201: Lessons on Writing, Creativity, and Mindset after 200 Episodes + My Author Journey

 

Happy 200 episodes! I share the biggest lessons I've learned in the past 200 episodes about writing, creativity, and mindset. I also share the overview of my author journey so far. Thanks for listening to the podcast! I appreciate all of you :)

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Lessons on Writing, Creativity, and Mindset after 200 Episodes + My Author Journey

 

Welcome to Your Big Creative Life. Welcome to the 200th. Well, actually, this is going to be episode 201, but I wanted to do an episode kind of celebrating 200 episodes of the podcast. Last week was our Q&A podcast that was technically number 200. But yeah, I cannot believe I've been doing this podcast for 200 episodes. And I want to just take a second before we get into the content for this week and just say thank you if you are listening to this, if you've listened since the beginning, since this podcast was in the OG days of Blank Page to Book, that used to be the name of the podcast before I rebranded to Your Big Creative Life. And I just want to say thanks for listening, for downloading, for leaving a review, for sharing episodes, for DMing me your thoughts. This podcast is for y'all and I just am so happy that people are even listening at all. It still boggles my mind and just kind of tickles me when I think about it. And I just am so grateful. I'm going to keep going with this podcast. I have no plans of stopping it anytime soon. And I just want to say thanks for allowing me to do this.

Yeah, it's really been, I feel like I've grown so much as a person, as a writer, just over the course of doing this. And so, I thought what we could do in this episode is I want to share some big lessons that I've learned over the time of doing this about creating, about writing. This could be a massive topic because of my work as a book editor and a coach and helping other writers. I feel like every year I do this; I just learn more and more from working with writers and working on so many different manuscripts and also writing more, like me writing books. books and just getting better and better as a writer. But I wanted to talk about 5 takeaways and big lessons that I've really, I really feel like have sunk into my bones. over the last 200 episodes. And hopefully there'll be some helpful things in there for you, insight into the creative process, into writing that you can kind of take away even if you are not someone who has a podcast and has no intention of starting a podcast. The lessons are not specifically about podcasting.

So, and then I also wanted to just do a little overview of my, history as a writer, because that's not something I've really talked about in depth in one place. Obviously, I've, on this podcast and on social media, I've touched on different parts of my story, but I wanted to just take a couple minutes and do a little overview of like the lore of me as a writer so that you can learn that if you're interested. And if maybe you haven't, you know, if you're a new listener or a new follower of the podcast, whatever, I thought I'd just kind of give the Cliff's Notes version of it. So actually, let's do that first and then I'll get into the takeaways and the lessons. So, I am a book editor. I'm a full-time freelance book editor, which means that I don't work for an agency. I don't work for a publisher. I'm an independent contractor, not contractor, that's not the right term. I'm a one-woman show, basically. I do have an assistant who's amazing, who helps me out a few hours a week with stuff with the podcast and content and other tasks. And I'm so grateful for her. But otherwise, it's just me.

So, I get clients from social media, from the podcast. And yeah, that's what I do. I'm also a coach. I work with people in a coaching capacity. But I want to focus on myself as a writer, though. So, I I tried writing a handful of times when I was a kid. I have been a huge reader my entire life. I started reading at a really young age. I started devouring books at a really young age. I've just, it's been like a constant through my life is just having this love of books. And so, I, there was a part of me when I was a kid that felt like I was a writer, even though I wasn't writing. And I tried a couple times. I even when I was, I don't know, 11, 10, something like that, my parents signed me up for this like one week writing camp. And I remember nothing about it. I don't remember anything I wrote. I just remember this little certificate that was like, Katie has completed this writer's camp. I don't know. And that was it. That was the extent of my writing.

In college, I got a degree in English lit. And I purposefully, I remember looking through the requirements for English degrees and making sure that I picked a specialization in English that didn't require any creative writing classes because I was terrified of writing at that point. Even though, again, I still had that little kind of remnant lingering of a part of me that felt like a writer, I was terrified because I had such a perfectionist mindset of like, I just wanted to be good at stuff right away. And if I wasn't, the thought of trying something and failing or just not being very good at it was terrifying to me. And so I didn't want to write. And I didn't want to have a class setting where I would be forced to share my writing with someone else. I mean, the thought just like would make me break out in hives of sharing something I wrote with anyone else. So, I got an English lit degree. I did take one editing class in undergrad where we did have to write one essay, one personal essay in the style of Modern Love, the column for the New York Times. And so I wrote about a breakup that I had with a boyfriend. I think it was like a year before that class. And the only person that read it was the professor. So that was like, well, I have to do it. I have to do it for an assignment. So, I did it and that was it.

