Ep 178: What If You Already Found Yourself? Angela Brown on Fiction, Fear, and Saying No
This episode quickly got personal because I'm elbow-deep in my first novel after six nonfiction books, and Angela Brown writes the kind of fiction that makes one feel quite seen.
Angela is the author of Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time, Some Other Time, and her newest, Ways to Find Yourself. And I will fully admit I read the prologue the night before we recorded and had a moment. Not a cute moment. A "why am I like this" moment. So we start there, obviously.
But this conversation goes way past my feelings about her book (though we do talk about her characters, her sneaky habit of naming them after real people in her life, and the "what if" questions that kick off each of her novels). We get into the actual mess of writing fiction: how she doesn't always know where a story is headed when she starts it, the time an entire book arrived in the shower (why does all our best thinking happen there?) and she wouldn't leave her desk for two hours because she was afraid it would vanish, and the moment (mid-draft) when she realized the book wasn't broken—she was just writing from the wrong point of view.
We also talk about her MFA (Was it worth it?), the myth that there's one right way to write a book, and how she's getting much better at saying one simple word: no.
Oh, and stick around for the end. You'll walk away saying "no ploblem" for the rest of your week. You're welcome.
CONNECT WITH ANGELA BROWN
Website: AngelaBrownBooks.com
Instagram: @angelabrownbooks
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