Transcript interview with Alice Kuipers

A writer's life, from the competitions to competitive publishing.

This transcript was created by Podium. You can listen to the interview here.

0:00:01 - Natalie Phillips

Hello everybody and welcome back to Plotted Out. Today I have a real treat for you. I have Alice Kuipers and she is the award-winning, internationally best-selling author of the chapter book series Polly Diamond, the magic book, appearance Magazine, best Book 2018 and the Junior Guilds Selection Library praise for bringing the magic of imagination to life. So she is acclaimed literally across the world. She has 14 novels under her belt at this moment in time. She is also a novelist coach and she's here with us on Substack today.

She regularly shares her love of reading on CTV Sax Ton in a segment Ali's Book Club and in her Substack newsletter. She's a mother of four. She has taught writing to thousands of people in personal and online workshops, and Chanel works at the Novelry as a writing coach. And if that is not enough, if that doesn't make her such an awesome person, I can also reveal she's a co-chair of the Saskatoon Public School Foundation's campaign, which raised 20 million dollars to ensure every child is reading a grade three level book by the time they leave that age. Okay, so I'm obviously going to be giving you lots of links so you can go and investigate her and her substack and her child support endeavours, and I am thrilled to have you here. Alice, thank you for coming on today.

0:01:25 - Alice Kuipers

Thanks very much. It's lovely to be here with you.

0:01:30 - Natalie Phillips

Now I admit I came across Alice almost by accident, because we did so on a kind of novelist meet and greet and sub stack. Then I started reading what she was writing, which is called Confessions and Coffee, and there's these beautiful, serene little posts that are like little jewels in your day. You sit down, you read it and you could go ah, that moment you have alice, you're having real talent for wordsmithing just that sequence of words that just get in a row and it's amazing. And I know for you that's normal life, but for me it was just a beautiful time out. So thank you thank you.

0:02:01 - Alice Kuipers

I don't think there's ever a stage in a writing life where you're like, oh, now I know exactly what I'm doing. So for me, with Substack, it's been a place where I get to be a bit playful outside of my writing life and try writing in a more personal way, which I haven't done much before. I've written tons of fiction. I began to ghost. I work as a ghostwriter too, maybe four or five years ago, and now at the Novelry I teach memoir, how do people write a memoir? And so I talk more and more about this notion of personal essay and personal storytelling, firstly with people who I'm ghosting for and then with people I'm working with at the Novelry.

And I'm really interested in how, with a personal essay and someone else said this, not me, I just can't remember who um, when you start you don't know at the end yourself as well at the beginning. So you, as you go through, you learn more about yourself than you knew, and by doing that, hopefully the reader does too. So that's kind of the ethic. I'm not wording it as well as the person who said it in the first place, but that's what I'm thinking about is, how do you write something where you're not clear, necessarily, of what it is you're going to know about yourself until you excavate it yes, I mean that in some respects is a very process of writing in its own right.

0:03:19 - Natalie Phillips

Only when you get down words on paper and you've clearly laid out your thoughts do you get that. And that's why I'm a little bit dubious about um, chat, gtp and or ai variants saying we can do writing for you. I'm like that's great, but you can't do your thinking for us. Okay, we can't use you to think. We've got to write in order to think and, logically, our thoughts, that's the best thing.

0:03:40 - Alice Kuipers

I think what's interesting yeah, I think what's interesting with um, with that chat GPT space is exactly that is the kind of moral judgment that you bring to what you're doing as an author isn't, isn't there with chat GPT and it doesn't give you the kind of creative room. So one of the things I'm most interested in as a writer is how to get into flow, how that kind of creative, playful space that writing has to be helps you do all the other things you have to do in life. So, like you, natalie, I have kids and try to juggle a whole bunch of things in my day to day and for me, when I come to that kind of fuel of writing, it helps me do better at being a human being. So handing that over to ChatGPT might be tempting from the point of view of speeding anything up, but it takes away what writing gives me, which is the, the fuel to to be a better human being, I think absolutely, and um, that leads me nicely on to the next point.

0:04:38 - Natalie Phillips

I mean 14 books and you've been in 11 countries and you're titan. You know Most people will have. I know I always sort of look at that with some surprise.

0:04:47 - Alice Kuipers

I'm like oh yeah, that is me. I mean, well, I had a bunch of children in there too, so it's sort of like book, baby, book, baby, book, baby. So some of it happened a little bit offside somehow. You know, I look back and think and one of my children has some quite challenging needs, uh. So there was like just years and years of him screaming his head off at me and attacking me and just the book stuff sort of happened along the edges. But for me it sort of helped me get through, um, get through what life looks like for me, uh, which in the main is very pleasant and privileged, but still the challenges of raising lots of children. And and then I think, um, yeah, yeah, the books have done well, some of them and some of them not.

