Show-not-tell and emotional specifics

How do you capture something as enormous and personal as the feeling of “home” in a book? How can you navigate the chaotic discovery period in writing something new? With Roz Morris.

In the intro, KU vs Wide [Written Word Media]; Podcasts Overtake Radio, book marketing implications [The New Publishing Standard]; Tips for podcast guests;
The Vatican embraces AI for translation, but not for sermons [National Catholic Reporter]; NotebookLM; Self-Publishing in German; Bones of the Deep.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Roz Morris is an award-nominated literary fiction author, memoirist, and previously a bestselling ghostwriter. She writes writing craft books for authors under the Nail Your Novel brand, and is also an editor, speaker, and writing coach. Her latest travel memoir is Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Diary of House-Hunting, Happenstance & Home.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• How being an indie author has evolved over 15 years, from ebooks-only to special editions, multi-voice audiobooks and tools to help with everything
• Why “home” is such a powerful emotional theme and how to turn personal experiences into universal memoir
• Practical craft tips on show-don't-tell, writing about real people, and finding the right book title
• The chaotic discovery writing phase — why some books take seven years and why that's okay
• Building a newsletter sustainably by finding your authentic voice (and the power of a good pet story)
• Low-key book marketing strategies for memoir, including Roz's community-driven “home” collage campaign

You can find Roz at RozMorris.org.

Transcript of the interview with Roz Morris

JOANNA: Roz Morris is an award-nominated literary fiction author, memoirist, and previously a bestselling ghostwriter. She writes writing craft books for authors under the Nail Your Novel brand, and is also an editor, speaker, and writing coach.

Her latest travel memoir is Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Diary of House-Hunting, Happenstance & Home.

Welcome back to the show, Roz.

ROZ: Hi, Jo. It's so lovely to be back. I love that we managed to catch up every now and again on what we're doing. We've been doing this for so long.

JOANNA: In fact, if people don't know, the first time you came on this show was 2011, which is 15 years.

ROZ: I know!

JOANNA: It is so crazy. I guess we should say, we do know each other in person, in real life, but realistically we mainly catch up when you come on the podcast.

ROZ: Yes, we do, and by following what we're doing around the web. So I read your newsletters, you read mine.

JOANNA: Exactly. So good to return. You write all kinds of different things, but let's first take a look back. The first time you were on was 2011, 15 years ago. You've spanned traditional and indie, you've seen a lot. You know a lot of people in publishing as well.

What are the key things you think have shifted over the years, and why do you still choose indie for your work?

ROZ: Well, lots of things have shifted. Some things are more difficult now, some things are a lot easier.

We were lucky to be in right at the start and we learned the ropes and managed to make a lot of contacts with people. Now it's much more difficult to get your work out there and noticed by readers. You have to be more knowledgeable about things like marketing and promotions.

But that said, there are now much better tools for doing all this. Some really smart people have put their brains to work about how authors can get their work to the right readers, and there's also a lot more understanding of how that can be done in the modern world.

Everything is now much more niche-driven, isn't it? People know exactly what kind of thriller they like or what kind of memoir they like. In the old days it was probably just, “Well, you like thrillers,” and that could be absolutely loads of things.

Now we can find far better who might like our work. The tools we have are astonishing. To start with, in about 2011, we could only really produce ebooks and paperbacks. That was it. Anything else, you'd have to get a print run that would be quite expensive.

Now we can get amazing, beautiful special editions made. We can do audiobooks, multi-voice audiobooks. We can do ebooks with all sorts of enhancements. We can even make apps if we want to. There's absolutely loads that creators can do now that they couldn't before, so it's still a very exciting world.

JOANNA: When we first met, there was still a lot of negativity here in the UK around indie authors or self-publishing. That does feel like it's shifted.

Do you think that stigma around self-publishing has changed?

ROZ: I think it has really changed, yes. To start with, we were regarded as a bit of the Wild West. We were just tramping in and making our mark in places that we hadn't been invited into.

Now it's changed entirely. I think we've managed to convince people that we have the same quality standards.

