My Biggest Mistake as a Writer: Zoë Richards

This month’s special guest Zoë Richards reveals the biggest mistake in her writing career…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your writing career?

ZOË: Doubting myself. So, many years ago, and I’m talking. I think, around about 22 years ago,
Writing Magazine had an offer from an agent that you could send in up to 3000 words. So I sent off to her 3000 words, and she came back. And now I reflect backwards and it’s like, oh, she gave me such incredibly good advice, but I didn’t get the “Well done, Zoë, you are a Gold Star student.” So because because I was brought up with the coercive control of “you are not good enough unless you are the star student.” When I came home second in the year, I’m sure you can guess where this is going. Second in the year out of 145 kids and I said I came home I came second in geography,
and my dad’s answer was, “What are you going to do next year to be first?” And there wasn’t a smile
in that response. So I was always expected to be the best in class. So this agent didn’t
make me best in class. So I believed I wasn’t a writer and I didn’t write for a few years. So I would say, anybody who gets rejection, remember, first off, if they give you a nuggets, store the nugget. You might not be able to accept what they’ve told you today, but at some point you’ll be ready to accept what they’ve told you. And she told me, was write what you know. I can tell that you’re writing something now that you don’t know anything about it. So either write something
you already know about or go and research what you’re trying to write about. And I took it as being, I’m no good at writing. She wasn’t telling me I was no good at writing. She was telling me it was obvious I didn’t know what I was writing about. And they’re are two distinctly different things. So anyone listening who’s thinking, oh, I’m useless because I’ve had a rejection: what are they telling you? And then secondly, it’s only their opinion. And if you are 100% sure you’re right
and you’ve written good stuff, keep going. But I think we’ve always got room to improve.

MARK: Now, listeners, if you’re thinking this is incredibly good advice where I can get more of this? You have a podcast, don’t you? So let’s give that a quick plug. Zoë, tell us about Write, Dammit.

ZOË: Well, yeah, it’s called Write, Dammit because I needed to remind myself to write, dammit. And I actually did the podcast because the government created something called Integrated Care Boards, and the one I worked for was told it was over establishment and needed to reduce its numbers. So a load of us were made redundant. Nobody’s ever made redundant in the NHS, so it was a bit of a shock to us all. And I was doing a job I loved with colleagues I adored. And so I thought, well, I can’t sit around and do nothing whilst I’m looking for a job and bear in mind; my kind of job, I was the only one in the country, so not the kind of job that you can get lots of work doing. So it was very, very difficult for me to find an identical job. I was having to reinvent myself. So what I did instead was start a podcast, and I learned what I could and discovered that if I could do seven, no, if I could do eight podcast episodes I was doing better than most because the majority of people stop at seven episodes or three months of running a podcast. So I said, right, I’m doing it for four months, and I’m going to do eight episodes. So we’re now on episode 127 and it’s 18 months old.

MARK: Yeah, this is episode three and I’ve still got the will to live, so I think we’re doing alright.

ZOË: Yeah, you’ve done one before though. I think you’ll keep this one
going for sure.