Episode 56: A Writer's Brain
IN THIS EPISODE
Jennie stereotypes Mel's musical tastes.
Check out Melanie's 8-hour writing playlist.
Jennie eats her breakfast of avocado toast on Ezekial bread with Penzey's everything bagel topper.
Jennie and Abby discuss worldbuilding and how your details serve the story.
“What do I need to have happen in this scene? What do I need to have happen in this world? Why is it even there? Because if you can’t answer that, you want to take it out.”
Don't just think about what's cool or plausible, but think about what serves your story.
Abby's discusses how watching the TV show The Goldbergs triggered a chain reaction of thoughts that took her from The Goldbergs to Ferris Bueller's Day Off to a memory from her days teaching high school to the book Wonder to the new, fabulous ending to her story.
Sometimes you have to stop along the way and go backward in order to replan how to move forward based on new discoveries in your story. Abby had to go back and remake the last half of her two-tier outline to fit the new ending.
Abby thinks it's important to draw on things that have happened to you and weave them into your fiction to make it more believable.
“One of the worst things you say to a fiction writer is, ‘Did that happen to you? Like, is that real?’ because it diminishes the work. Like what *Abby* just did of filtering everything, and massaging it, and making it fit the story... All those decisions and all that work, that’s the creative process.”