Readers don't mind—I don't think the readers ever minded, actually, so long as the book looked right, felt right, read right. It's much easier now. It's much more of a level playing field. We can prove ourselves. In fact, we don't necessarily have to prove ourselves anymore. We just go and find readers.

JOANNA: Yes, I feel like that. I have nothing to prove. I just get on with my work and writing our books and putting them out there. We've got our own audiences now. I guess I always think of it as perhaps not a shadow industry, but almost a parallel industry.

You have spanned a lot of traditional publishing and you still do editing work. You know a lot of trad pub authors too.

Do you still actively choose indie for a particular reason?

ROZ: I do. I really like building my own body of work, and I'm now experienced enough to know what I do well, what I need advice with, and help with. I mean, we don't do all this completely by ourselves, do we? We bring in experts who will give us the right feedback if we're doing a new genre or a genre that's new to us.

I choose indie because I like the control. Because I began in traditional publishing—I was making books for other people—I just learned all the trades and how to do everything to a professional standard. I love being able to apply that to my own work.

I also love the way I can decide what I'm going to write next. If I was traditionally published, I would have to do something that fitted with whatever the publisher would want of me, and that isn't necessarily where my muse is taking me or what I've become interested in.

I think creative humans evolve throughout their lives. They become interested in different things, different themes, different ways of expressing themselves. I began by thinking I would just write novels, and now I've found myself writing memoirs as well.

That shift would have been difficult if someone else was having to make me fit into their marketing plans or what their imprint was known for. But because I've built my own audience, I can just bring them with me and say, “You might like this. It's still me. I'm just doing something different.”

JOANNA: I like that phrase: “creative humans.” That's what we are. As you say, I never thought I would write a memoir, and then I wrote Pilgrimage, and I think there's probably another one on its way. We do these different things over time.

Let's get into this new book, Turn Right at the Rainbow. It's about the idea of home. I've talked a lot about home on my Books And Travel Podcast, but not so much here.

Why is home such an emotional topic, for both positive and negative reasons? Why did you want to explore it?

ROZ: I think home is so emotional because it grows around you and it grows on you very slowly without you really realising it. As you are not looking, you suddenly realise, “Oh, it means such a lot.”

I love to play this mind game with myself—if you compare what your street looks like to you now and how it looked the first time you set eyes on it, it's a world of difference.

There are so many emotional layers that build up just because of the amount of time we spend in a place. It's like a relationship, a very slow-growing friendship. And as you say, sometimes it can be negative as well.

I became really fascinated with this because we decided to move house and we'd lived in the same house for about 30 years, which is a lot of time. It had seen a lot of us—a lot of our lives, a lot of big decisions, a lot of good times, a lot of difficult times. I felt that was all somehow encapsulated in the place.

I know that readers of certain horror or even spiritual fiction will have this feeling that a place contains emotions and pasts and all sorts of vibes that just stay in there. When we were going around looking at a house to buy, I was thinking, “How do we even know how we will feel about it?”

We're moving out of somewhere that has immense amounts of feelings and associations, and we're trying to judge whether somewhere else will feel right. It just seemed like we were making a decision of cosmic proportions.

It comes down so much to chance as well. You're not only just deciding, “Okay, I'd like to buy that one,” and pressing a button like on eBay and you've won it. It doesn't happen like that. There are lots of middle steps.

The other person's got to agree to sell to you, not do the dirty on you and sell to someone else. You've got all sorts of machinations going on that you have no idea about. And you only have what's on offer—you only get an opportunity to buy a place because someone else has decided to let it go.

All this seemed like immense amounts of chance, of dice rolling. I thought, yet we end up in these places and they mean so much to us. It just blew my mind. I thought, “I've got to write about this.”

JOANNA: It's really interesting, isn't it? I really only started using the word “home” after the pandemic and living here in Bath. We had luckily just bought a house before then, and I'd never really considered anywhere to be a home.

I've talked about this idea of third culture kids—people who grow up between cultures and don't feel like there's a home anywhere.

I was really interested in your book because there's so much about the functional things that have to happen when you move house or look for a house, and often people aren't thinking about it as deeply as you are.

