
• 27:07
  Ruth McKell: And if you can't, then you can turn to the natural world, or you can turn to science, or you can turn to all these things.
• 27:14
  Ruth McKell: Because in my head, like magic is used for a lot of different purposes in literature.
• 27:19
  Ruth McKell: Sometimes it's used as an expression of power.
• 27:21
  Ruth McKell: But I think a lot of the times magic is an expression of what we don't understand.
• 27:27
  Ruth McKell: Because if we do understand it, we call it science.
• 27:30
  Ruth McKell: You know, if we know how to do this, plus this, we put them together, they make a flame.
• 27:34
  Ruth McKell: Science.
• 27:35
  Ruth McKell: If someone Snaps their fingers and makes a flame.
• 27:38
  Ruth McKell: That's magic.
• 27:39
  Ruth McKell: But if we, like, a lot.
• 27:42
  Ruth McKell: In fact, I think a lot of the things that we are so fascinated with magic and fiction, and I'm like, we're surrounded by magic.
• 27:48
  Ruth McKell: We just call it science, we call it chemistry, we call it all these things.
• 27:53
  Ruth McKell: We're fascinated by alchemy.
• 27:54
  Ruth McKell: I'm like, but we're surrounded by that literally in our real world.
• 27:59
  Ruth McKell: And understanding, like, bridging the gap between I don't understand this to.
• 28:03
  Ruth McKell: I understand this.
• 28:05
  Ruth McKell: That gap is pretty small, actually.
• 28:09
  Ruth McKell: And I think it makes a difference in how we categorize things, but it also is how I think we process our mental health.
• 28:16
  Ruth McKell: So, like, if you don't understand how.
• 28:21
  Ruth McKell: Well, we were just talking about chemistry, I can't even get thinking of an actual example because chemistry was a very long time ago for me.
• 28:27
  Ruth McKell: But, you know, you'll, like, take this prop thing, this thing, you add them together and it flashes purple or whatever.
• 28:32
  Ruth McKell: If you saw that as a magic trick and someone just did it, you'd be like, wow, I don't get it.
• 28:36
  Ruth McKell: That's amazing.
• 28:37
  Ruth McKell: If someone explained to you, oh, it's, you know, this element and this element make this.
• 28:40
  Ruth McKell: There's a reason for it that happens in our brains where we go, why am I reacting this way?
• 28:47
  Ruth McKell: Why am I feeling this way?
• 28:49
  Ruth McKell: What is wrong with me?
• 28:52
  Ruth McKell: So many things were answered for me personally when I learned that I had ocd because I. I was like, no. People had even asked, like, do you have.
• 28:59
  Ruth McKell: I'm like, no, I don't.
• 29:00
  Ruth McKell: Because I. My house is a mess, therefore, I cannot have ocd.
• 29:03
  Ruth McKell: I didn't understand that.
• 29:05
  Ruth McKell: It can manifest in so many different ways.
• 29:07
  Ruth McKell: And when it clicked, like, oh, all these things and the way my brain is doing them, processing them, this is the reason.
• 29:15
  Ruth McKell: It was like, that moment of someone saying these two elements together flash purple.
• 29:19
  Ruth McKell: The distance between understanding and not understanding, shifting from, like, this, like, magical other to this known as much as we can know.
• 29:28
  Ruth McKell: It, I think, is.
• 29:32
  Ruth McKell: It feels ungraspable.
• 29:34
  Ruth McKell: It feels like I'm never gonna have answers to this, even when it's really close by.
• 29:40
  Ruth McKell: And I think when we can't find it in real life, looking for in our stories is really helpful.
• 29:46
  Ruth McKell: I don't know if that's making sense.
• 29:47
  Ruth McKell: I feel like that came out in a very garbled way, but making sense for sure.
• 29:52
  Rachel: So you've mentioned one of the things that I keep thinking about, and I don't know you, Mikel, as well as Emily does, but One thing that I've observed from talking to you is that it feels.
• 30:04
  Rachel: I feel like you're so in tune to your emotions and it feels like you have a really high emotional intelligence because you're able to name a lot of emotions and understand how those emotions flow through us.
• 30:17
  Rachel: And, and from what I've heard so far about your journey, you had mentioned how when you started, honey, you hadn't yet gone back to therapy or you hadn't yet undergone this personal metamorphosis to understand what was going on inside your body and inside your brain.
