Reflections on Material Feels and Eight Secrets to Guaranteed Happiness
Collaboration: Material Feels

One of the most important things I’ve learned in this work is to embrace creative constraints and even to seek them out. At their essence, collaboration and critique are really just two different ways of creating creative constraints that can make your work better. This week’s assigned episodes look at them one at a time to bring you deeper inside that process.

Material Feels was a collaborative episode that came from the same creative constraint that created a whole series of episodes like it, including “Why We Need the Friends We’ve Never Met,” which you heard a few weeks ago: time. My conversation with Catherine Monahon started the same way my conversation with Alexandra did: a short list of questions that we’d both answer, and then I’d edit it down and maybe move a few things around to create a narrative arc even within the conversation. I knew that we shared an affinity for music and artful sound design, and that their co-host Liz was also a musician. So when I started editing the audio, I reached out to Catherine to see if they had any interest in collaborating on sound design. They said yes, and what followed was one of the smoothest collaborations I’ve ever been a part of.

The ease of the collaboration began with clearly-defined communication and trust in each other’s ability to do good work. Before Catherine had even said yes, I had outlined what they could expect from me: I would edit the audio and then send them a .wav that had our tracks combined by no later than Monday afternoon. 

When Catherine agreed to the collaboration, we defined the terms further. They’d take my audio track and put it to music, which they’d then send back to me by merging all of the music files into a single track so I could easily import it into my DAW. They committed to getting me those choices by the end of the day on Tuesday, and as it turned out, they had them back to me a couple of hours after I sent them on Monday. 

We both stated repeatedly throughout the process that it was okay if we didn’t take each other’s suggestions or wanted to edit things further or make different choices. As it turned out, I used almost all of what Catherine had sent, but with more of it. I loved the music choices they included—and I made sure to communicate that to them—and then added a couple of my own as well. Catherine had also added another element to the episode that I loved: a short clip from an episode they mentioned about glassblowing. I took that as a jumping off point to include a clip from Finding the Fuego, and I complimented Catherine on coming up with the idea in the first place. Once I’d added those elements and merged the music to one track once again, I sent the audio files as separate tracks to Catherine, and also exported the episode as an .mp3 and .wav file so they had both of those ready to use for when they wanted to drop the episode in their own feed, which was something we’d talked about from the beginning.

That episode happened to come out in a week when I got sick with a fever. But since Catherine and I had agreed upon a timeline up front, and also clearly defined who was doing what, I was able to get the episode done early. even though I was feeling pretty terrible. It felt like a gift to have Catherine in the process with me, even though our actual contact during that process was limited to a few emails, texts, and voice memos. In a week when my brain was struggling, Catherine could see the work with a clearer vision. And I loved what came out of it. The gift of that collaboration continued beyond the episode, both through the newsletter I put out where I talked about how much I appreciated collaborating with Catherine in a week where I was struggling, and in the months that followed, where I continued to hear from listeners of both of our shows how much they enjoyed it.

Critique: Eight Secrets for Guaranteed Happiness

The second episode you listened to for this week, Eight Secrets for Guaranteed Happiness, brings us inside another creative constraint: critique.

Going into 2022, I had two new year’s resolutions:  find creative solutions when the work piles up, and play more. This episode was a way to do both. The idea with all this episode was to celebrate each of our kids during their birthday month, use a list to give the script a simpler and more clearly defined structure, and to give ourselves permission to be a little silly while we did it. I’d originally gotten the idea for a list episode after a friend sent me that Jay Shetty episode on 8 Types of People You Need In Your Life. The title came from another creative constraint, one I’d given myself many months before for a mini episode called Weird and Effective Tricks for Chilling Out, which was a private joke with myself to see what would happen if I used a list of semi-ridiculous viral titles as a jumping off point for some of episode titles. The idea was to make an over-the-top promise that of course no one could deliver on, like guaranteed happiness, or in the case of our episode for our son Gabe, fixing the world—but then to actually offer something in the episode that could achieve some element of that promise if we actually changed the way we lived. Before a single word was written, we knew the title of this episode, and that it would include a list of 8, Grace’s age.

Generally speaking, Nate is better than I am at getting out of his head and writing a first draft quickly, whereas I tend to write more slowly because I’m always thinking about things on a sentence level, trying to get each thought just right and imagining how the words will sound out loud. We’ve had good luck with him writing first drafts, and then me coming in as an editor to shape the story or rephrase things so they’re more clearly in my voice.

