“Safe writing is boring writing.”

Module 7 transcript ▫︎ audio tutorial

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“Safe writing is boring writing.”

The first time I heard those words was in my very first week of grad school, in the novel-writing workshop I was taking with the critically acclaimed author Micheline Aharonian Marcom, who would prove to be one of the best and hardest teachers I’d ever have.

I’d bravely raised my hand to be one of the first to submit my work, in this case a 3-page scene about a woman who’d had a miscarriage. I was twenty-five at the time, not yet seriously considering having children let alone losing one, and seconds after I’d read the scene aloud, Micheline had pronounced my story “mundane” (which is another word for “boring,” she’d said, just to make sure I’d gotten the point).

Micheline and I spoke recently about this, and she apologized for those words she no longer remembers speaking. She said she wouldn’t say them now. Many years of teaching—and life—have made her kinder to her students.

But I told her the apology wasn’t necessary. Her words jolted me in a way that I needed, and all these years later I still appreciate them. They pushed me into a crossroads I would face again and again as a writer: would I choose safe, boring writing? Or would I take the risk of putting myself out there?

That’s what this week’s module is all about. It’s about the decisions we make about how personal we’re going to get when we tell stories—not just the stories we write for our podcasts, but the stories we tell ourselves and others every single day.

We’ll look at getting personal first in written stories, then in the way we share our podcasts, and finally in situations where we’re in the hot seat being interviewed by someone else.

As usual, we’ll look at this in the big picture, and then we’ll get specific with real-life examples that we hope you’ll use to build your own podcast.

getting personal first in stories

So first, the big picture: what does it mean to get personal in our work, and why is this even something we should consider?

What Micheline was getting at in that first class was this: what’s at stake when you tell this story? Why does it matter? What life are you breathing into it that will come at a cost to you? It’s that why create question all over again, applied in a very specific way.

That question of what’s at stake is also another way of talking about conflict, one of those basic elements of great storytelling—but it’s also at the same time about character.

Micheline wasn’t objecting to my boring story because I wasn’t writing myself into it. It was a novel-writing workshop, so we were supposed to be writing fiction. What she was objecting to was that I had put the conflict out there, but without infusing it with anything that mattered to me personally. What Micheline saw in that boring first story I submitted was what I now know intuitively: that if there’s nothing at stake in our words, then our readers or listeners will feel that too. I had assumed that because I was writing fiction, I needed to keep myself out of it. I thought imagination was all I needed. The problem with that story was not that I was writing about something I’d never experienced firsthand. The problem with that story was that I had not put an ounce of my own experience of pain and suffering into it. I’d played it safe and kept those messy emotions to myself. And the reader felt it in every boring sentence and phrase. It was too safe to be interesting.

Of course sometimes getting personal does mean including ourselves.

If we go back to those elements of storytelling—conflict, character, setting, and resolution—we remember that a story needs conflict to be interesting. But that conflict will only be believable if there’s a character experiencing that conflict in a way that feels authentic and true. The conflict in my story—that my character had lost a child in pregnancy—was an idea, but the reader didn’t feel it because I hadn’t taken the time to ask myself why I felt compelled to write that story in the first place, or to put any of my own pain into it.

That lesson—that safe writing is boring writing—came back to me again the first week of Shelter in Place season 1, when I realized I had come to the same crossroads in my podcast that I had in my fiction.

For years, people in my life had been telling me I should write memoir, but I never seriously considered it, because I didn’t think I had an interesting enough story to tell. But when I began Shelter in Place, I understood that what I was objecting to all of that time was something deeper: I was afraid that if I put myself out there and let people see who I really was, they’d reject me. Growing up, I’d been the sensitive kid who was always getting her feelings hurt over offenses that I can now see were at least half the time imagined. I was thin-skinned and insecure. With the people closest to me, I didn’t try to hide this, because over time I realized that when I shared that vulnerability with others, more often than not people appreciated it, and felt safe to let their own guard down and admit they didn’t have it all figured out.

But publicly, sharing my story felt terrifying. I imagined internet trolls who would feast on me, critics who would proclaim me too untidy to be trusted. What if I said something I would later regret? What if I was wrong? Or misunderstood? Or misconstrued? Or dismissed? Or criticized? Or laughed at?