• 30:32
  Rachel: And through writing it, it sounds like you've had to.
• 30:37
  Rachel: They're very interconnected journeys.
• 30:38
  Rachel: But you had a journey understanding what was going on in your body, and then you had a journey applying that to.
• 30:44
  Rachel: On the page.
• 30:45
  Ruth McKell: Yeah. What.
• 30:46
  Rachel: What was that like for you?
• 30:46
  Rachel: And then I also was thinking a lot about, like, your ideal reader, probably as a. As someone like you or, or a past version of you.
• 30:57
  Rachel: And what was, what was it like?
• 30:59
  Rachel: Do you feel like you've been able to write this story and get closer to exactly what you wanted this book to be about because of what you learned throughout your personal journey as well?
• 31:11
  Ruth McKell: Okay.
• 31:13
  Ruth McKell: Well, thank you.
• 31:14
  Ruth McKell: First of all, I almost feel like.
• 31:18
  Ruth McKell: Like I feel like progressing in understanding ourselves and accepting ourselves feels less like the metamorphosis of like a butterfly, where it's like this one time event and more like the molting of a snakeskin where, like, we're gonna do this a lot of times, like we're gonna outgrow this a lot of times.
• 31:36
  Ruth McKell: Or like a hermit crab searching for a new shell, where you're like, okay, this one fits for now.
• 31:41
  Ruth McKell: We're not done.
• 31:41
  Ruth McKell: Like, we're always going to be working for the next thing.
• 31:44
  Ruth McKell: But I feel like they do feel very interconnected to me, to be very, like, open and vulnerable for a second.
• 31:52
  Ruth McKell: I've been re.
• 31:53
  Ruth McKell: I listen to my audiobook, I have an early copy to it, and then I listen to it again.
• 31:58
  Ruth McKell: I'm listening to it again, and I might do it again.
• 32:00
  Ruth McKell: I feel like I am grieving, letting the story go right now because it has been my constant companion walking through some really big life changes.
• 32:12
  Ruth McKell: And there's a lot that I haven't like, mentioned here, but a lot has happened for me in the last five years.
• 32:18
  Ruth McKell: And this, this has been my emotional support story.
• 32:22
  Ruth McKell: Yeah.
• 32:24
  Ruth McKell: And I love these characters in my head.
• 32:27
  Ruth McKell: They are so real, and I'm so sad that they're actually fictional because I just, I just want to scoop them Up.
• 32:36
  Ruth McKell: But I.
• 32:39
  Ruth McKell: I'm trying to remember.
• 32:40
  Ruth McKell: There was a question that of yours that I wanted to answer.
• 32:42
  Ruth McKell: My ideal reader, I feel like in this story, I would hope that it's someone who's a deep feeler or who wants to better feel their feelings safely.
• 32:53
  Ruth McKell: Someone who really struggles with feelings of not being enough or not being right.
• 32:59
  Ruth McKell: Someone who wants to feel seen and loved and like they're just okay.
• 33:03
  Ruth McKell: I feel like there'll be people who don't like this book, and I already know that.
• 33:07
  Ruth McKell: I've seen it, because it's hard not to look at reviews.
• 33:11
  Ruth McKell: And there are people who love this book and people who don't love this book, and that's great.
• 33:14
  Ruth McKell: That's fine.
• 33:15
  Ruth McKell: That's how it's supposed to be.
• 33:17
  Ruth McKell: But the people who will love it and the people I really want it to reach are those readers, I think, who need someone to say, you're okay and you're going in the right direction and there's nothing wrong with you and you are right as you are, and this is hard, but you can do it.
• 33:40
  Ruth McKell: Like, they.
• 33:41
  Ruth McKell: They need gentleness.
• 33:43
  Ruth McKell: And that's what I really hope this book gives people, is a little bit of space and a little bit of gentleness and a loving kiss on the forehead that says, it's not always going to be like this.
• 33:52
  Ruth McKell: It is going to get better, it is going to improve, and you're going to look back on this and feel stronger and softer for it.
• 34:03
  Emily: Yeah.
• 34:03
  Ruth McKell: Yeah.
• 34:04
  Emily: Oh, that's beautiful.