And I wasn't, so I wasn't writing all through my mid-20s. I wasn't writing. And I would try a few times, like I remember trying a couple of times to write longhand. I had a notebook, and I would try to just start something and see where it went. But I never got more than a couple of pages in because it just was hard, and it felt forced and it felt like I didn't know what I was doing. And I also had very romantic ideas of what it meant to be a writer. So, I'm sober. I haven't had a drink in 10 years. So, I got sober when I was 27. And before that point, my mid-20s, is when I would try to write and I would get a nice cup, I'd get some whiskey, I'd get a few drinks in and try to write. And then it never worked because I was getting sloppy drunk. And it just, yeah, it never worked. So, I went to grad school. I got a master's degree in library and information science and thought I was just going to be a librarian for the rest of my life. I worked at a college for a little bit. I was an academic librarian.

And then what actually got me to really start writing is I saw on Facebook, this was maybe 10 years ago, nine years ago, something like that. I saw on Facebook, a friend of a friend of a friend posted, she was an author. And she had someone record a video of her opening up a box of books from her publisher a couple of months before her debut novel came out. So, she was like, you know how authors do that. They'll receive a copy of their book and they open it up and it's so exciting and they hold it. I mean, to hold a copy of your book in your hands, that just would feel amazing. I can't wait. And then like held it up to the camera and she's like, oh my gosh, this is so exciting. And a friend, the person that I followed on Facebook had either reposted it or commented on it. And so that's why I saw it on my newsfeed. And I had this experience. I'll never forget it. I watched this video and something in my body, it was like I was being pulled forward. I got this like, yes, feeling. And also, this insane rush of jealousy. Like I was so viscerally jealous of this person that I knew. We'd gone to college together. So, I kind of vaguely knew her, but I'd never talked to her. I was so jealous of her in that moment.

So, then I thought, okay, Katie, this is my like, come to Jesus moment where I was like, all right, Katie, you've been thinking about this for literally decades of your life. Like, why don't you actually try writing? Like, why don't you just give this a shot? So, I did. I started writing and did a couple of short stories first before I attempted a novel. They were not very good, but that's okay. And then I took my first writing class probably, I don't know, 8, nine years ago. And it was an introductory two or three hours like how to write a novel class because I wanted to gain information. I didn't really know how to write a novel. I thought that because I was a reader that I would just automatically know sort of like how to structure it and how to do it, but I didn't. So I took that class, got some insight, and my first book that I wrote took me about 2 1/2 years to write and edit, to finish the entire process. And in those 2 1/2 years, I had a lot of pauses and moments where I wanted to throw in the towel. And it was a book that was, it was women's fiction. It was a story of, told in alternating perspectives. a woman who was 25 in present day and then alternated with the perspective of her mother when her mother was a kid in 1980.

So, it was like it dealt with different generations of this family. And yeah, so it took me 2 1/2 years to do that. And as I was writing it, I really, I looked into publishing, and I knew that I wanted to query to try to find an agent and try for traditional publishing. So, I queried it in the spring of 2019. and got an agent. I signed with her in May of 2019. And I thought, I was so naive, and I just didn't really understand how traditional publishing worked and timing worked. And I thought I would be getting money from my book deal in like July. We signed in May of 2019. And I fully thought by July, like I was going to have an income from being an author because I would get money when we signed, when the book sold. that did not happen. Traditional publishing moves very slow. So, we took a while to edit that book and then it went on submission in October of 2019. And we had some interest from an editor right away after a couple of weeks, but she wasn't able to get it past acquisitions, which means that she was interested. She had some other people read it. She took it to the team and was like, hey, I want to buy this. But they weren't convinced they wanted to see some changes to the book. So that's what I was working on with my agent and the editor. We had a call with the editor.