I mean, you learn as a writer for a long time that the outside is, is outside, and really what's exciting is, and maybe your listeners or people who are here now like for them, what's exciting is, what's, what's the idea, what's the story, what are you trying trying to say? Can you know that in the first draft? Do you know that in the fifth draft? I'm on the sixth draft of my book right now I think I'm finally figuring it out. You know, and I've written so many books, um, it's, it's always a it's always a personal kind of challenge.

And then that meeting with a reader later so lovely to have a child read something you write. But you know, it's just as humbling when a child listens to you passionately describe your writing process and they put their hand up at the end and say I've got an ingrown toenail and you're like, oh, you didn't care about that at all. You know it is external. All that stuff is external for me. The, the books and the you know the different countries is wonderful but doesn't feel very connected to what I'm actually writing and doing.

0:06:26 - Natalie Phillips

I was going to say. I mean, given your busy life and the sheer amount of stuff you've got going on, how do you make space for writing and how do you make space for the process of editing? Because it's never enough just to do one edit and done. You normally have to go through five or six to really dig out what's going on.

0:06:41 - Alice Kuipers

Yeah, so it's a good question, the question around how to make time for it, and I think it's one I'm commonly asked. I have ADHD and so partly the reason my writing life sounds exhausting to lots of people is just because that's how I roll Like it helps me manage my brain and how busy it is to be doing lots of things. But sometimes I kind of hit that burnout and overwhelm where I've taken on too many different projects. So for me, what I like to do, and what I've learned to do, is put the writing to the front end of the day and to write for an hour or two, maybe three, around, you know, getting the kids to school. So maybe an hour between six and seven, maybe a couple hours, like I was writing until we started our call now, which here in Canada was nine till 1030. And then mix it up with some other things. So get up, move around. Then I do work things and I try to put those a bit later in the day. My job things, which I'm lucky that all of my work is fairly flexible hours now. So this afternoon I'll do some novelry work and get on top of things there and do some coaching calls which get on top of things there, and do some coaching calls which are wonderful and inspiring and fun. Um, and then editorially, I like to shift some of that to later on in the day when I'm a bit, a bit more able to be critical and calm, but not, um, mean to myself. I think editorially sometimes you can be a bit abrasive, like, oh, this sucks, this is terrible if there isn't enough actual writing happening. So I tend to try to do my editorial work in spaces, particularly the more fine level stuff. Maybe if the editorial is at that kind of developmental and thinking and how is this really story working that can go in the front end of the day.

So for me it's a lot about how I work with my rhythms and routines as who. I am right and that's partly because I have to balance how my brain deals with stuff and partly because it's just how I find I write better. And some days it doesn't happen because some kid has been puking all night and so I try to give myself grace on those days. But also I'm reflective at the end of the week so I'll look back and, okay, did I really? How much writing did I actually get done this week. How much did I do that was not connected to the primary writing source of the day, like how far did I go from my story that I'm working on right now and how much did I spend in that kind of strange gray zone of busy work, checking emails and scrolling and like that stuff, you know like. So I'm a little bit rigorous with myself once a week where I just kind of look back and look forward.

What can I take out of the week coming up and where can I block out a writing hour? And so for some people listening, you know they don't have much time around, so can they do half an hour every day or an hour every day or an hour every two days. What could you actually block out and then really honor that promise? It's horrid the first couple minutes sometimes getting to the page because you're like, oh, I just don't know what to write and it's so much and I'm never going to finish my book. I just kind of tune that out out. I know it's going to feel like that. I know that's part of getting into flow and so I just try to sit down and and ignore that and okay, what's the next sentence, just one sentence right yeah, no, that is a really, really good piece of advice and, oddly enough, you're not the first person I've heard this from.

0:10:00 - Natalie Phillips

I mean, um, I've, at this point, interviewed a few other authors part of this and they've all said the same thing they've had to find their own personal rhythm for writing. One of the people I've read is Erica Drayton. She writes often at the end of the day and she has to get something written before she goes to bed. Like you, she's a mother. Like you she's very busy. She does it the same. Simon is another one. He does it in blocks, know fits and starts, and he says Substack actually does allow him to produce his rhythm and keeps him accountable. Which leads me to a great question how did you get started in Substack?