• 34:05
  Rachel: And it's.
• 34:06
  Rachel: You know, it sounds like that's been it to me.
• 34:09
  Rachel: The writing experience has been very much like, as you peel back the layers, as you write more versions of the story, as you discover what you want to say, it's kind of been there the whole time, but you don't know that.
• 34:22
  Rachel: You, like, you can't touch that until you've written draft after draft.
• 34:27
  Rachel: And it sounds like that's been your experience as well.
• 34:31
  Ruth McKell: Yeah. Well, what we were saying earlier, where it feels.
• 34:34
  Ruth McKell: I feel like there are things that we don't know how to say to ourselves.
• 34:38
  Ruth McKell: I feel like that's what happens.
• 34:39
  Ruth McKell: You get to, like, draft three, and you're like, I didn't even realize I was doing this.
• 34:42
  Ruth McKell: Oh, wow.
• 34:42
  Ruth McKell: How great for me, like, we're talking to ourselves on a very, like, subconscious level.
• 34:49
  Ruth McKell: You know what I mean?
• 34:50
  Ruth McKell: That's why I think some of the work can be done in, like, oh, I'm gonna fold this into the mental health element in the magic here.
• 34:57
  Ruth McKell: I'm gonna do this but there's also, like, subconscious stuff that is going to surprise you.
• 35:01
  Ruth McKell: And that's good, that something in you that wants to speak that is being given a voice in your story.
• 35:07
  Emily: Yeah, I keep.
• 35:09
  Emily: As you've been talking, I've been struck a lot by, like, how intentional you are about exploring the connections.
• 35:21
  Emily: Right.
• 35:21
  Emily: Going deeper, not looking away, like, allowing yourself to.
• 35:24
  Emily: To let your subconscious out on the page.
• 35:27
  Emily: Right.
• 35:27
  Emily: But then, like, face it and, like, look at what that is there.
• 35:32
  Emily: And I'm wondering if.
• 35:34
  Emily: If we.
• 35:36
  Emily: If it's important, right, to kind of say that while we are exploring these things on the page and allowing it to come out in that way, that organic way and, like, expressing ourselves.
• 35:48
  Emily: Right.
• 35:48
  Emily: And figuring out what's actually there, that it's important to actually look at that and start to interrogate it and start to ask what it is that we're trying to say.
• 35:57
  Emily: Right. Because I wonder if there.
• 35:59
  Emily: I guess, you know, the point I'm trying to get to is I wonder if there's a risk in exploring these questions in a way that's going to reach readers.
• 36:07
  Emily: Right.
• 36:08
  Emily: Exploring mental health in this metaphorical way in a way that you intend to share with people.
• 36:13
  Emily: Right.
• 36:13
  Emily: Who might also struggle with those issues, that we owe it to ourselves and to them to also be intentional about it.
• 36:20
  Emily: Right.
• 36:20
  Emily: Like, are there risks of doing this where we don't dig deep enough to figure out exactly what we're trying to say?
• 36:26
  Emily: Does that question make sense?
• 36:26
  Emily: I feel like I'm, like, going, maybe.
• 36:30
  Emily: I just.
• 36:30
  Emily: Is there a risk in doing this and, like, saying something you don't intend to say?
• 36:33
  Emily: Right.
• 36:35
  Emily: And, like, having a harmful impact?
• 36:38
  Ruth McKell: I think.
• 36:39
  Ruth McKell: I mean, there's always the risk of being misunderstood, and that's really scary.
• 36:43
  Ruth McKell: And the risk of missing something.
• 36:46
  Ruth McKell: I think readers forget that we're very human, and we are.
• 36:50
  Ruth McKell: We're trying.
• 36:52
  Ruth McKell: And there will likely always be people who misunderstand something we need to say.
• 36:56
  Ruth McKell: I think we have safeguards that can help us.
• 36:59
  Ruth McKell: You know, sensitivity readers, for example, beta readers, having editors, like, going over it more than once.
• 37:06
  Ruth McKell: But I think our job.
• 37:08
  Ruth McKell: You know, how lots of people say that they read to escape, And I think that's a very valid thing.
• 37:15
  Ruth McKell: I. I've realized, though, that I don't connect with it very much and that I find myself more often craving to read for connection, that I want to feel something deeply and to feel connected when I read.