So did you start working on the memoir as you went to see places, or was it something you thought about when you were leaving?

Was it a “moving towards” kind of memoir or a “sad nostalgia” memoir?

ROZ: Well, it could have been very sad and nostalgic because I do like to write really emotional things, and they're not necessarily for sharing with everybody, but I was very interested in the emotions of it.

I started keeping diaries. Some of them were just diaries I'd write down, some of them were emails I'd send to friends who were saying, “How's it going?” And then I'd find I was just writing pieces rather than emails, and it built up really.

JOANNA: It's interesting, you said you write emotional things. We mentioned nostalgia, and obviously there are memories in the home, but it's very easy to say a word like “nostalgia” and everyone thinks that means different things. One of the important things about writing is to be very specific rather than general.

Can you give us some tips about how we can turn big emotions into specific written things that bring it alive for our readers?

ROZ: It's really interesting that you mention nostalgia, because what we have to be careful of is not writing just for ourselves. It starts with us—our feelings about something, our responses, our curiosities—but we then have to let other people in.

There's nothing more boring than reading something that's just a memoir manuscript that doesn't reach out to anyone in any way. It's like looking through their holiday snaps.

What you have to do is somehow find something bigger in there that will allow everyone to connect and think, “Oh, this is about me too,” or “I've thought this too.”

As I said, we start with things that feel powerful and important for us, and I think we don't necessarily need to go looking for them. They emerge the more deeply we think about what we're writing. We find they're building.

Certainly for me, it's what pulls me back to an idea, thinking, “There's something in this idea that's really talking to me now. What is it?”

Often I'll need to go for walks and things to let the logical mind turn off and ideas start coming in. But I'll find that something is building and it seems to become more and more something that will speak to others rather than just to me.

That's one way of doing it—by listening to your intuition and delving more and more until you find something that seems worth saying to other people.

But you could do it another way. If you decided you wanted to write a book about home, and you'd already got your big theme, you could then think, “Well, how will I make this into something manageable?” So you start with something big and build it into smaller-scale things that can be related to.

You might look at ideas of homes—situations of people who have lost their home, like the kind of displacement we see at the moment. Or we might look at another aspect, such as people who sell homes and what they must feel like being these go-betweens between worlds, between people who are doing these immense changes in their lives.

Or we might think of an ecological angle—the planet Earth and what we're doing to it, or our place in the cosmos.

We might start with a thing we want to write about and then find, “How are we going to treat it?” That usually comes down to what appeals to us. It might be the ecological side. It might be the story of a few estate agents who are trying to sell homes for people. Or it might be like mine—just a personal story of trying to move house.

From that, we can create something that will have a wider resonance as well as starting with something that's personally interesting to you. The big emotions will come out of that wider resonance.

JOANNA: Trying to go deeper on that—

It's the “show, don't tell” idea, isn't it?

If you'd said, “I felt very sad about leaving my house” or “I felt very sad about the prospect of leaving my house,” that is not a whole book.

ROZ: Yes. It's why you felt sad, how you felt sad, what it made you think of. That's a very good point about “show, don't tell,” which is a fundamental writing technique.

It basically tells people exactly how you feel about a particular thing, which is not the same as the way anyone else would feel about it—but still, curiously, it can be universal and something that we can all tap into.

Funnily enough, by being very specific, by saying, “I realised when we'd signed the contract to sell the house that it wasn't ours anymore, and it had been, and I felt like I was betraying it,” that starts to get really personal.

People might think, “Yes, I felt like that too,” or “I hadn't thought you'd feel like that, but I can understand it.” Those specifics are what really let people into the journey that you're taking them on.

JOANNA: And isn't this one of the challenges, that we're not even going to use a word like “sad,” basically.

ROZ: Yes. It's like, who was it who said, “Don't tell me if they got wet—tell me how it felt to get wet in that particular situation.” Then the reader will think, “Oh yes, they got wet,” but they'll also have had an experience that took them somewhere interesting.

JOANNA: Yes. Show me the raindrops on the umbrella and the splashing through the puddles. I think this is so important with big emotions.

