NYT Bestseller Katherine Center Writes for Joy
In this episode…
📚✨ Feeling overwhelmed by the pressures of writing? Join Maya Linnell as she chats with New York Times bestselling author Katherine Center on the Writes4Women Podcast! Katherine shares her journey of moving from a slow-burn to success, her love for the joyful process of writing, and the art of self-encouragement. Discover how hope and humour blend seamlessly in her stories, and why embracing joy can make all the difference. Don't miss out on this inspiring episode filled with wisdom, laughter, and heartening advice for aspiring writers! ✍️💗
Key Takeaways
(00:00) Introduction to Writes4Women
(03:12) The Joy of Writing and Overcoming Publishing Challenges
(10:31) The Importance of Reading for Pleasure
(20:22) Katherine's Early Writing and Publishing Struggles
(34:28) Balancing Joy and Heartache in Stories
(37:04) Daily Writing Process and Challenges
(44:39) Advice for Aspiring Writers
(48:13) The Heart of Writing: Hope
Transcript
Maya Linnell: I'm a rural romance author with Alan and I have the pleasure today of talking to Katherine Center. She's an American author based in Texas, and she has 11 books to her name and not just 11 books, but she has multiple Instant New York Times bestsellers.
Maya Linnell: Two of her wonderful novels have been converted to movies, and she has the absolute art of making people laugh, cry in these beautiful, bittersweet endings that are very hopeful and joyous. Now, if you're a regular on the podcast, you'll know that occasionally the lovely host Pamela Cook, lets us do these takeovers, and I'm really excited about today's chat.
Maya Linnell: Katherine is a very generous author with her time and her advice. She's got some really wonderful insights into her writing process. Throughout this conversation, she talks about her drafting the way that it was a slow burn to get her start in writing and becoming a published author, even though she knew that was what she wanted to do from the age of 12, there's some tips for aspiring writers and just an all round great chat, especially focusing on her new release, the Wrong Comment, which was released very recently at the start of June, 2024.
Maya Linnell: Get yourself a cup of tea and sit down and relax whether you're watching this on YouTube or whether you're tuning in via podcast whilst you're driving or doing the housework or exercising. I hope you enjoy today's very wonderful chat with the lovely Katherine Center. It is our very big pleasure to have you.
Maya Linnell: Katherine Center on the Rights for Women Podcast today. Welcome to the podcast.
Katherine Center: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
Maya Linnell: Katherine, I'm coming to you from Southwest Victoria in Australia. Can you tell us a little bit about where you are talking to us from today, please?
Katherine Center: I'm in Texas in my dining room and I'm so excited to be chatting with you.
Katherine Center: Thank you for having me on.
Maya Linnell: No worries. Now, the main excitement about our podcast chat today is the release of your brand new book, the Romcoms, and I'm holding up the cover for the people that are listening on the podcast. I'm sorry, you're just gonna have to look at the socials and look at this gorgeous, colorful cover.
Maya Linnell: But for those who are watching on YouTube, you can see it is a fantastic, bright, colorful, full of joy color. Can you tell us a little bit about this wonderful book, Katherine, for those who are yet to race out to the stores and buy it?
Katherine Center: Yeah, it's a romantic comedy about screenwriters who are writing a romantic comedy.
Katherine Center: So basically it's a romcom about writing a romcom. And the, there are two main characters, Emma Wheeler and Charlie Yates. And Charlie is a very famous screenwriter in Hollywood and he has written romantic comedy screenplay. It's the first rom-com he's ever tried to do. He mostly just does like mafia movies and like Space War kind of movies, like guy movies.
Katherine Center: And he is written this rom-com and it's terrible and it's so bad that Emma, our narrator and main character gets. Hired to come and fix it as a ghost writer. And so she is a very good writer who loves rom-coms and has always wanted to be a screenwriter. But her dad has been ill and she's had to stay home and take care of him and defer a lot of her dreams.
Katherine Center: So when she gets this job. It's the, like the opportunity of a lifetime. So she goes to work on the screenplay with Charlie in Los Angeles. And he doesn't really want her there and they don't get along. And he doesn't like rom-coms or believe in love. And she loves rom-coms and she's very offended that he would think about writing another terrible one and putting it out into the world.