0:10:33 - Alice Kuipers

So for many years I had a mailing list and I didn't really send them anything. People who were signing up. So people were subscribing and signing up and then not like getting anything from me, and I kind of knew, and I kind of knew that it was, you know, something I could be doing or should be doing, maybe as an author, but I didn't really. Um, I don't love talking about me as author. Look at this book I've written. Look at this thing I've done. I sort of have this notion that if someone is going to read something, they'll find it in the bookstore or the library, and I think I'm a bit naive about that. But I also don't 100% care that. I'm a bit naive about that. I'd rather have conversations about writing and storytelling and your story and your book and what are you writing, and just do my own thing right. So I found the mailing list. I never quite knew what I was doing. For a while I interviewed other authors. That was really fun and then I heard more and more about Substack and I thought quite a bit about what I could do. So at one point I transferred my newsletter list over and then, uh, began writing a little. You know, like it's me, and this is what I've been doing type posts and it still felt like it had potential to be something a bit more interesting to me as a writer. And I read more and more of these personal essays and realized I liked writing them. And now, as I said, coaching memoir, I wanted to challenge myself to be writing more like that too, and so I started writing more of those, but much more with the angle of what's useful for someone who's coming to the page, like you say, that little pause in the day. That's kind of what I'm hoping for is that people feel, okay, this won't take me long, but it gives me just a moment to pause and have a cup of coffee and read and reflect and then look up maybe another person to read Like I try to direct people to other people to read all the time and then carry on with my day feeling a little bit refueled, right, like I feel, after I've had a cup of coffee refueled. Yeah, so that started to be what I was thinking about.

I've started to add in a section around obituaries and death stories, so I'm kind of interested in what that looks like, but I don't't quite know yet. I am training to become a celebrant here in Canada for funerals, and I'm really interested in this space of who we are when we're gone and what stories are told about us right, and I think it fits really well with some of the work I've done in the past around storytelling. So I'm starting to explore that a little bit more. What I'm writing at the moment is about, you know, this notion that we have to have a purpose. Yet when you read someone's obituary, their sort of purpose isn't necessarily what's described. You know, when you hear somebody's bio backwards, even when you're reading mine at the beginning, there it's funny because it captures just a tiny piece of who somebody really is. So who are we to other people when we've gone and what stays in our stories? That really interests me.

I haven't got very far with that yet, I'm just starting to play with it, but what I realized was that Substack, for me, is a place where I enjoy being creative and building a community of people who are interested in the creative freedom that storytelling gives us, and so I'm newer to writing it like that. I had a great big cull of newsletter readers not that I called them, but Substack was like these people are not responding and I was like, well, probably because some of them were moved over from my old mailing list and they, you know, signed up 10 years ago and have never had an email from me and maybe don't even have that email address anymore. So there's a massive culling. So I lost loads and loads and loads over a thousand subscribers, um, in a day, which was like, okay, this is. You know, this is not about numbers, this is about what I'm writing.

0:14:11 - Natalie Phillips

Sometimes it's a relief. Just to explain, I do email marketing in real life and advise businesses and sometimes just getting rid of that dead weight, it's absolutely off your chest.

0:14:21 - Alice Kuipers

It's like I can move forward now well, and I think that I just I just really like what I'm writing and I really like the people who are writing comments. You know it can really. I've never been super swayed, like I said, by by what people are saying about the books, but sometimes it's because it's so long since finishing the book and then somebody reads it and they're like I love it or I didn't love it, whatever, but it just feels like oh yeah, I did write that that was a while ago, whereas this is much more present and and current, and so it's just a fun way to communicate with people who love books. And I like notes, I like talking about books and seeing what people are writing and just sitting there. So I've actually taken a break from all the other stuff I was doing on social media where I was just kind of floundering around not really saying anything for years and years and taking up time. Um, and I just I just enjoy what I'm doing with confessions of coffee right now and invite anyone to like come along and tell me how to do it better too and say like I would love to hear this or this would be useful.

But one of the things I'm really careful of is I teach writing all the time at the novery and I love coaching writing, but I love doing it within the framework of the novelry. So let's say you want to write a novel and you come to the novelry but you're writing science fiction and fantasy. I'm not your coach, right, but maybe you've heard about the novelry through me. But then you go to one of our science fiction and fantasy coaches, and then you work with them, and then you move to the editorial team, who have all got experience with big houses and like industry-standard lenses that I can't bring right. I can bring my experience as a writer. I can bring my experience as a reader. I can help you finish a draft, but I can't necessarily get you to that publishing stage, even if I can help you get your story brilliantly right, which is what I work on.

So I love that I get to teach all the elements, but I love that I have a whole team of people who I work with who can help a writer get where they want to be. Tons of classes and lots of fun things for people to do. But because before, with my newsletter, I really was talking more about how to be a writer, I had to really rethink. So a lot of the last year has been like what am I actually saying and why, and what's useful outside of all the work I already do within the framework of the novelry? So that's been like a really interesting place to be. If I'm not going to be teaching writing on here which I'm not then what else do I have to talk about?

0:16:35 - Natalie Phillips

very much, very much so. Um, and that's a point I think all of us are forced to confront when we start the Substacks, like if we're going to be writing this week in, week out, what's what's the point, what's the why? And for me, it's been about supporting other writers and connecting with them, and it's been an absolute joy. Just so we're clear, though, one of the questions I've actually got on my whiteboard is “what's your favourite genre?” Can I take a stab and say it's around the personal essays and memoirs?

0:17:01 - Alice Kuipers

For me to write or for me to read?

0:17:05 - Natalie Phillips

Oh, really good question, give me the answer to each.