And then in January, so January is when we got the news that she wanted to do a revise and resubmit. So, I was working on that. And then COVID hit, because that was January of 2020. And then COVID hit in March. And unfortunately, that editor, it was at an imprint at St. Martin's Press, a Big Five publisher, and the imprint closed, and the editor got laid off. So that was the end of the road for it. And my agent, you know, we had a meeting after, like probably summer of 2020, and she was like, you know, we sent it on 2 rounds of submission. We could send it to a smaller round, but like, I really think we might be better just kind of moving on. And that crushed me because it was not in my plan. No one has that in their plan. for something to stall and just not sell. But 2020 was such a weird time in publishing. People were getting laid off. Things were consolidating. Publishers were nervous about debut authors. And of course, there were still deals happening. There were authors that got book deals, debut authors, but it was just challenging. It was a challenging time.

So, the book didn't sell. And it really weighed on me. I had a low point in 2020 because I just, I didn't know. I think I was totally blindsided by it because I hadn't heard people talk about books not selling, which to step back for a second, that's part of the reason why I'm so vocal about it and I share about it so much because it turns out, I feel like people are more open about it now in 2025. Even 2020, I just feel like people weren't talking about it as much. This is so common, way more common than you would think that a book just doesn't sell, which is, it's just, it's kind of like querying. There are only so many agents who can take on authors, and there are way more people who want agents than there are agents. And it's the same with editors. Editors at publishers can only acquire so many books per year, and there are way more agents submitting manuscripts of author, there are author clients than there are editors who can take them on. So, it's just a numbers thing.

So, I was working on something new. I decided to shift and write more of a thriller because I felt like that was just kind of it was something I wanted. My first book had like some notes of thriller-y-ness, some ominous stuff lurking in it. And I decided to really embrace that because I feel like the story I wanted to tell, it belonged to a thriller genre, right? So I was working on that, and my agent saw a rough draft of it that was very rough and very all over the place because I was learning like how to write a thriller. And I had some issues with that agent where communication styles were not really aligned. She didn't really represent thrillers. I just felt like it was, my career as an author was just stalled because of this agent and it felt like I was just at an impasse. And I made the decision in 2021 to leave this agent and query to find a different one.

So, I was without an agent for probably three or four months while I was doing that, because you have to leave your agent officially before you can query to find a different one. Now, during this time, I had been, when I moved to Nashville in 20, 18, I joined a writing group. I started taking all these writing classes, like tons of writing classes on all different things at this writing center in Nashville. And I joined a critique group. So once a month we would meet and bring work and share and critique other people's works. And it was such a good experience for me to gain insight into writing, but then also learning how to get feedback. And so around this time is when I When did I start editing? Actually, it was before this. It was 2020, I want to say. I started doing beta reading and I started on Fiverr. I got some experience there on a freelancing platform, just doing it on the side. I still had my day job and everything. But yeah, so I was doing that kind of on the side. And then 2020 is when I really took it seriously, my editing. And was like, okay, let me actually try to build this up and make more of an income from it, build a client list. Because it had been kind of a half-hearted thing, just like a minor side hustle for a while before that.

So anyways, I signed with my second agent in 2020. God, now I can't remember the timing. 2022. Are we all the way to 2022? I think so. Y'all, it's hard for me to remember. I think I signed with her in 2022. So, I signed with Molly Glick at Creative Artists Agency after like three or four months of querying. And it's scary. It's scary to leave an agent and query another one because there's no guarantee that you are going to get a different agent. But I had worked on the book after I left my agent. I felt like it was solid. I felt like it was marketable. There was potential with it. So, I queried the second book and signed with her. We spent a lot of time editing that novel and it went on submission in 2023. And we only ever sent it out to one round of editors, one round on submission. And we got some feedback that there were too many books about podcasts on the market because the main character in my book had a podcast. And they were like, yeah, we're just healing, we're just hearing. So, kind of the same situation happened as 2020, 2019, 2020 with my first book where an editor loved it. She took it to acquisitions, but she couldn't get it past acquisitions because the feedback was, too many books about podcasts, it's a no-go. So, we got that feedback and Molly and I talked and decided that I was going to revise the manuscript and take out the podcast element.