In the past, all of these questions had kept me very quiet. Even in my fiction, I was careful with the risks I took. But when I began Shelter in Place as a daily, I didn’t have time to perseverate. I had to decide—and fast: I could play it safe and make the podcast all about somebody else—or I could dive in headfirst, knowing that in doing so I would likely get hurt (eventually), but at least my heart would be in it.

Maybe because I was tired, or because I had no lead time to obsess over the decision, or because I just didn’t think anyone would really listen, I chose to jump in.

I quickly realized that the decision to get personal—or not—is a false dichotomy. In reality, my decision brought me not to a crossroads, but to a point on a spectrum, where I’d need to decide over and over again how personal I was going to get. It’s a choice I’ve now faced hundreds of times, and I don’t always make the same decision every time. While I’m quicker to jump, the leap still scares me. I’ve faced it when talking about my faith, my mental health, my failures and insecurities, about the things I’m still trying to figure out, the stuff I don’t know, the ways I still sometimes get hurt with my family. But when I do choose to get personal, the work is better for it, because there’s something at stake, and that something is me.

Before we move onto the next point, I want to say quickly that having something at stake doesn’t have to mean sharing intimate details from your life. It could be more like that boring story I wrote in Micheline’s class, where what’s needed is just a little infusion of feeling. It might be incredibly subtle, like the way your voice wavers when you talk about a situation that someone else is experiencing, but that moves you. It might be a single detail that you offer up as an illustration of your empathy. However small that offering might be, when you have something at stake, you’re giving your listeners a reason to care.

Also, there are times when we shouldn’t get personal. No one is required to pull their skeletons out of the closet, or expose your friends or family. Especially when we’re dealing with trauma or abuse, or when we’re in an emotionally fragile state where we know we aren’t able to have the perspective that’s required to share something deep, it’s wise to err on the side of safety. There are other ways to share, other ways to have something at stake. But knowing about yourself how willing you are to get personal will help you navigate even those moments.

I’ve learned through repetition that occasionally there are times when privacy or a relationship or my own mental health pushes me to hold back and not get personal. It’s wise to think carefully before we do, because sharing yourself is one of the bravest things you can do as a creator. You have to go into it knowing that you could get burned.

Over time I’ve learned that if listeners accept me or maybe even like me, then my story is safe with them. And if they hate me? No amount of wordsmithing will protect me from them if they decide to lash out. That’s the risk I take. It doesn’t get a whole lot more personal than that.

in our own podcasts,

Getting personal with our stories is the obvious way to look at this topic, but there are also more subtle ways that will shape the work we do. One of those is the way that we talk about our podcasts.

As podcasters, we have stories that we tell over and over again. Stories about what our podcasts are about. Stories about why we’re the perfect people to produce or host them. Stories about why listening will make our listeners’ lives better or richer or more informed.

Whether or not we see ourselves as storytellers, stories are the way we present ourselves to the world. That tagline for our podcast is a story. So is our host or producer bio. So is the way we describe our podcast to a friend who asks about it.

How ready we are to tell that story can often make the difference in whether or not the person we’re talking to will actually listen to what we’re creating. But telling that story well can be deceptively difficult.

If you’ve ever had to write a personal statement, you know what I’m talking about. Universities and grants will often ask for them because they want to know the story that you tell when you talk about who you are and what you’re contributing to the world. Even if we’re very young, our lives our complex tapestries of millions of memories and moments—each a story of its own. So where do we begin to know how to tell the story of us?

It helps to think back to that basic idea of conflict—and of what’s at stake. With your podcast, especially if you’re the host, the story you’re telling is how this podcast is the culmination of everything that came before, how your specific experiences have made you the perfect person to be telling this story right now. Even if the answer to that question seems obvious to you, it’s worth thinking through the specific plot points in your story that you’ll point to when you tell this story of how your podcast came to be.

If the answer doesn’t feel obvious at all, it may be because your reasons for doing this podcast are external. Maybe you’ve been hired to make a podcast that you wouldn’t do on your own. Maybe you’re just the architect for someone else’s story. But even then, I’d challenge you to think about what you bring to this particular work that gives you a connection to it, that something at stake that will bring energy and urgency to the work that your listeners will pick up on.

