Editor Leslie Watts talks to Rebecca about what it takes to build an author career, starting with giving yourself permission to figure out your own process. She talks about creating a writing practice and the importance of reading what you write so you can get curious and play in those spaces that light you up. Leslie gives Rebecca about lengthening her story and talks about what works and what doesn’t.
Leslie Watts is a Story Grid Certified Editor, writer, and podcaster based in Austin, Texas. She’s been writing for as long as she can remember—from her sixth-grade magazine about cats to writing practice while drafting opinions for an appellate court judge. As an editor, Leslie helps fiction and nonfiction clients write epic stories that matter. She believes writers become better storytellers through study and practice and that editors owe a duty of care to help writers with specific and supportive guidance. You can find her online at Writership.com.
Things Leslie and I mention in the episode:
Some of these links (marked with an *) are affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission if you click on and make a purchase from them. Your price doesn’t change either way.
- The Story Grid Roundtable Podcast
- Natalie Goldberg and her concept that we must study and accept our own minds
- Big Magic* by Elizabeth Gilbert
- Dorothea Brand’s Becoming a Writer*
- If You Want To Write*
- Morning pages from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way*
- Neil Gaiman
- Joyce Carol Oats: [on how to know when a story is done/how long it should be] when you can see the ending and you know where it’s going
- Myer’s Briggs
- Don’t Feed The Monkey Mind*
- Cassandra
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time*
- Ocean at the End of the Lane*
- Jenny Shih
The Story From This Episode
No one suspected that lightning had anything to do with the deaths in our town. That every time it struck, someone would lose their life in the same location exactly three days later.
But I’ve been keeping track.
I first noticed when Simon caught the strike on camera over the water. He won an award for the picture and so bragged about it for weeks after.
Three days after the shot was taken, by my keen observational eye, Sammy was pulled out by a rip current while her mother slept off an all night shift at the hospital on the shore. No one heard her screams. By the time they found the body, it was bloated and drifting to the surface. She was buried quickly, with little ceremony after that.
Mom and dad cooed over Sammy’s mother for a week or so after the death. They made me go with them when they brought casseroles and held up idle conversations in her now oversized house.
We stopped going because mom said, “we couldn’t help someone too stuck in their grief to even notice when company was over.” Good thing too, because two weeks after Sammy another lighting struck directly over their house. Three days after that they found Sammy’s mother, but no one would tell me how she died.
I could have written it off, could have said it was a fluke, except that the pattern followed twice more after the bad storm that tore up the Munro garden. Old man Jenkins died in his sleep and poor Mr. Henderson had a heart attack at work. Both on the same day, minutes apart.
Unrelated? That’s what they’d like you to think.
Mom made me stop keeping track of the lightning when I tried to tell her. She took my journal and notes and told me to “think happier thoughts.” I wouldn’t care so much because, in a way, I think she’s right, except that I think lightning struck over our house last night and now I’m wholly unprepared to try and stop whatever’s happening from taking someone I love.