Also, when we say nostalgia—we've talked before about Stranger Things and Kate Bush and the way Stranger Things used songs and nostalgia. Oh, I was watching Derry Girls—have you seen Derry Girls?

ROZ: No, I haven't yet.

JOANNA: Oh, it's brilliant. It's so good. It's pretty old now, but it's a nineties soundtrack and I'm watching going, “Oh, they got this so right.” They just got it right with the songs. You feel nostalgic because you feel an emotion that is linked to that music.

It makes you feel a certain way, but everyone feels these things in different ways. I think that is a challenge of fiction, and also memoir. Certainly with memoir and fiction, this is so important.

ROZ: Yes, and I was just thinking with self-help books, it's even important there because self-help books have to show they understand how the reader is feeling.

JOANNA: Yes, and sometimes you use anecdotes to do that.

Another challenge with memoir—in this book, you're going round having a look at places, and they're real places and there are real people. This can be difficult.

What are things that people need to be wary of if using real people in real places? Do you need permissions for things?

ROZ: That book was particularly tricky because, as you said, I was going around real places and talking about real people. With most of them, they're not identifiable. Even though I was specific about particular aspects of particular houses, it would be very hard for anyone to know where those houses were.

I think possibly the only way you would recognise it is if that happened to be your own house. The people, similarly—there's a lot about estate agents and other professionals. They were all real incidents and real things that happened, but no one is identifiable.

A very important thing about writing a book like this is you're always going to have antagonists, because you have to have people who you're finding difficult, people who are making life a bit difficult for you. You have to present them in a way that understands what it's like to be them as well.

If you're writing a book where your purpose is to expose wrongdoing or injustices, then you might be more forthright about just saying, “This is wrong, the way this person behaved was wrong.” You might identify villains if that's appropriate, although you'd have to be very careful legally.

This kind of book is more nuanced. The antagonists were simply people who were trying to do the right thing for them. You have to understand what it's like to be them.

Quite a lot of the time, I found that the real story was how ill-equipped I sometimes felt to deal with people who were maybe covering something up, or maybe not, but just not expressing themselves very clearly.

Estate agents who had an agenda, and I was thinking, “Who are they acting for? Are they acting for me, or are they acting for someone else that we don't even know about?” There's a fair bit of conflict in the book, but it comes from people being people and doing what they have to do.

I just wanted to find a good house in an area that was nice, a house I could trust and rely on, for a price that was right. The people who were selling to me just wanted to sell the house no matter what because that was what they needed to do.

You always have to understand what the other person's point of view is. Often in this kind of memoir, even though you might be getting very frustrated, it's best to also see a bit of a ridiculous side to yourself—when you're getting grumpy, for instance.

It's all just humans being humans in a situation where ultimately you're going to end up doing a life-changing and important thing. I found there's quite a lot of humour in that.

We were shuffling things around and, as I said, we were eventually going to be making a cosmic change that would affect the place we called home. I found that quite amusing in a lot of ways. I think you've got to be very levelheaded about this, particularly about writing about other people.

Sometimes you do have to ask for permission. I didn't have to do that very much in this book. There were people I wrote about who are actually friends, who would recognise themselves and their stories. I checked that they didn't mind me quoting particular things, and they were all fine with that.

In my previous memoir, Not Quite Lost, I actually wrote about a group of people who were completely identifiable. They would definitely have known who they were, and other people would have known who they were. There was no hiding them.

They were the people near Brighton who were cryonicists—preserving dead bodies, freezing them, in the hope that they could be revived at a much later date when science had solved the problem that killed them.

I went to visit this group of cryonicists, and I'd written a diary about it at the time. Then I followed up when I was writing the book to find out what happened to them. I thought, I've simply got to contact them and tell them I'm going to write this. “I'll send it to you, you give me your comments,” and I did.

They gave me some good comments and said, “Oh, please don't put that,” or “Let me clarify this.” Everything was fine. So there I did actually seek them out and check that what I was going to write was okay.

JOANNA: Yes, in that situation, there can't be many cryonicists in that area.

