Convos With Creative People

Convos With Creative People is a conversation show about how creative work actually gets made, hosted by Jolene Haley and Brian LeTendre. Its defining quality is the friendship between them. The two share a writing group and years of creative adventures, and the recording lets that history show instead of hiding it behind a tidy format. The talk moves at a leisurely pace, and the side notes, self-corrections and jokes stay in. Nostalgic detours are part of the appeal. In one, the pair recall messaging a writing-group friend named Mary for years before meeting her in person at a conference in Toronto. Those stories usually land somewhere practical. Their NaNoWriMo prep episode treats a month of drafting as a social project as much as a solo one. The advice is to line up people to talk to when a story gets stuck and people to check in with, and to have the conversation early with family, partners and friends, since most of the free time will go to writing. The same episode is openly an excuse for the two to talk about scary movies. Guests get room to tell their stories without being hurried. With Karin Wu, the conversation turns to leadership, empathy and the idea that the worst bosses often teach the most, and Brian recalls working 12 years for a boss who never once told him he had done a good job. That episode ends with a host mentioning a page full of notes. The feed also carries numbered episodes of See Brian Write, which Brian introduces as a podcast all about writing, and they widen the range. One is a panel he moderated at Connecticut Comic-Con 2014 with Danny Fingeroth and Denny ONeil on writing comics. There, the question of outlining before scripting gets a flexible answer: get the idea down, then put a structure on it and change it as needed. In 'See Brian Write #28--Prepping for Camp NaNoWriMo with Jolene Haley', Jolene is the guest. Neither she nor Brian claims to be a good outliner, and plotters are pointed toward laying out a story on a wall of sticky notes. 'See Brian Write #2--Screwpulp and Animoto' features Richard Billings of the self-publishing platform Screwpulp and a look at Animoto as a tool for video book trailers. In it, Brian sketches a three-part plan of personal updates, an interview and a writer's toolbox segment. Across all of it, the common thread is momentum: starting, finding a community and keeping going.