Finding the Throughline with Kate Hanley

[Jenna Blum, inner stuff]: Getting over the fear that you’re wasting time

·22 min·2 clips

Jenna Blum reveals she absolutely hates starting projects, comparing first drafts to a Pollock spatter she despises.

Jenna Blum starts with resistance. She says she hates the Pollock-spatter stage of a first draft, the same stage her heroine Sam names in Murder, Your Darlings. The book is openly meta: Sam's writing life is basically Blum's, so the craft talk begins somewhere personal instead of polished. Kate Hanley keeps the focus on the throughline, meaning the writer's perspective, process, and path when the work gets rough. Time is the sore spot. Blum names the fear that a false start can make a whole day feel wasted, especially when books take so long to build. She does not try to pretty that up. She talks about stepping outside the panic and speaking to herself more kindly, while still keeping some discipline in the room. Her image is mulch. A bad writing day can become fertilizer for the thing she is growing, even when the author ego is busy calling it wasted. The trust comes first. Blum says she has learned to trust that voice before she fully feels it. Then Hanley asks how being 55 has changed the work, and their shared age gives the moment an easy warmth. Blum answers with some caution. Historical fiction has taken her 10 years of research for each novel, and she is thinking harder about what she can finish now. She wants two more books out in the next five years. That goal has made genre flexibility feel useful, including the thriller she has just written, while the emotional questions still come first. By the end, she says ideas tend to come from unresolved emotional situations that keep nudging her imagination.

As heard by us

Jenna Blum turns a wasted writing day into mulch for the book still trying to grow.

Jenna Blum's worry about wasting time gives this episode its useful tension. A first draft can feel like a Pollock spatter, and one false start can make a whole day seem gone.

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Why you'd press play

If a false start makes you feel like you wasted a whole day, Jenna Blum has a gentler argument.

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