ROZ: They really were identifiable.

JOANNA: There's probably only one group! But this is really interesting, because obviously memoir is a personal thing. You're curating who you are as well in the book, and your husband. I think it's interesting, because I had the problem of “Am I giving away too much about myself?”

Do you feel like with everything you've written, you've already given away everything about yourself by now?

Are you just completely relaxed about being personal, for yourself and for your husband?

ROZ: I think I have become more relaxed about it. My first memoir wasn't nearly as personal as yours was. You were going to some quite difficult places.

With Turn Right at the Rainbow, I was approaching some darker places, actually, and I had to consider how much to reveal and how much not to. But I found once I started writing, the honesty just took over.

I thought, “This is fine. I have read plenty of books that have done this, and I've loved them. I've loved getting to know someone on that deeper level.” It was just something I took my example from—other writers I'd enjoyed.

JOANNA: Yes. I think that's definitely the way memoir has to happen, because it can be very hard to know how to structure it.

Let's come to the title. Turn Right at the Rainbow. Really great title, and obviously a subtitle which is important as well for theme.

Talk about where the title came from and also the challenges of titling books of any genre.

You've had some other great titles for your novels—at least titles I've thought, “Oh yes, that's perfect.” Titling can be really hard.

ROZ: Oh, thank you for that. Yes, it is hard. Ever Rest, which was the title of my last novel, just came to me early on. I was very lucky with that. It fitted the themes and it fitted what was going on, but it was just a bolt from the blue.

I found that also with Turn Right at the Rainbow, it was an accident. It slipped out. I was going to call it something else, and then this incident happened. “Turn Right at the Rainbow” is actually one of the stories in the book. I call it the title track, as if it's an album.

We were going somewhere in the car and the sat nav said, “Turn right at the rainbow.” And Dave and I just fell about, “What did it just say?!” It also seemed to really sum up the journey we were on. We were looking for rainbows and pots of gold and completely at the mercy of chance.

It just stayed with me. It seemed the right thing. I wrote the piece first and then I kept thinking, “Well, this sounds like a good title.” Dave said it sounded like a good title. And then a friend of mine who does a lot of beta reading for me said, “Oh, that is the title, isn't it?” When several people tell you that's the title, you've got to take notice.

But how we find these things is more difficult, as you said. You just work and work at it, beating your head against the wall. I find they always come to me when I'm not looking. It really helps to do something like exercise, which will put you in a bit of a different mind state. Do you find this as well?

JOANNA: Yes, I often like a title earlier on that then changes as the book goes. I mean, we're both discovery writers really, although you do reverse outlines and other things. You have a chaotic discovery phase.

I feel like when I'm in that phase, it might be called something, and then I often find that's not what it ends up being, because the book has actually changed in the process.

ROZ: Yes, very much. That's part of how we realise what we should be writing. I do have working titles and then something might come along and say, “This seems actually like what you should call it and what you've been working towards, what you've been discovering about it.”

I think a good title has a real sense of emotional frisson as well. With memoir, it's easier because we can add a subtitle to explain what we mean. With fiction, it's more difficult. We've got to really hope that it all comes through those few words, and that's a bit harder.

JOANNA: Let's talk about your next book. On your website it says it might be a novel, it might be narrative nonfiction, and you have a working title of Four.

I wondered if you'd talk a bit more about this chaotic discovery writing phase when we just don't know what's coming.

I feel like you and I have been doing this long enough—you longer than me—so maybe we're okay with it. But newer writers might find this stage really difficult. Where's the fun in it? Why is it so difficult? And how can people deal with it?

ROZ: You've summed that up really well. It's fun and it's difficult, and I still find it difficult even after all these years. I have to remind myself, looking back at where Ever Rest started, because that was a particularly difficult one. It took me seven years to work out what to do with it, and I wrote three other books in the meantime.

It just comes together in the end. What I find is that something takes root in my mind and it collects things. The title you just picked out there—the book with working title of Four—it's now two books. One possibly another memoir and one possibly fiction.