• 37:28
  Ruth McKell: And sometimes it's because I resonate with, like, oh, that's like me.
• 37:31
  Ruth McKell: And sometimes it's, oh, that's not like me, but it has brought me closer to understanding this person's experience, and I still feel connected.
• 37:40
  Ruth McKell: And I think if we approach our stories with that goal of, I. I want to bridge something with this story.
• 37:47
  Ruth McKell: Because you are not the only creator of your book.
• 37:50
  Ruth McKell: When you write a story, you.
• 37:53
  Ruth McKell: I feel like it's like extending a hand to the reader, but they fill in all the gaps.
• 37:58
  Ruth McKell: For all those hundreds of words, there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands more that are unspoken but filled in by the reader.
• 38:08
  Ruth McKell: They're the one who visualizes what you describe.
• 38:11
  Ruth McKell: They're the ones who insert their own personal experience between the lines.
• 38:15
  Ruth McKell: And you can't control that, so you can't control them doing it in a way that might not be good for them.
• 38:21
  Ruth McKell: Maybe it is making them confront something they don't want to confront, or maybe they're.
• 38:24
  Ruth McKell: They don't have an experience that they just don't connect with that story, but it's an invitation, and they.
• 38:32
  Ruth McKell: For the right readers, like, those who are going to connect with it, they finish the story in their head.
• 38:37
  Ruth McKell: We just start it on the page, Right.
• 38:39
  Ruth McKell: Like, but they.
• 38:40
  Ruth McKell: They complete it.
• 38:41
  Ruth McKell: It's a joint effort between author and reader.
• 38:45
  Ruth McKell: And I think, being intentional, of course, I think we should always try to be intentional about our stories and.
• 38:53
  Ruth McKell: And also give ourselves grace for being incredibly human and for always growing.
• 38:58
  Ruth McKell: And there are some things that we're like, I feel really good about this.
• 39:01
  Ruth McKell: And then down the line, we're like, I've learned more.
• 39:03
  Ruth McKell: But we can only ever give ourselves permission to do as well as where we are at any given moment.
• 39:10
  Ruth McKell: You know, like, if you learn better, you do better.
• 39:12
  Ruth McKell: And if you look back and you're like, oh, I wish I'd done this a little bit stronger, it's like, well, you can't change it, but you can do the next one stronger.
• 39:19
  Ruth McKell: And so, like, a combination of being very intentional and giving your past self so much grace, extending that same grace to others, I think is kind of all that's in our control.
• 39:30
  Emily: Yeah.
• 39:30
  Emily: No, I think that's a beautiful answer.
• 39:32
  Emily: And it's also, I'm hearing, like, leaning into the truth.
• 39:35
  Emily: Right.
• 39:35
  Emily: Leaning into what you're.
• 39:37
  Emily: Even if you can't articulate it, right.
• 39:38
  Emily: Even if it's, you know, feels vague and hazy to you, like, leaning into what feels true.
• 39:45
  Emily: Mm.
• 39:46
  Emily: And what feels right is like, that's the connection piece.
• 39:49
  Emily: Right.
• 39:49
  Emily: You're leaning into, like, the thing you want to express to somebody else and, like, allowing that to be true.
• 39:55
  Emily: Right.
• 39:56
  Emily: Whatever it ends up.
• 39:57
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 39:58
  Ruth McKell: Because it's not gonna be true for everybody.
• 39:59
  Ruth McKell: That's not gonna be everyone's experience.
• 40:02
  Ruth McKell: But if you've had an experience, you've had an emotional experience, you've felt something, someone else has felt that same thing.
• 40:09
  Emily: Like, we're.
• 40:10
  Ruth McKell: We're not isolated.
• 40:12
  Ruth McKell: And everything that we think is like, I'm the only one who's ever gone through this.
• 40:15
  Ruth McKell: We're so wrong.
• 40:17
  Ruth McKell: There are many, many people who have not only felt that same thing, but have also thought, I am the only person who has gone through this.
• 40:24
  Ruth McKell: Therefore, X, Y, Z about myself, therefore something's wrong with me, or something's weird about me, or I'm, you know, like, writing your story.
• 40:33
  Ruth McKell: You're not going to bridge that gap with everyone because not everyone has been through something like that.