But when I saw Nate’s draft of this episode, I immediately knew we were in trouble. He had written a full draft with eight items, but it was full of the kind of anecdotes that only our immediate family would find interesting. To be fair, he’d been working fast on a week when our kids were on spring break and his entire family was visiting, and was just trying to get something on the page so we had a place to start.

The biggest problem with the episode was that it had no story. A list is only interesting if there’s some driving force behind it, the answer to a problem, with steps on how to solve it. That Jay Shetty episode works because it implicitly sets up a problem, that we’re not as happy or fulfilled as we’d like to be—and then offers a surprising solution, that we need all kinds of people in our lives to make us better—including people who are difficult and who may not even be trying to help us.

Grace’s episode needed a problem. It wasn’t enough that she was cute or sweet. We might care about those things, but no one else would unless we wove them into the larger story. I started thinking about recent moments I’d had with Grace, and also about the problem we were trying to solve in an episode that promised happiness. What I eventually landed on was that moment that opens the episode, where Grace climbed into the tree I’d just hacked down to its bare bones. I’d known even as I was cutting off branches that my rage-pruning wasn’t just about gardening. My next door neighbor had joked that this would be a great metaphor for something in an episode. I’d been thinking the same thing—and now I had my moment to use it. My problem was that I was feeling frustrated by a life that was overcomplicated and overfull—but there were no quick or easy solutions. I was going to have to live with the ugly skeleton branches and mess for a while before we’d have leaves and flowers. I wrote that scene as the opening to the episode to set up the problem, and leaned into the places where I could find humor in my own misfortune. Then I returned to Nate’s list.

I told him about my rage-pruning scene, and suggested that we reframe the list as a response to the scene that opened it. I told him as delicately as I could that I didn’t think the episode was working—but that list became eight ways to find happiness even in the midst of lives that were often too full, busy, and stressful. 

It would not have been unreasonable for Nate to get touchy about the episode at that point, especially since what I was proposing would pretty much wipe out everything he’d written. Even after all of this time, we both still have those moments. But instead, he saw the truth of what I was suggesting. The episode needed clear conflict and resolution. It needed a story. So he agreed to all of the changes I was making. 

But there was another important part of that process that allowed the episode to come together from that point forward: he recognized that I’d gotten to that point in the process where the writing was coming easily. I knew where I needed to go, and in a week when we were already splitting our time between visiting family and our kids being home all day, we knew we had to work fast if we were going to get the episode done on time. So he stepped aside and let me take the lead on the writing, only coming back into the script when I felt like I’d done as much as I could alone and was ready for an editor. When I got to that point, I read the episode out loud—a part of the process that we almost always do before recording. Thanks to Nate not taking it personally when I critiqued that early draft, the episode quickly got better. It ended up being a lot of fun to create, even though it had gotten off to a rough start in the beginning.

For every time when that critique process goes smoothly, there are also times when it doesn’t. Both in the episodes Nate and I have created, and with the ones that we’ve done with our Kasama Collective trainees, we’ve learned to expect some amount of conflict and discomfort. Sometimes we’re able to work through those things and find a collaborative rhythm that makes working together even more fun than it would be to work alone. Other times it’s meant recognizing that the person we’re working with is just too close to the work to not take the critiques personally, so we have to adjust the process. But great episodes can still come out of difficult circumstances. 

An Affront to Zeus, the episode that won the International Women’s Podcast Awards, came together beautifully even though the trainee who was supposed to be the lead on the project had a personal crisis that prevented her from continuing in the program. Eve Bishop was the other trainee working on that project with us, and that crisis gave her the opportunity to step up and work more closely with me so we could finish by our deadline. It was an experience that Eve and I both ended up really enjoying and appreciating, that taught us to trust each other and gave me a chance to affirm the skills that she was learning incredibly fast. 

Working with others often means adjusting the process. Occasionally, it means putting in extra work to support someone when they’re not able to complete their part of the work because life interfered. Sometimes it means adjusting ourselves. 

But even if you’re a solo podcaster with no plans of ever working with a partner or team, I want to encourage you to seek out opportunities for both collaboration and critique. If you’re not sure you’re ready for those things, start small. Ask someone to work with you or in parallel on a very small task with clearly defined roles and deadlines. The exercises for this week are designed less to make that process overly structured, and more to help you do the up front thinking that will make you open to the process. Because while collaboration and critique can be difficult, they can also be wonderful. They can help you see your own blind spots and strengths differently. They can make the work better and open up new opportunities. They can make you better too. They may even become the way you discover your next episode, or your next podcast, or a whole new way of creating.