0:17:09 - Alice Kuipers

So I read crime. I read everything, but I love to read crime fiction and that's what I'm writing now. Years ago I won an award for crime fiction for one of my YA novels and it's always been a genre I've enjoyed reading and it's always been a genre I've enjoyed reading, and so the book. The last three books I've written have been adult crime. One had a rejection from my publisher, one I didn't send to anyone, and so this one is the third one where I think I may be getting a handle on the story and it might end up being something that a publisher would work with. But we will see.

One of the great risks of a writing life is that each book is an adventure, and when you're a mid-list writer, like I am, you can't be certain that your name as a writer is going to be enough for a publisher to say, oh sure, we'll publish it. In fact, I don't think anything that I've published before helps with this crime novel, because I've published, like really fun children's books around writing and the magic of writing, and I've published, like you know, fairly dark contemporary ya to readers who are no longer teenagers, so pivoting like this is a bit of a risk, yeah, people that grow up, they start having books and then reintroduce them when they're older, maybe.

I don't know. Yeah, and you know and I haven't always been super good at the self-promotion side of things, because I'm swiftly shifting to this is the project that interests me and now it's this I know it's completely different to this one. So in terms of what I read and now what I write, they're much more aligned. I've always read tons of teen novels, tons of YA. I read a bit less now just because my children are reading them and they don't necessarily want to be reading the same things I'm reading. Some of my children are. And then I realized too that there's just a time in your writing life where you're interested in one thing and then you're interested creatively in something else.

I do read a lot of memoir. I read a lot of personal essays. I really loved Happiness Falls by Angie Kim recently, which is kind of literary crime, so that's kind of a space. Tana French I love. Jane Harper I love. So there's some authors out there who are doing some beautiful work. But I'm also the type of reader who will read like NK Jemisin on Monday and um, what did I just read?

0:19:35 - Natalie Phillips

Six of Crows on Tuesday and then you know, okay, a Mills and Boone romance novel on Wednesday, like I read fast, oh, why not? Yeah, maybe as well on Saturday, but I think that is. That's the joy of being a reader you can just dip into various worlds. I mean, I've got four on the go at the moment. I'm currently reading through two Substack serials. I've currently got New Child on the go, bernard Cornwall, mkj Rick Rivers, and I think there's another one about coaching. Right, it's a complete mismatch. It gives you some very weird dreams, yeah, especially when you're doing retired.

0:20:07 - Alice Kuipers

So as a writer it's been hard for me to kind of narrow down very much, but I like. What I like with confessions and coffee and the kind of little life lists and the short death stories is they feel like they go quite well with with the crime novel, um, and what I'm exploring in there. So it's coming together maybe for this era and then when I'm older maybe I'll be doing something different again and maybe that will change again.

0:20:26 - Natalie Phillips

Who says you have to stick to just one thing? There's been plenty of big names out there who've done just that done one type and then gone to the other. One of my favourites, jk Tolkien, spent most of his life as publishing standard literature or non-fiction. He's made treatises of all the languages, and then he does Lord of the Rings, and that was literally a side project. It's a hobby, you know.

0:20:52 - Alice Kuipers

You wrote and I think, yeah, right, and I think one of the things, too is that, um, when you're challenging yourself creatively like I love doing all the writing I did for children and young adults and I have another idea that I might work on for children that pleases me a lot and I have, like I had a book come out just in February that was for young readers, so I have things that I've still been doing in that space.

0:21:14 - Natalie Phillips

You can't just say that you can't say I've had a book out and not give us the title. It's a little book.

0:21:18 - Alice Kuipers

It's just a small, it's a high-low book. It's called Dropped. It's about a boy who's dropped on an island in a social media challenge and he has to decide if it's for likes and follows, that he needs to keep doing more and more dangerous things or what. So it's a fun one. So high-low books are a really great space for writers to explore. They're high concept but low vocab, so they're for reluctant readers. And as a publisher I work with NBC, who I've done I think, three, now maybe four um of these and they're just really fun sort of standalone projects that are short um that I have to pitch by doing the outline first. So, natalie, as a writer I'm the type of writer who just throws a whole load of words down on the page and then doesn't necessarily outline as a ghost. I cannot do that like professionally. The publishers I work with would be appalled if I was like I'm just gonna see how the story goes just to explain.

0:22:10 - Natalie Phillips

Just to explain for our listeners, in addition to everything else that alice does, you know, she is literally the multi-passionate artist of our world she also does ghost writing for people. Okay, so, in addition to pitching, publishing, doing Substacking and coaching, she goes right.

0:22:23 - Alice Kuipers

Okay, keep going, alice so, yeah, with the ghost writing I have to plan it out, like I have to listen to someone's entire story, which takes days and days and days and days and days and weeks, and then I have to plan it right. So what I've learned is that often for me with fiction and maybe this is the same for some of your listeners too is that pouring down like the first draft is almost a bit like that what could this story even be? And then for me it's a case of going back and then trying to find it and almost reverse, outlining, like okay, now I need to start to plan. I've learned as I've got older as a writer like not really about age, but more just 20 years into this that I do better if I do like have a one page kind of synopsis that I'm working with, even in that first draft, but before I would just write and see where it went.