• 40:38
  Ruth McKell: But you're always going to find someone and many someones who see that and go, oh, my gosh, that feels so good to read.
• 40:45
  Ruth McKell: I've never read that in a book before.
• 40:47
  Ruth McKell: Or I. I feel seen by this story.
• 40:49
  Ruth McKell: This story is comforting for me because I feel like it's seeing me and it's reminding me that I'm not alone in this.
• 40:57
  Emily: Yeah. Oh, that's beautiful.
• 41:00
  Emily: Oh, this has been amazing.
• 41:02
  Emily: Okay, final question.
• 41:03
  Ruth McKell: Okay.
• 41:04
  Emily: That I have.
• 41:05
  Emily: But so for any listeners who are thinking about doing this, right, maybe they're already realizing that they're through this conversation, maybe realizing that they're exploring something.
• 41:16
  Emily: Right.
• 41:17
  Emily: Something with themselves on the page.
• 41:19
  Emily: Do you have any advice for the.
• 41:21
  Emily: For folks who are doing this?
• 41:23
  Ruth McKell: Okay, very practical advice is to go further back than where your story is and spend time with the things that have not only hurt your character, but are still hurting them.
• 41:43
  Ruth McKell: I saw some advice, it was this weekend, I think, and I really loved it.
• 41:47
  Ruth McKell: It was talking about how the trauma is not the thing that helps us get to know our character.
• 41:53
  Ruth McKell: It's the coping mechanisms that they are still using after that trauma.
• 41:56
  Ruth McKell: It's not just like this happened to me, but it's what am I doing to avoid it happening again or avoid facing it?
• 42:04
  Ruth McKell: I think considering those wounds and the ghost that is haunting your character and letting a piece of yourself leak into that is a good starting place.
• 42:16
  Ruth McKell: You don't have to rip the band aids off all your wounds.
• 42:18
  Ruth McKell: I think there are things in us that are not ready to be written.
• 42:22
  Ruth McKell: Like, you don't have to write something that you are not ready to share.
• 42:27
  Ruth McKell: And I think allowing yourself.
• 42:30
  Ruth McKell: There are things that I'm like, I'm not ready for that.
• 42:32
  Ruth McKell: But there.
• 42:33
  Ruth McKell: I remember saying that years ago, about things that are now in Honey.
• 42:36
  Ruth McKell: And we need to give ourselves time.
• 42:38
  Ruth McKell: But when you see something that you're like, this feels ready.
• 42:41
  Ruth McKell: I need to sort through this on the page.
• 42:45
  Ruth McKell: Give a piece of it to one of your characters, let it hurt them, and spend time with them, both in the draft and in writing outside your draft, even, like, you can write as your character to yourself.
• 43:01
  Ruth McKell: Think about them.
• 43:02
  Ruth McKell: Let them be this shield between you and the big, scary, hard thing that's hard to face.
• 43:07
  Ruth McKell: If it's hard to think about, like, this thing in me, you can think about, like, well, how.
• 43:11
  Ruth McKell: How does my character experience this?
• 43:13
  Ruth McKell: Because you start talking to your own self, your inner self, too, and it's going to come out in real ways.
• 43:19
  Ruth McKell: You don't have to do everything, like, perfect to communicate to your readers the first round.
• 43:23
  Ruth McKell: All you have to do is put something real in yourself, in your characters, and let yourself go there just a little bit.
• 43:31
  Ruth McKell: And that.
• 43:31
  Ruth McKell: That's where I would start.
• 43:34
  Emily: I love it.
• 43:36
  Emily: Anything else?
• 43:36
  Rachel: Rachel, there's one thing that you said earlier, which I want to call back to here as we're talking about, like, practical tips and advice, which is that when you were talking about chemistry and magic and magic being just a part of the world that we don't understand, it sounds to me like if a. If a reader is considering how to incorporate these things together, the question they can ask of themselves is, I want to insert this hard thing into the story.
• 44:07
  Rachel: I'm considering there being a metaphor.
• 44:09
  Rachel: So how can I weave it into this part of the world that we don't understand by science?
• 44:16
  Rachel: And what magic results through that?
• 44:16
  Rachel: I mean, magic can be anything.
• 44:21
  Rachel: Like, it could be elemental.
• 44:22
  Rachel: It can be psychic.
