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“I don’t get stuck,” Jillian Lauren says. She tackles resistance. Pray to write the most mediocre page, she told us. Write through your writer’s block. Jillian Lauren is a superstar. She’s written two bestselling memoirs and a novel, as well as an ongoing, award-winning mommy blog. We caught up with her at the launch of her tour for Everything You Ever Wanted. She gave terrific, clear insight into the process of finding an arc of your memoir, pinpointing the character shift and the moment that exemplifies that shift, and handling leaps in time deftly. We comiserated about the pain of reading your old journals, and she had an excellent tip for that, too. She showed us how to create a time map for your memoir, when to show and when to tell, and what it means to write through the body. In terms of structure, we talked about specific underlying forms and how to find the beginning. Jillian has a “board of directors”–the readers she trusts to read her drafts. She talks about when to show the work and what to show to whom. She inspired us with a frank look at honesty, rigor and self-reflection. “Art,” Jillian reminds us in a discussion of happy and unhappy endings, “is hopeful because it’s an act of creation.”
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Jillian Lauren
Jillian Lauren: I’m a writer, storyteller, mom, rock-wife, and Los Angeleno, by way of Jersey. I’m the New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs Everything You Ever Wanted, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem and the novel Pretty. Some Girls has been translated into 18 different languages and is currently being adapted for TV. I write a lot of essays and articles, some of which have been in The New York Times,The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine, Elle, The Daily Beast and Salon, among others. I speak and tell live stories, often with The Moth. Howard Stern interviewed me once and he was actually really nice! I did a Tedx talk about identity and adoption, in 2014 at Chapman University. I’m married to the musician Scott Shriner, and together we adopted our son Tariku from Ethiopia in 2009. We’ve slept a total of seven hours since.
Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.
The hosts:
Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.
Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.