Half the books I wrote didn't finish. Like half of them I just gave up halfway through. So for every published book there's at least one or two sort of semi books or kind of half finished, three quarter finished things that didn't you know, 50,000 words at a time. That just would be yeah, people being there there. So, yeah, yeah, I've got planning. Yeah, right now, exactly. So planning helps me really think about how to write a book. When I'm writing a longer fiction book, that planning comes kind of really more intensively after the first draft stage. But with a book like dropped the orca book, I have to do a plan first, because that's how the publisher works, like you do the plan, then they decide if they're going to buy it. Then I write it. So it's just a nice kind of clean way for me to really practice this notion of what could the story be? How do I dial that down before I write it, which I'd love to bring more and more into my writing practice. But it doesn't always work like that right.

0:24:09 - Natalie Phillips

Oh, and there's also the problem that, even if you did do the story arc and outlining characters have a horrible tendency to waylay you with a new shiny idea and certainly you're careening down a path you never expected to go.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. So you've said you've got a book coming out out, you've got several ideas in the pipeline. We can definitely see more from you in 2024, um. Before you go, by the way, well, I am going to electronically tie alice down and get all her titles out of her and add them to my blog post so you can go and look them up yourselves. Okay, there are no hiding places left, alice, for your work, um. But that leads me to another question, um, because you see a lot of the publishing industry offline and on. Where do you think it's going for the rest of the 2020s? There's a lot of speculation that it's fundamentally changing thanks to AI, thanks to online presences, and a lot of the bigger publishers have folded or merged. I'd just like to know what do you?

0:25:01 - Alice Kuipers

I think it's really difficult to predict when I think a lot of big publishers are having trouble predicting too. One of the things I've noticed and paid attention to is that it's easier to share work than it ever has been before. So it's much easier for someone who's in their quiet space in their room writing to put work out and for people to actually see that and read it than it was maybe 20, 30 years ago. It's harder, perhaps, to make a living as a writer than it was. Not that it was easy, it wasn't like oh yeah. So I think it's always been difficult to make a career of it, and I think one of the things people do is they put a huge amount of pressure on themselves really early in their writing process to make a career of their writing lives, right. So they start with something that they're passionate about and they want to start telling it as a story and they immediately commodify what could this do to make me money? And I think that can actually be an anathema to a writing project, right, as soon as you start, for it to be the only thing where you draw in any revenue streams and it's like gets that weight. A new book is a very tender thing and an idea is a very tender thing. And an idea is a very tender thing and it needs a little room to become what it might be. So I think sometimes the focus on what the publishing industry might be and what it could be, and what people are going to read and what they might do, it's so far from where a story is, where it begins, that it can be very destructive for that story and idea. So what I tend to do like I think it's probably coming clear is focus mainly on the writing. What am I writing today? How does it root with what I'm trying to do as a storyteller? This book is Crime Novel I've been working on maybe a year and a half now.

If I start thinking too much about, you know, is someone going to publish it? Is it going to get a rejection, like the last one did, or you can be sure I'm not writing very much that day. So the only way sort of there for anyone who wants to publish one day is through. You can't go around it, you can't go under it, you've got to go through it. Right, like the, like the children's book, and I think it's actually the way to do it is to go through the writing of your book, really find what you're saying and then at that point if there's a good home for that story, then that's when you start thinking about it.

If you're at the stage where you're looking for a good home for your story, then I think that the traditional path of querying agents and querying publishers can be really challenging as the industry is changing so fast. But what I do see over at the Novelry is every couple of weeks, every three or four weeks, we have somebody who finds an agent or has a publishing deal because they're getting the support from our editorial team, who have contacts and connections and who are also reading the work and helping make it the strongest it can be. It's one of the things I really like, because then those publishing questions kind of move out of my lack of knowledge around it, because the industry changes so quickly. I must have worked with 15 different editors now um through the editorial process because so often they change houses. I'll be halfway through a book and then I get a phone call and the editor says so, it's been so great to work with you.

Now I'm moving to this house or I'm changing and I'm going to go and live on a farm and raise my children and like, raise sheep or whatever, like there's just such a pressure on people within the industry that that long-term relationship between a writer and an editor and staying with one house that it just has never been my experience. And so what I think that looks like is finding a trusted reader who you get to work with as a writer, who talks to you about what you're doing and helps you feel excited and motivated and just kind of a wish and a prayer sometimes with publishing. Yeah, the books I have coming out have been been one through my agent, one not through my agent. Um, and it just, it, just. It's a very variable career. So having the other revenue streams and the other things I do, like the novelry and, you know, kids and life, takes a.