• 44:23
  Rachel: Like, there's so many different ways to explore what magic actually means, but a process through which to bring magic about in the story is, like, what is that part of their life that they can't explain?
• 44:37
  Rachel: And how do we.
• 44:38
  Rachel: How can we weave in the metaphor into that?
• 44:40
  Rachel: Does that sound right?
• 44:40
  Rachel: Is that.
• 44:42
  Rachel: Would you agree?
• 44:43
  Ruth McKell: Yeah. And I think, like, going back to that relationship story of, like, how things are connected, how we see.
• 44:49
  Ruth McKell: Okay, like, I can use an example.
• 44:51
  Ruth McKell: In Honey, there's a lot of moments of feeling claustrophobic because Arthur's monster can take him over and he can puppet him, use his body.
• 45:05
  Emily: Yeah.
• 45:06
  Ruth McKell: Put him inside where he can't move.
• 45:08
  Ruth McKell: And that feeling of claustrophobia, it's serving a deeper purpose.
• 45:15
  Ruth McKell: It's serving this purpose of feeling powerless and out of control.
• 45:19
  Ruth McKell: And throughout the book, you have a lot of feelings and Symbols about being trapped in ice, being preserved in amber, being stuck, being buried alive.
• 45:28
  Ruth McKell: Like, all these things that evoke that same claustrophobic.
• 45:30
  Ruth McKell: I can't move.
• 45:32
  Ruth McKell: I can't change this.
• 45:33
  Ruth McKell: I can't do anything feeling.
• 45:36
  Ruth McKell: And I think, like, on a practical level, if you're like, I want to weave this into my magic, but I'm not sure how.
• 45:41
  Ruth McKell: I think, considering how it.
• 45:43
  Ruth McKell: Whatever it is that you want to involve, like, consider how it feels in your body.
• 45:48
  Ruth McKell: Consider where you feel it.
• 45:49
  Ruth McKell: Do you feel it in your chest?
• 45:50
  Ruth McKell: Do you feel in your head, your hands?
• 45:50
  Ruth McKell: Like, what is it that you are experiencing?
• 45:55
  Ruth McKell: Do you see any echoes of that in the natural world?
• 45:58
  Ruth McKell: Do you see any echoes of that in.
• 46:02
  Ruth McKell: In other areas of science?
• 46:02
  Ruth McKell: Like, how can what you experience, this tiny aspect of what you experience, can you see it anywhere else?
• 46:10
  Ruth McKell: And I feel like once you start doing.
• 46:14
  Ruth McKell: Starts bridging out this web of like, oh, I could pull on this thing as this allegory I could use.
• 46:20
  Ruth McKell: This thing is reflective.
• 46:22
  Ruth McKell: This external piece.
• 46:23
  Ruth McKell: I'm using my hands, and no one can see me using my hands.
• 46:27
  Ruth McKell: This external element has an internal purpose.
• 46:33
  Ruth McKell: And I think this is also why I recommend, like, starting with your character's wound and the ghosts that still haunt them is.
• 46:40
  Ruth McKell: I think when we choose external scenes that are purposefully drawn from a character's wounds, then it's.
• 46:51
  Ruth McKell: It's much easier for me than if I use, like.
• 46:53
  Ruth McKell: I personally don't, like, use, like, Save the Cat or what's the other one?
• 46:57
  Ruth McKell: There's so many.
• 46:59
  Ruth McKell: Because I just.
• 47:00
  Ruth McKell: I'm like, why.
• 47:01
  Ruth McKell: Why am I doing this?
• 47:01
  Ruth McKell: I don't understand.
• 47:03
  Ruth McKell: I have to start with the psychology of my character of, like, what has to happen next?
• 47:08
  Ruth McKell: Like, why does this need to happen?
• 47:08
  Ruth McKell: And when you choose external pieces that have a direct internal link, then I feel like the character arc naturally grows with your story, or you grow a story that fits the character arc where it's all drawing back to that wound.
• 47:27
  Ruth McKell: It's all drawing back to the connection of this thing going on in the character is also going on in the world or this thing that they're not facing is to going.
• 47:35
  Ruth McKell: Creating issues like them not facing it is hurting the plot.
• 47:38
  Ruth McKell: And that's the point where you can create this internal and external, like, resonance between the two.