Katherine Center: And so they fight and banter and negotiate, and then they wind up falling madly in love. And that is not a spoiler. That's just something to look forward to, like that's a guarantee of the book. They will definitely fall in love in the most fun, delicious, heartwarming and heart rendering way possible.
Maya Linnell: And I think that is such a wonderful promise that you give to readers and romance readers and commercial fiction, genre of fiction readers. They know what they are signing up for, and that is why these are such beautiful, highly selling books is because people know what they're signing up for.
Maya Linnell: And I love that they've got the promise of the premise.
I, yeah, I think that, that guaranteed happy ending that you only get in romance and romantic comedies. Allows you as a writer to create this very lovely, very blissful sense of anticipation in the reader. Because the reader knows that we're working our way towards a happy ending.
So no matter what happens on the way, even if we all get thrown into a snake pit by pirates or whatever it is that's gonna happen. It's never the depths of despair because you know that you're moving in a positive direction, and I think there's no other story genre that can do that for you in that way, like it's really special, hopeful, positive, joyful genre of fiction.
It allows us all to feel better in a lot of important ways.
Maya Linnell: The premise of putting more joy on the page, I know that's one of your personal mottos and statements and you've even got bookmarks and things like that talk about that and artwork. Why was it that you came to adopt that premise?
Maya Linnell: Katherine? I.
Katherine Center: So all my thanks for asking all my training early on when I was younger was very literary. So I have a master's in fiction writing which turns out to be a useless degree. Doesn't really qualify you for any jobs, but I did get a master's in fiction and when I was younger, I really.
Katherine Center: I wanted to write serious fiction. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to be good, whatever that means. And so I.
I
Katherine Center: kept things a lot darker when I was younger. And then it's, I've had this kind of very slow evolution that I think of as a process of de-snobification where I've let go of a lot of my early attitudes and assumptions about the relative value of different genres of fiction.
Katherine Center: And I've come to like. Follow my own compass about what it is that I really love to read. And what I really love to read more than anything else is love stories. And the reason that I love to read them is for this very reason, this building sense of anticipation that they can create because of the sort of parameters of the genre.
Katherine Center: And slowly over time as a grownup, letting go of what I thought I was supposed to be writing and giving myself permission to write what I really wanted to write has been very freeing and very joyful. And part of that process has been letting myself read what it is that I wanted to read. And so the more that I've done all of that, the more I've found myself talking about that with readers and book clubs, just saying, follow your own compass. Give yourself permission to read what you want to, not what you think your high school English teacher would want you to read, or what you think your next door neighbor would approve of if they saw the cover of your book. Like just,
Katherine Center: I think there are questions that we are all asking all the time deep in our psyches that we might not even have the words for.
Katherine Center: We might not even know who we're asking those questions. The books that we're drawn to help us wrestle with those questions and look around for the answers. And so trusting yourself to be your own guide, to take you to the stories that you need to read and the stories that you need to hear allows you to find stories that are really gonna resonate in a very deep.
Katherine Center: In a very deep, life changing way. And that those are not questions that you can ask with your head. Those are questions you have to ask with your heart.
Katherine Center: And so I'm always just trying to give people permission to do that. I think for a lot of us, when we went through school, if we loved to read we wanted to do well in English class, but stories became work instead of play. And they became things that we did for grades and that we got evaluated on. And I think a lot of people I know lost touch with their love of reading and their joy of reading at that moment in life and kind of, some people never got it back. So I'm always trying to encourage people to give themselves permission to read for play, right?
Katherine Center: And to read for joy, and to read for fun, and to read the stories that. Call to them, not the stories that they think they ought to be reading. So that's where I've come down on it. Read for Joy is my battle cry for sure.
Maya Linnell: Yeah, I think that's fantastic. Katherine and I was listening to your wonderful Ted talk that you did talking about why boys should read more stories about girls and that building of empathy and really starting early and it's, it was quite shocking the way that when you actually broke it down and looked at the statistics of, the children's books and how many of those books had a male lead character, it was really quite confronting.