So, I spent a long time doing that. We sent it back out to that one editor. And she was like, no, still not really interested in this new version. So that was fine. So only one editor saw that new version. So that's why I don't really say that book died on submission because it only ever went out to one round, like 12 editors, and only one editor ever saw that revised version. And then in 2023, my agent had some personal stuff going on where she had to kind of step back a little bit. So, I was just kind of thinking about my next book and wallowing a bit and feeling like, why can't I get a book published? So, I started working on another book and thinking about it but not really getting serious about it until 2024. So last fall, I got the draft done and sent it to her. And now in fast forward to now to September 2025, when I'm recording this, we are, I have a call at the end of the month with her to discuss the latest round and to like, hopefully it'll be just minor things that we tweak and adjust before. it goes out on submission. So, by the time this episode is released, we're either going to be on submission or we'll be very close. And I feel like I've been saying for like 4 months, we're almost on submission. We're almost on submission. We're almost on submission. But it's just, it takes a while because you're, you know, when you have an agent, your agent's busy. You're not their only client. So sometimes it takes a while for them to get to your manuscript and read it and give you notes. And then you go back and make the notes and then wait.

So, there's a lot of waiting involved. but hopefully we're either going to be on submission in October or we'll be very, very close. And it's a thriller and I feel much more at peace with this. It's my third book, which is frustrating, and I never thought I would be here, but I feel, you know, it is what it is, and I feel good about it. And also, just at peace. Like if this, Absolute worst-case scenario. If this book doesn't sell, I'm going to change something. I don't know exactly what that's going to be, but I can't keep continuing on the way that I am. Maybe it means submitting to a small press as opposed to a Big 5 publisher. I don't think I want to self-publish at this point, which is something that people ask about a lot. Like, you know, would you consider self-publishing? And because I have an agent, I really want to explore this first, but we'll see. So yeah, that's me as a writer. And I, I've not had anything published. I mean, I've had a few short stories published. When I was working on short stories when I first started writing, kind of in combination with me working on my first book, I did more essays and short stories and I got a couple of those published. But I've never had a book published.

So, I'm really hoping that this is it. I don't know why the **** this has been so hard. complete moment of honesty here. I have cried over this. I have screamed at the universe. I have been like, what is, what does all of this mean? Because it's like, I get close. I have an agent. I had an agent at Curtis Brown. I have an agent at CAA. They're like great agents. They have sent, you know, they've got, they saw something in my work, enough for me to get an agent, but not enough to get a book deal. So, it's like, I get close and then it doesn't work. I'm like, okay, there's got to be a lesson in this. And I don't know what it is yet other than like, there are so many ups and downs in writing, in being an author. And I guess I'm just getting experience with that now. But maybe in the future, maybe in a couple years, I'll be able to look back and be like, oh, that's why it all worked out that way. Okay. But yeah, I feel like I've learned so much and I've grown so much as a writer in my own process through these years of doing it that like a lot of good has come from it despite the hardship of getting published. I've enjoyed it. I've really grown. I feel like I've really honed in on my process and my voice and all of these things that are just really good as an author. So there have been a lot of positives as well. well. Okay, I want to talk about a couple of lessons now that I've learned in these episodes. So, #1, there is no one correct way to write a book. I really feel like that has just been proven to me over and over because of working with clients, because of hearing from other writers. There is no one correct path or way to do this. Even in my own process, the way that I wrote all three of my books was extremely different. So, There's no one right way. Yeah, it's not. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach. Now, there are recommendations that I think work for 99% of writers, yes, but even within that, there's no set formula of how you have to do it.