0:29:28 - Natalie Phillips

I mean, I love the way you phrase that to take the pressure off. One of the things I've noticed again perhaps because I'm just interviewing, talking to quite a lot of different people at various stages in their lives is first, books take time. We don't allow ourselves to appreciate the process that writers go through. I was speaking to Leanne last week and, for those who are wondering, her interview is now on my Substack. She spent 10 years writing this book of hers which is now getting published. Literally, she started it, she went off, she had kids, she came back to revise it repeatedly and finally it's getting published.

Another one is Justin Denning and he has just published one book 50 Little Tales on Amazon and he treats it as a vacation. For him, it's not a source of revenue, it's a source of nourishment, and I'm increasingly seeing this with lots of abstract writers where they will have multiple projects going on, all of which might bring this more income stream. But it all directs correctly to the core of being an artist and I think that's something which gets very overlooked in the modern world being an artist.

0:30:34 - Alice Kuipers

Being an artist, no, and I think it's. I think it's always been how I've operated. So when I was 18, I read a book something like Tim Ferriss or someone like that about like, how to freelance your life. It's that type of a book, right, um? And it had a title like that how to freelance your life and it struck me at the time oh, this is what I'm going to do. This is how I'm going to live. I'm not going to get a job. I didn't know then that I had ADHD. I didn't know. That's how I rolled in the world. I just wasn't going to get a job. I was going to get a ton of different jobs and I was going to be paid doing all.

So basically, since I was 18, I've been freelancing and I've done all sorts of mad projects and some have been great and well paid. Some have been disastrous and not as well paid, but I always have something contractual happening to take all the pressure off. So I actually work here in Saskatoon for a company called DCG Philanthropic and what we do every couple months is write something called a case for support for a local charity or a charity somewhere in Canada who's doing a massive fundraising campaign. So if they're trying to fundraise, like you know, in the kind of 15 to $20 million mark, then I help them write all their content. It's not what I'm doing with the Saskatoon Public School Foundation, which is a whole different thing. This is just paid work and like.

What's nice about that is it's just background. Income comes in all the time. I have stuff from books I have you know like. But with books you can't tell, like with the different countries, sometimes one might say, oh look, we're going to reissue this one and now suddenly you get paid this sum of money. But that is very unpredictable.

The DCG work is kind of solid, predictable background stays out the way of everything else that I'm doing. And I think sometimes when I meet writers who are new, they're so hopeful that they can give up their job, which is exhausting them, and writing is going to become their income. And for me writing has always been a form of income alongside a whole bunch of other types of work. So usually what I wonder is is if there's another way they could have their income being a place that's a bit more joyful for them, but without making exactly like this other author you're just describing, without making their writing not be somewhere that's super like nourishing and exciting and tender for them. Because for me, exactly that the writing of the book has to be the thing that kind of gives me the energy for all the other things I do.

0:32:53 - Natalie Phillips

Yes, yeah, that's a very good way. It's not separate to you, it's not a nice-to-have, it's not a junk, it's something that's compulsory, always for a writer. For me, yeah, yeah, not in the way of someone standing over you with a whip, but just when you get it out, your brain is more ordered, there's more space. Yeah, I recognize that making money off it. That's almost a bonus?

0:33:13 - Alice Kuipers

Well, for me it has been, and I've learned that, just like, from knowing lots of writers. Lots of writers it's not their primary income, the books that they write, I don't know. They did a study in the uk and they talked about what the average income for a writer was and it was not very many thousand pounds, certainly not enough to run absolutely yeah, and it's like as soon as you start throwing children into that, that's such a small amount of money to be able to function right Below the poverty line, right, and so it's just if you sort of know that you can maybe hope to be the outlier, but it's a little bit like hoping to win the lottery and it takes away. Like what for me? Like you talk about that nourishment place of what the writing is for me, like writing is how I understand the world I live in. It helps me feel calmer when the world feels hectic and stressful and climate disasters.

And what are we doing, raising children in a world that's this complicated? And how do we get through the day? And how do I navigate my child's emotional outbursts and how do I, you know, deal with the fact it's snowing and it's middle of spring, like you know what. What is it like on a day-to-day basis? And for me my creative act is writing, and for you it's writing, and for someone else it might be gardening or cooking or whatever that thing is. That kind of gives us that fuel. But only human beings have really like AI can't do that. They're not pulling to be creative to fuel themselves. So for me that's what writing has always been about, and I love the books I've written. I've enjoyed all of them in places and in places they've been really, really hard to get to the page. You can't tell that in the final book. All I know is that each one gave me something, a gift of its being in the world in the writing of it if that makes sense.

0:34:59 - Natalie Phillips

Yes, yes, if that moment in that time, in that space, and no one can take that away from you no one can recreate it for you. It's special, that's um. Well, bring it back in. We've got very deeply philosophical for a moment and our listeners must be thinking what the heck are you going on about? Natalie and Alice, you know, give us the good stuff. So what is your? What would you say is the greatest accomplishment, what you're achieving that you're really proud of out of the multitude of them?