It's evolving all the time. I'm just collecting what seems to go with it for now and thinking, “That belongs with it somehow. I don't yet know how, but my intuition is that the two work well together.” There's a harmony there that I see.

In the very early stages, that's what I find something is. Then I might get a more concrete idea, say a piece of story or a character, and I'll have the feeling that they really fit together.

Once I've got something concrete like that, I can start doing more active research to pursue the idea. But in the beginning, they're all just little twinkles in the eye and you just have to let them develop.

If you want to get started on something because you feel you want to get started and you don't feel happy if you're not working on something, you could do a far more active kind of discovery. Writing lists. Lists are great for this.

I find lists of what you don't want it to be are just as helpful as what you do want it to be because that certainly narrows down a lot and helps you make good choices.

You've got a lot of choices to make at the beginning of a book. You've got to decide: What's it going to be about? What isn't it going to be about? What kind of characters am I interested in? What kind of situations am I interested in?

What doesn't interest me about this situation? Very important—saves you a lot of time. What does interest me?

If you can start by doing that kind of thing, you will find that you start gathering stuff that gets attracted to it. It's almost like the world starts giving it to you. This is discovery writing, but it's also chivvying it along a bit and getting going. It does work.

Joanna: I like the idea of listing what you don't want it to be.

I think that's very useful because often writers, especially in the early stages—or even not, I still struggle with this—it's knowing what genre it might actually be.

With Bones of the Deep, which is my next thriller, it was originally going to be horror and I was writing it, and then I realised one of the big differences between horror and thriller is the ending and how character arcs are resolved and the way things are written.

I was just like, “Do you know what? I actually feel like this is more thriller than horror,” and that really shaped the direction. Even though so much of it was the same, it shaped a lot about the book.

It's always hard talking about this stuff without giving spoilers, but I think deciding, “Okay, this is not a horror,” actually helped me find my way back to thriller.

ROZ: Yes, I do know what you mean. That makes perfect sense to me, with no spoilers either. It's so interesting how a very broad-strokes picture like that can still be very helpful. Just trying to make something a bit different from the way you've been envisaging it can lead to massive breakthroughs.

“Oh no, it's not a thriller—I don't have to be aiming for that kind of effect.” Or try changing the tone a little bit and see if that just makes you happier with what you're making, more comfortable with it.

JOANNA: You mentioned the seven years that Ever Rest took. We should say the title is in two words—”Ever” and “Rest”—but it is also about Everest the mountain in many ways. That's why it's such a perfect title.

If that took seven years and you were doing all this other stuff and writing other books along the way, how do you keep your research under control? How do you do that? I still use Scrivener projects as my main research place.

How do you do your research and organisation?

ROZ: A lot of scraps of paper. My desk is massive. It used to be a dining table with leaves in it. It's spread out to its fullest length, and it's got heaps of little pieces of paper. I know what's on them all, and there are different areas, different zones.

I'm very much a paper writer because I like the tangibility of it. I also like the creativity of taking a piece of paper and tearing it into an odd shape and writing a note on that. It seems as sort of profound and lucky as the idea. I really like that.

I do make text files and keep notes that way. Once something is starting to get to a phase where it's becoming serious, it will then be a folder with various files that discuss different aspects of it.

I do a lot of discussing with myself while writing, and I don't necessarily look at it all again. The writing of it clarifies something or allows me to put something aside and say, “No, that doesn't quite belong.”

Gradually I start to look at things, look at what I've gathered, and think, “How does this fit with this?” And it helps to look away as well. As I said with finding titles, sometimes the right thing is in your subconscious and it's waiting to just sail in if you look at it in a different way.

There's a lot to be said for working on several ideas, not looking at some of them for a while, then going back and thinking, “Oh, I know what to do with this now.”

JOANNA: Yes. My Writing the Shadow, I was talking about that when we met, and that definitely took about a decade.

ROZ: Yes.

JOANNA: I kept having to come back to that, and sometimes we're just not ready.

Even as experienced writers, we're not ready for a particular book.

With Bones of the Deep, I did the trip that it's based on in 1999. Since I became a writer, I've thought I have to use that trip in some way, and I never found the right way to use it. I came at it a couple of times and it just never sat right with me.