Number 2, there's nothing wrong with having external accountability, whether it's for releasing a podcast episode every week or sticking to a writing schedule, whatever it is. I just feel like the way that I've been able to do 200 episodes of this podcast is having external accountability. Y'all are expecting a podcast episode every Tuesday. I release them every Tuesday at 3 a.m. Eastern time. That is standard. The only time I missed, and I'm putting missed in quotes because it wasn't really missed, I took like 5 weeks off when I was on maternity leave in 2023, and I just repurposed like old episodes. And I picked like the top five most downloaded episodes and put those out. But other than that, like I release a podcast episode every Tuesday. And if it weren't for that set schedule, I probably would have stopped doing this. I probably would have been like; I'll release one when I feel like it. So having that external accountability is great. And for writing, this can be if you have a friend, like a buddy, an accountability buddy, a writing group, some deadline that an editor has set for you. Coaching clients that I work with have an app called Voxer that they can use to check in with me. They use that for accountability. Like there's nothing wrong with having that external accountability to help you get things done. There needs to be no guilt or shame in that. Some people are extremely internally motivated and that's great. Some people, we need that accountability and it's fine. I'm one of those people where certain things I have a lot of internal drive to do, but some things I need external accountability.

Okay, next lesson. Oh God, done is better than perfect. Writing this podcast, content creation. Now I say done is better than perfect with writing. Obviously with the caveat that you have to edit. You should never just release a first draft of something because oh it's done; it's never going to be perfect. But with this podcast, there have been maybe two times where I have recorded an episode and then sat with it and be like, actually, it's not really, I'm not talking about this the right way. I don't like how I'm presenting this. And so I rerecord it. But that's happened like two times in 200 episodes. I just, I don't edit my podcasts very much. I want to just; I take some notes. I have a little Google Docs or Google Sheets that I look at where I have the title of the episode, a couple of notes to myself about the topic, and that's it. I don't edit the episodes a ton. Y'all know if you watch me on YouTube, I do not edit these videos very much. I just pop them up on YouTube and that's it because that's what I have capacity for. If I had to have high production, an extremely polished video or podcast, it just wouldn't happen. So done is absolutely better than perfect. And the last lesson I really want to pass on is that our brains are our own worst enemies as creative people.

This is something that I just have been hit in the face with over and over after 200 episodes in my business, in the podcast, in writing, in creating content, whatever it is, because our brains can convince us of all kinds of things that are just not true. There's that saying, feelings aren't facts, and this is what it is. Like I can have a feeling about something I've created, whether it's a chapter of a book, a podcast episode, a social media post, and feel like it's absolute **** like it's absolute hot garbage. And then I look at it the next day after some time has passed and I feel completely different about it. And maybe you've had that experience with something that you've written where you're like, God, this is just trash. And then you look at it 24 hours later and you're like, oh, actually this is not bad at all. So, it's like we can't trust our brains to be objective about what we're creating, which makes sense. We can never be objective about our own work. But also, our brains are our own worst enemies in terms of procrastinating and coming up with all kinds of stories about why we shouldn't do something, why it's going to be hard, why bother, self-doubt, that this, I'm pointing to my brain, this is what makes the writing process hard. This is what makes the creative process hard. It's all of the mindset stuff and the judgment and the procrastination and the guilt. It's like it just brings up all of this stuff. And that's what makes it hard.

The actual writing process, sitting down to write, coming up with ideas is not that difficult for me at least. Like if I take away all the mindset stuff and judgment and procrastination, the actual writing part is not that difficult. It's everything else, the 90% of the other stuff that makes it feel hard, and it makes it feel like why bother, makes it feel like why am I doing this? And I just really feel like That's it. Our brains are our own worst enemies. Also, our biggest asset because that's where our creativity comes from. But yeah, it just goes in hand in hand with it. So, I always try to remember feelings aren't facts. Like I can't get too precious about something that I create or be like, no, it has to be perfect. And what are people going to think? I just have to release it and put it out into the world. It's almost like I have to just Yeah; I really do just have to release it and stop thinking about it so much because we can overcomplicate everything as creative people. Okay, so those are my lessons and my rambling explanation of my author journey so far, my writing career so far. I just it has been a wild ride. I will keep you all posted as much as I can. Again, I know I feel like I've been saying for like ******* six months, oh, I'm almost on submission, almost on submission, but I will keep you all posted and let you know when we are officially on submission, which hopefully will be soon with this book. And if y'all can just like put good energy out into the world for the highest good, whatever's meant to be with this book, I would really appreciate it. And again, just thank you really for listening and supporting the podcast. It means a lot to me and hell, let's go for another 200 episodes. Let's do it. Okay, thank you for listening and I will talk to you.

Katie Wolf