• 47:46
  Ruth McKell: Does that make sense?
• 47:47
  Rachel: Yeah, definitely.
• 47:48
  Emily: Yeah.
• 47:49
  Rachel: And I think that's.
• 47:50
  Rachel: That's pretty actionable to.
• 47:52
  Rachel: To explore and to have people start to take a look at this is it.
• 47:56
  Rachel: It also takes time.
• 47:57
  Rachel: I mean, you said that earlier, like, this was not something that you had in your very first draft or vision of what this story ended up becoming.
• 48:05
  Rachel: It.
• 48:05
  Ruth McKell: Not at all.
• 48:06
  Rachel: It takes growth.
• 48:08
  Emily: It.
• 48:09
  Ruth McKell: Yeah.
• 48:10
  Rachel: Yeah. So I think that's really validating because the.
• 48:14
  Rachel: If I had, you know, a nickel for every time I heard someone lament that it's not where they wanted to be, I would be a very rich person.
• 48:23
  Rachel: But that's, like, how it works.
• 48:26
  Rachel: That's how it works.
• 48:27
  Rachel: It takes a lot of time and thought and reworking to get it to that spot.
• 48:33
  Emily: Yeah. And I love this idea of starting with the emotions, like, whatever the struggle is that you want to, you know, put into metaphor on the page, like, how does it make you feel?
• 48:42
  Emily: And then figuring out how to make that feeling into a metaphor.
• 48:45
  Emily: I feel like that's a really actionable way to start.
• 48:49
  Emily: Oh, this has been amazing.
• 48:51
  Emily: Thank you so much.
• 48:52
  Emily: Mikhail, can you tell people where they can find you and where they can find Honey in her veins?
• 48:57
  Ruth McKell: Yes, you can find me on instagram @ruth mckellbooks.
• 49:02
  Ruth McKell: And, well, you said when this comes out, Honey will already be out.
• 49:06
  Ruth McKell: So you can.
• 49:06
  Ruth McKell: You can buy it wherever you get your books.
• 49:11
  Ruth McKell: We're all over.
• 49:12
  Ruth McKell: We're all over, so.
• 49:15
  Emily: And there's an incredible audiobook, so if that's how you get your books, you should definitely go check the audiobook out.
• 49:20
  Ruth McKell: I'm, like, probably gonna read it at least one and a half more times, which I did not think.
• 49:24
  Ruth McKell: I thought.
• 49:25
  Ruth McKell: I was so done with reading this story, I didn't want to look at it anymore.
• 49:29
  Ruth McKell: But just after I read it, like, a hundred times and then I got the audiobook, and I'm like, I'm so seduced by the narrators.
• 49:37
  Ruth McKell: We'll do this.
• 49:37
  Emily: It's so surreal.
• 49:39
  Emily: Like, I know.
• 49:40
  Emily: Bringing your characters to life, it's the.
• 49:42
  Emily: That was my favorite part of Crimson coming out was the audiobook.
• 49:46
  Emily: Just being like, oh, my God.
• 49:48
  Ruth McKell: It's like helping me cope with letting go.
• 49:50
  Ruth McKell: I think it's.
• 49:51
  Ruth McKell: It's.
• 49:52
  Ruth McKell: It's passing the torch away.
• 49:54
  Emily: It's out there.
• 49:55
  Emily: Yeah. Yeah. They're alive in someone else's voice.
• 49:57
  Emily: It's amazing.
• 49:58
  Emily: I know.
• 50:00
  Emily: Well, everybody go get Honey in her veins by Ruth McKell.
• 50:04
  Emily: Thank you so much, Mikel, for being here.
• 50:05
  Emily: This was.
• 50:06
  Emily: This was a really good conversation.
• 50:07
  Emily: This was awesome.
• 50:08
  Ruth McKell: Thanks so much.
• 50:09
  Rachel: If you want to build a successful, fulfilling, and sustainable writing life that works for you, you've got to get on our email list.
• 50:15
  Emily: Sign up now to get our free email course, the Magic of Character Arcs.
• 50:18
  Emily: After seven days of email Magic, you'll have the power to keep your readers flipping pages all through the night.
• 50:23
  Rachel: Link in the show notes.
• 50:24
  Rachel: We'll see you there.
• 50:25
  Emily: Bye.