0:35:25 - Alice Kuipers

I think I feel proud every time when I finish a book. You set out with a blank page and nothing, and then you make something from it.

0:35:36 - Natalie Phillips

Even if it doesn't make sense.

0:35:37 - Alice Kuipers

I know one ever reads it and I've got plenty of books like that too. My Polly Diamond series has been really fun. The first one took me seven years and it's only maybe 12,000 words long. It's not a long book, but it took so much to kind of rewrite and redraft and understand how to get Polly onto the page that worked. It taught me so much about writing so I loved doing that and I loved seeing how that world then became her world, so that when I was doing the second book and the third book it just it was not easier necessarily, but I didn't have to do all of that world building, but it helped me understand what it can take to make a book. When you talk about the rides, you took 10 years to write. Something like that makes sense to me, because you're building a whole world out of a piece of paper or your laptop or whatever.

And then honestly this is a more personal parenting answer my, my child with neurodiversity he has ADHD and his, his challenges were quite immense and his emotional dysregulation was exceptionally hard to navigate and it also meant I had to learn how to regulate with a system. I hadn't known what it was called, but it's called something like nonviolent response. So me learning to regulate and learn to navigate, like what, what I have to do with and help him deal with that, like his trajectory I would say was worrying me and the work that I've done there to kind of just kind of center and be a calmer parent for him and then for my other kids. So my oldest son, as children will do, did turn around and say to me maybe a year or two ago now you know, the only reason that you stopped yelling at us is because the son who did all the yelling started yelling back and I was like, oh wow, that's, that's very apt and like not my favorite version of myself.

But I did actually change in that story. So in a good book a character changes and I did change. I changed as a parent and I'm doing a better job of it and I know that there's still work to do and like we get things wrong all the time as parents. But it didn't even seem possible to me to parent in the way that I wanted to, to give my son, who had the challenges that he had, a better chance, and I feel that's probably been the hardest thing I've had to accomplish very personal.

Thank you for sharing that, alice yeah, well, hopefully it's helpful to someone else who's thinking how do I write a book while my kid is like screaming at me 40 times a day and hitting me like how do I do this? I mean, I a way where you make one?

0:38:10 - Natalie Phillips

I'll have to admit, there have been times I've been waiting at the school gate and I've literally been tapping out words on my phone because I just had to get it out before my kids came out of school.

Personal secret here. My daughter Holly, absolutely loves me telling her stories and I have to make it up on the fly I don't know if you've ever done this, but it's incredibly challenging. And then she demands the next story, the next instalment, the next instalment and like five days in. I'm like I can't actually remember the beginning of the story now, where we've got to, or why the heck have I got a cat eating porridge? That's why I got a broomstick, lovely, or what even the cat's name was. And then she comes up with the detail. I'm like you in ways you did not expect, right, but yes, finding time, and I was going to ask you now. You said, for example, you start at the beginning of the day, then you almost get up. Do you literally take a laptop to bed or do you write on pen and paper?

0:39:07 - Alice Kuipers

I get up early and I hate it every day. I hate it every day and I never want to get up. And every morning I lie there and I think it every day. I hate it every day and I never want to get up and every morning I lie there. I think you think this every day. Just get out of it.

Um so for a while I was trying to get up at five, but I was so tired and grumpy by the end of the day that it was just indecent for my family. I wasn't yelling anymore. I managed to get way past that in my life, but I was still pretty foul. So I get up at quarter to six every day and I'm writing from six to seven and any child who appears before that is told. Like Enid Blighton's children were told mum is here but not available. But they're older now my youngest is eight.

Like I could not have done that when they were younger. My daughter got up at 5.30 every day for three years and there's no way I could have got up and wrote then. She would have just been. So I had to do like what I could around it then, because I think sometimes people listen to this and they're like, okay, now I'm going to try and do that. And then, like my kid is awake and it's just not, it just doesn't roll. So, exactly like you said about the other writer who does it in the evening, like whatever works for you right now, and if it doesn't work for you right now, also all good, like it will again.

Like one of the things I've learned with having all these kids is it does change, it does shift. I couldn't have imagined that I could even have that hour from 6 to 7 a couple years ago, and now I do. If I get up. And if I don't get up because it feels so good to stay in bed until like quarter to 7 or whatever, if I don't get up by like half past 7, I'm kind of like, oh, I wish I'd done it. If I don't get up by like half past seven, I'm kind of like, oh, I wish I'd done it, I wish I'd got up. So I try to remind myself of that when I wake up. I'm like, at half past seven you're going to wish you'd got up, but in the moment, every time, it's just painful.

0:40:41 - Natalie Phillips

Yes, god, I've had that. I have something similar. I have an alarm on my phone when I don't bed. It was not under the pillar work. It does this. Um, I wake up late and I'm like, ah, writing time precious. Yes, it really really is precious, okay. So here's another personal question I keep coming. I, like you, is um has writing professionally. You know, doing it as a coach goes right. Has that ruined casual reading for you?