Maya Linnell: That's something you're obviously very passionate about.
Katherine Center: It was something I was thinking about a lot when my kids were younger and I wanted to encourage everyone to read everyone's books. I think it's very easy to wanna read stories about people who are like you. 'cause it's a.
Katherine Center: In whatever way that is. Because it's an easy entry, because you already feel like you know how to get into that story. But I think there's so much growing you can do and so much empathy you can learn about. And there's so much mind expanding stuff that can happen when you step into the stories of other people who aren't like you.
Katherine Center: And one of the things that I love about fiction, one of the reasons that I think it's relevant and life changing is that fiction is not human life. Of course, it's not real life, but it's the next best thing. It's very similar to real life. And if the writer of a story is really doing a good job, you step into that story and you're not just like watching those characters from across the room do their thing.
Katherine Center: You're right in there with them. If the story is really cooking. You're not just like close to them. You like step into their shoes. You basically just like crawl inside their skin. And you're. Experiencing empathy and compassion for those characters in such an intense way that those things feel like they're happening to you, right?
Katherine Center: You merge with these characters in this way that's really special and that doesn't come along in other areas of human life. And when those characters want something, you want it too, right? And when they're scared, you're scared. And when they're hopeful. You're hopeful. And when they fall in love, you get to fall in love.
Katherine Center: And there've been all these studies on the brain about how your brain is literally reacting to the things happening in the story as if those things are really happening to you. Like your brain makes it real. It's like the matrix. And so you go through that story and you have this simulated experience.
Katherine Center: When you come out the other side, you get to pull wisdom out of that story in the way that you would in real life. And that's really special because, wisdom is not something that you can get out of a textbook, right? Wisdom only comes from learned experience. I mean from lived things that happen in your real life, and so you can't.
Katherine Center: You can't just think about something in the abstract and become wise. You have to go through it. And so fiction lets us go through all kinds of things that we never would've encountered just at the grocery store. And it makes our hearts grow and our minds grow. So yeah, I think it's very good for you to be a reader and I think it makes you a better person.
Katherine Center: And I think stepping into other people's stories helps you understand the world in a much more complicated way.
Katherine Center: So yeah, I'm a fan.
Maya Linnell: Yeah, and people haven't seen that TED talk. Go have a look on YouTube. Just Google, Katherine Center, TEDx talk, and it's a really interesting backstory into your first foray into fiction writing as well as a sixth grader or as we say here in Australia, a year sixth student.
Maya Linnell: And it was a really good insight. We really enjoyed it as a whole. Family watched it this morning oh, thanks. That was neat. Now your stories resonate so clearly with people. Katherine, you have made many bestseller lists, instant New York Times bestseller as I mentioned in the introduction. What does that feel like as an author?
Maya Linnell: Not just to put books out there in the world, but to put books out there that people are just really relishing and loving and sharing and buying and waving about on all the social media so they can spread the word.
Katherine Center: It feels great. I'm so grateful for it. I'm like the opposite of an overnight sensation because I've been at this for a very long time.
Katherine Center: I feel like I'm like the great grandma of romcoms at this point. I published my first book in 2007 and the, and the process of finding readers has been a very slow one for me. I've basically done it sort of book club by book club. And I live in Houston, Texas, which is the fourth largest city in America, and it's full of book clubs.
Katherine Center: And basically if anyone ever emailed me and said, Hey, will you come to my book club? I said, yes. And then I would go and I'd meet these folks and we would talk about books and slowly, I got people to get interested in what I was doing and read the books. And so I, I do. I do not take anything for granted.
Katherine Center: I know some writers who have had things happen for them very fast, and that's one way to do it. But my method has been like the turtle versus the hare I've been very slow and I. I think that was a good kind of gentle way of growing, and it makes me incredibly grateful. It's been this, it's a good thing.
Katherine Center: I like a slow burn in general because it has been a very slow burn process, but I think more than anything, the The thing that it taught me is to just be grateful for every reader who comes along and every person who gets excited about what I'm doing. Because otherwise I would've quit I think years ago.