Maybe you’re great at solving problems, or encouraging others, or bringing order to chaos, or being decisive, or leading well in difficult situations. What’s the story you tell that illustrates those gifts and connects you to the work? If you understand that, it’ll change the way you talk about your work, no matter what you’re working on.

in the hot seat being interviewed

Finding ways to connect personally to our work isn’t just about what we’re creating. It’s about the stories we tell in everyday conversations, and also in more formal situations like job interviews or being interviewed on other podcasts or by the press.

One of the best insights I’ve ever heard about the job interview process came from Alana Herlands, one of our Kasama Collective graduates, after she’d applied for more than 100 jobs in a single year, and gotten to the final round of interviews in many of them.

Alana is a dynamite producer, and she did eventually get hired, but in the meantime she became a student of the interview process. I asked Alana if she’d share some of those insights with us now.

This was during a particularly frustrating point in the pandemic, when jobs were scarce and the application processes often required multiple interviews and extensive work samples. She read books like Thea Kelley’s Get That Job! The Quick Complete Guide to a Winning Interview, and listened to podcasts like Guy Raz’s How I Built This. What she learned—both from these industry experts who had spent decades thinking about what makes a great interview, and from her own experience—was that when you boil it down, interviews are just probing and interrogating a story. Whether we’re in a job interview or being interviewed by the press, our ability to pull from short, succinct stories that we know by heart and that illustrate who we are is directly tied to how well that interview goes—and how comfortable we feel being in the hot seat.

She started to build an arsenal of success stories, some of them as short as 30-40 seconds long, that she knew by heart. These were stories that showed what she was capable of, but they were also infused with who she was: a compassionate storyteller who wasn’t afraid of hard work, but also knew how to set boundaries and take care of herself so she didn’t burn out.

Once she knew the stories that she wanted to tell, she was able to get her thoughts down into concise soundbites that she practiced first with notes until she didn’t need her notes anymore. This helped calm her nerves and made her less likely to ramble. It also helped her to anticipate the questions that were coming, and think about how to respond in a way that would allow her to steer the conversation back to the stories that illustrated who she was best.

What Alana learned to do in job interviews was the same thing that I’ve learned to do in podcast interviews where I’m the guest in the hot seat. If I know ahead of time the stories that I want to tell about myself and my show, I’ll be able to present myself in a much more thoughtful, succinct way. Over time, I might even have developed jewels of wisdom because I’ve thought about my stories deeply and repeatedly, crafting them over time so they illustrate who I am better than any off-the-cuff conversation ever could.

Alana said that once you develop the stories you want to tell about yourself, you start shaping those stories to fit specific conversations. If it’s a job interview, you can identify key words in the job description, and make sure your story touches on that. If it’s a podcast or publication you’re being interviewed for, you can look at past episodes or websites to make sure that the way you’re telling your stories feels like a great fit with the larger themes you see in that past work.

And like anything, the more you do it, the better you get at anticipating the questions when they’re coming, of learning how to respond even to tricky questions in a way that can steer the conversation back to those stories.

Ultimately, telling your story comes down to trust. When you share your story with others, you don’t know what they’ll do with it. When you share your story in your own work, you still don’t know how people will receive it, but you can at least shape what you’re giving them. We could certainly go through life and never share anything that will force us to get comfortable. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this.

But when we do share our stories with people we can trust, or who we hope we can trust, we offer a great gift to the world. You’ll hear an example of this in this week’s assigned episode, “In the Tunnel,” and in our reflection conversation, where we hear from some of the women who helped make that episode, which is one of the most deeply personal episodes I’ve ever created. It was incredibly scary to share something so personal. It wasn’t safe, but it was joyful to share in that act with others.

For this week’s coaching call, we’re asking you to come up with some of your own stories. We want to hear one or two of your 30-40 second stories that you tell about yourself or your work.

Then we want to ask you a question we all get all the time: what is your podcast about? How can you respond to that question in a way that illustrates one of your stories and your connection to that work?

As always, use the coaching call submission form to submit your answers, and if you’re up for it, record your answers as audio!

We can’t wait to hear your stories.