0:41:08 - Alice Kuipers

I mean, do you?

0:41:08 - Natalie Phillips

sit there thinking I could have phrased this better. I can see the plot point coming or oh my god, what would she do with this description?

0:41:14 - Alice Kuipers

I think I a little bit like fool myself. So I do two things. Firstly, when I'm reading like a writer, I'm in a different zone, right. So I'm not often like reading just before bed or I might be reading very specifically at like a period of time in the day I might think of as a writing time, or sitting in like a space where I might normally write, so like I have a little corner over at the back there. That might be where I would be sitting if I was reading, like to really look at dialogue, like, let's say, how does Tana French introduce, um, her characters and into the words, like, how does she do that?

So then I'm reading like a writer, thinking then I think I do like a little bit like fool myself stuff. You know, like if I'm watching a murder mystery on tv, I'm like don't guess, don't guess, don't guess, don't guess. And I think I'm the same. There's occasionally I'll put a book down because I'm just like I don't love the writing at all and it's just not not doing me any favors and like I just feel like. But most of the time I'm like just excited to see what happens next and like into the story and not necessarily like I try to turn my writer brain off a bit, um, so I can really enjoy the story. And then if it's something I think I might learn from as a writer like Happiness Falls for example I might shift into that writer mode and look over the text again a second time, right?

0:42:21 - Natalie Phillips

Yes, yeah, and that's the beauty about the writer that you get. You just literally have this entire ocean in front of you that you can delve into and find different writers and give an. It's all bare laid out for you, that's right yeah, they want you to come to them, yeah.

0:42:35 - Alice Kuipers

So yeah, I mean, there's some amazing crime books out there right now that have got this kind of literary character feel to them that I really enjoy. But there's also some that's been there for a long time, right, and so like looking back over that work and enjoying, enjoying some of that, uh, before really thinking about how that's put together has been really interesting for me that is.

0:42:57 - Natalie Phillips

That is okay. So just to round this off and thank you so much for being such a good guest. Um, what's your top tip for anyone that is browsing your substack? Okay, where would you recommend?

0:43:08 - Alice Kuipers

To go and watch me. Uh, just come to like, grab a coffee and join me and just say hi, drop me a comment. Tell me what you like to go and watch me. Just come to like, grab a coffee and join me and just say hi, drop me a comment. Tell me what you like to read on Substack, what interests you, what excites you about writing and reading, so that I can make sure I'm writing things that are useful for you and anything that you think. Oh, it would be great if you were doing this as well.

0:43:31 - Natalie Phillips

That sounds really really good, really good.

0:43:33 - Alice Kuipers

Yeah, I think it's a learning process right so yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's like it's because it's such a learning process. It's sort of I think it's helpful when anyone gives feedback and commentary right and is is saying you should read this person. They would really inspire you.

0:43:48 - Natalie Phillips

So yes, yeah, um, I've been very lucky to do some fantastic collaborations on substack as a result, and I love getting comments back on my own stuff I don't know about you, but I find likes, those little heart-shaped likes, they are a drug. When you get a few of them, you're like, yes, someone has read this and they've been long enough to like it on the app, yeah, so yeah, definitely pay me in. Likes, everybody that.

That's right, and please go forth to Alice's Substack, read her stuff. She's mentioned the novelry. If you need help you're writing a manuscript. Please head over there so you can investigate their offerings as well. As you've heard, they are very successful in coaching you, getting your manuscript to a fantastic point and even perhaps helping you along the path to a fantastic point and even perhaps helping along the path to a quick publishing deal although obviously I'm not making any promises on their behalf there no, no, and like, I think we're quite clear too, like we, we help.

0:44:41 - Alice Kuipers

We help when writers, um, have a book that's submission ready, with partnerships, with agencies, uh, but it always has to do with the writer in their book and and the work they put in. I mean, one of the other coaches said, you know, the work has to happen at some stage and I love being part of helping people write their books and also seeing you know like it's so great to have a coaching call with someone and then next time we talk to think, wow, they've really they've, they've taken some of the things I've said, but they've also, like, made it so much a way to really improve their own work with their own imagination and lens right, which is super exciting I firmly maintain there's no such thing as a bad novel, but there's such thing as a novel in progress.

0:45:21 - Natalie Phillips

It would be if you're sitting thinking, oh god, my writing's crap, you just need to learn a bit more.

0:45:26 - Alice Kuipers

It never ends I still feel like I need to learn a bit more. I've been doing this forever, I hope that's encouraging.

0:45:35 - Natalie Phillips

When did you write it Right? Okay, never despair everybody when we're in our graves when the bones will be going just one more word, just one more word, one more thing to learn, alice. Yeah, yeah, one more thing. Thank you so much for your time here today.