Then something on this master's course I'm doing around human remains and indigenous cultures just suddenly all clicked. You can't really rush that, can you?

ROZ: You absolutely can't. It's something you develop a sense for, the more you do—whether something's ready or whether you should just let it think about itself for a while whilst you work on something else.

It really helps to have something else to work on because I panic a bit if I don't have something creative to do. I just have to create, I have to make things, particularly in writing. But I also like doing various little arty things as well. I need to always have something to be writing about or exploring in words.

Sometimes a book isn't ready for that intense pressure of being properly written. So it helps to have several things that I can play with and then pick one and go, “Okay, now I'm going to really perform this on the page.”

JOANNA: Do you find that nonfiction—because you have some craft books as well—do you find the nonfiction side is quite different? Can you almost just go and write a nonfiction book or work on someone else's project?

Does that use a different kind of creativity?

ROZ: Yes, it does. Creativity where you're trying to explain something to creative people is totally different from creativity where you're trying to involve them in emotions and a journey and nuances of meaning. They're very different, but they're still fun.

So, yes, I am an editor as well, and that feeds my creativity in various unexpected ways. I'll see what someone has done and think, “Oh, that's very interesting that they did that.”

It can make me think in different ways—different shapes for stories, different kinds of characters to have. It really opens your eyes, working with other creative people.

JOANNA: I wanted to return to what you said at the beginning, that it is more difficult these days to get our work noticed. There's certainly a challenge in writing a travel memoir about home. What are you doing to market this book?

What have you learned about book marketing for memoir in particular that might help other people?

ROZ: Partly I realised it was quite a natural progression for me because in my newsletter I always write a couple of little pieces. I think they're called “life writing.” Just little things that have happened to me. That's sort of like memoir, creative nonfiction, personal essays.

I was quite naturally writing that sort of thing to my newsletter readers, and I realised that was already good preparation for the kind of way that I would write in a memoir.

As for the actual campaign, I actually came up with an idea which quite surprised me because I didn't think I was good at that. I'm making a collage of the word “home” written in lots of different handwriting, on lots of different things, in lots of different languages.

I'm getting people to contribute these and send them to me, and I'm building them into a series of collages that's just got the word “home” everywhere. People have been contributing them by sending them by email or on Facebook Messenger, and I've been putting them up on my social platforms.

They look stunning. It's amazing. People are writing the word “home” on a post-it or sticking it to a picture of their radiator. Someone wrote it in snow on her car when we had snow.

Someone wrote it on a pottery shard she found in her drive when she bought the house. She thought it was mysterious. There are all these lovely stories that people are telling me as well.

I'm making them into little artworks and putting them up every day as the book comes to launch. It's so much fun, and it also has a deeper purpose because it shows how home is different for all of us and how it builds as uniquely as our handwriting. Our handwriting has a story. I should do a book about that!

JOANNA: That's a weird one. Handwriting always gets me, although it'd be interesting these days because so many people don't handwrite things anymore. You can probably tell the age of someone by how well-developed their handwriting is.

ROZ: Except mine has just withered. I can barely write for more than a few minutes.

JOANNA: Oh, I know what you mean. Your hand gets really tired.

ROZ: We used to write three-hour exams. How did we do that?

JOANNA: I really don't know.

JOANNA: Just coming back on that. You mentioned mainly you're doing your newsletter and connecting with your own community. You've done podcasts with me and with other people. But I feel like in the indie community, the whole “you must build your newsletter” thing is described as something quite frantic.

How have you built a newsletter in a sustainable manner?

ROZ: I've built it by finding what suited me. To start with I thought, “What will I put in it? News, obviously.” But I wasn't doing that much that was newsworthy. Then I began to examine what news could actually be.

The turning point really happened when I wrote the first memoir, Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction. I thought, “I have to explain to people why I'm writing a memoir,” because it seemed like a very audacious thing to do—”Read about me!” I thought I had to explain myself.

So I told the story of how I came to think about writing such an audacious book. I just found a natural way to tell stories about what I was doing creatively.

I thought, “I like this. I like writing a newsletter like this.” And it's not all me, me, me. It's “I'm discovering this and it makes me think this,” and it just seems to be generally about life, about little questions that we might all face.

From then, I found I really enjoyed writing a newsletter because I felt I had something to say. I couldn't put lists of where I was speaking, what I was teaching, what special offers I had, because that wasn't really how my creative life worked.

Once I found something I could sustainably write about every month, it really helped. Oh, it also helps to have a pet, by the way.

JOANNA: Yes, you have a horse!

ROZ: I've got a horse. People absolutely love hearing the stories about my ongoing relationship with this horse. Even if they're not horsey, they write to me and say, “We just love your horse.” It helps to have a human interest thing going on like that.

So that works for me. Everyone's got different things that will work for them. But for me, it builds just a sense of connection, human connection. I'm human, making things.

JOANNA: In terms of actually getting people signed up—has it literally just been over time? People have read your book, signed up from the link at the back?

Have you ever done any specific growth marketing around your newsletter?

ROZ: I tried a little bit of growth marketing. I have a freebie version of one of my Nail Your Novel books and I put that on a promotion site. I got lots of newsletter signups, but they sort of dwindled away.

When I get unsubscribes, it's usually from that list, because it wasn't really what they came for. They just came for a free book of writing tips. While I do writing tips on my blog—I'm still doing those—it wasn't really what my newsletter was about.

What I found was that that wasn't going to get people who were going to be interested long-term in what I was writing about in my newsletter. Whatever you do, I found, has got to be true to what you are actually giving them.

JOANNA: Yes, I think that's really key. I make sure I email once every couple of weeks. And you welcome the unsubscribes. You have to welcome them because those people are not right for you and they're not interested in what you're doing.

At the end of the day, we're still trying to sell books. As much as you're enjoying the connection with your audience, you are still trying to sell Turn Right at the Rainbow and your other books, right?

ROZ: Absolutely, yes. And as you say, someone who decides, “No, not for me anymore,” and that's good. There are still people who you are right for.

JOANNA: Mm-hmm.

ROZ: I do market my newsletter in a very low-key way. I make a graphic every month for the newsletter, it's like a magazine cover. “What's in it?” And I put that around all my social media. I change my Facebook page header so it's got that on it, my Bluesky header.

People can see what it's like, what the vibe is, and they know where to find it if they're interested. I find that kind of low-key approach works quite well for what I'm offering. It's got to be true to what you offer.

JOANNA: Yes, and true for a long-term career, I think. When I first met you and your husband Dave, it was like, “Oh, here are some people who are in this writing business, have already been in it for a while.” And both of you are still here. I just feel like—

You have to do it in a sustainable way, whether it's writing or marketing or any of this.

The only way to do it is to, as you said, live as a creative human and not make it all frantic and “must be now.”

ROZ: Yes. I mean, I do have to-do lists that are quite long for every week, but I've learned to pace myself. I've learned how often I can write a good blog post. I could churn out blog posts that were far more frequent, but they wouldn't be as good. They wouldn't be as properly thought through.

In the old days with blogs, you had an advantage if you were blogging very frequently, I think you got more noticed by Google because you were constantly putting up fresh content. But if that's not sustainable for you, it's not going to do you any good.

Now there's so much content around that it's probably fine to post once a month if that is what you're going to do and how you're going to present the best of yourself.

I see a lot on Substack—I've recently started Substack as well—I see people writing every other day. I think they're good, that's interesting, but I don't have time to read it. I would love to have the time, but I don't.

So there's actually no sin in only posting once a month—one newsletter a month, one blog post a month, one Substack a month. That's plenty. People will still find that enough if they get you.

JOANNA: Fantastic.

So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?

ROZ: My website is probably the easiest place, RozMorris.org.

JOANNA: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time, Roz. As ever, that was great.

ROZ: Thank you, Jo.

The post Writing Emotion, Discovery Writing, And Slow Sustainable Book Marketing With Roz Morris first appeared on The Creative Penn.