Katherine Center: 'cause it's easy to get discouraged. It's a crazy job. It's any audience-based job is stressful and odd. But this one. The way that I've been in the game for so long and the way that I've managed to not just get frustrated and quit or give up has been to just truly cherish every single person.
Katherine Center: Which is why if you DM me on Instagram, there's a very good chance that I will DM you back because I am so grateful for you. Thank you for reading the book, and I'm so genuinely thankful that you liked it. Yeah. That's
Maya Linnell: fantastic. I know there's a lot of readers that are so grateful for that type of investment from you as an author.
Maya Linnell: So not only do you put out these beautiful books, but your social media is a really lovely place to spend time on. I find it joyous to go on there and see the artwork that you're creating and the different cakes that people make that look like your book covers and all sorts of cool things that you're getting out there and doing.
Maya Linnell: I do wanna dive into that a little bit, but first. I'd like to go back 16, 17 years ago to when that first book was published. What was your life like then? What were you doing before? Because it was that, a 12-year-old had that dream of publishing a book and it got, it happened when you were in your early thirties.
Maya Linnell: Can you tell us what life looked like before the books hit the shelf?
Katherine Center: I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I was 12. I got started writing fan fiction. About the 1980s boy band Duran. I was very awkward and very nerdy at that age, and I had two best friends who were also awkward and also nerdy.
Katherine Center: And we got this idea that we should write novels about meeting the band members of Duran. And we should cast ourselves as the main characters in those novels. And of course, the story that I wound up writing was about me meeting Duran and all five of them falling in love with me. That was the whole story.
Katherine Center: It was basically a romance novel. And the plot was that I had to decide who to marry. And it's a terrible book. It's not a book, it's a notebook full of, ballpoint pin scribblings. But I have this, rule for my older sister that if I'm ever hit by a bus, she has to go find that novel. I have it up in the attic in storage and burn it immediately.
Katherine Center: I must never see the light of day. It's very bad. But it was also brilliant, because we saved ourselves that year by finding this incredibly joyful thing to do with each other. We would have sleepovers and read our novels to each other and installments. We had the best time.
Katherine Center: And so that was the first moment in my life when I. I was doomed to wanna be a writer when I first tasted that like particular nectar of what stories can do for you, how they can change your life and give you hope and shift your perspective. So from then on, I wanted to be a writer. I never wanted to be anything else.
Katherine Center: I wrote. Stories and unhappy love poems and I memorized song lyrics and I went to Vassar College and in the US which is like a very englishy kind of English majory type of school. And majored in English. Won a little prize there and then came back, went to graduate school, got that master's.
Katherine Center: And so I was actively trying this whole time, I was writing things, I was sending things out, and I was basically getting rejected just over and over and over and over again. And I really thought if I was smart, I would quit. That was I kept trying to quit actually. I would just be like, you know what, this isn't healthy, right?
Katherine Center: This is not. Good For me. It's just depressing. It's very hopeless. I'm not getting anywhere. I keep constantly chasing after this dream that I cannot seem to catch. If I were a smart person, I would just quit, but I couldn't seem to do it like I would declare that I had quit forever. And then two weeks later, I would get another idea for a story and I would start up again.
Katherine Center: And it just felt like a very sad affliction that I had, like my whole family felt very sorry for me. It was just like I was this sort of tragic. Figure in the family, but I just kept trying. I couldn't stop trying, is basically what happened. And when I finally got that publishing deal, I was 32, so it was two full decades between when I decided I wanted to be a writer and when I actually got a little bit of traction and my son wasn't even born yet and my daughter was a little baby.
Katherine Center: And so we my kids are both now. Taller than me and one of them's in college. So it's been a long journey. But yeah, I was just totally overwhelmed mom life, diapers, spit up all the stuff everywhere. Just I actually remember the night that I got the book deal. I had written this novel and it, I had put it in a drawer because I had written the book actually, and then.
Katherine Center: My son Thomas arrived a month early and it had been like on my to-do list, find agent, sell novel. And then I had not been able to get that done. It's harder than it sounds. And then the baby came early and I just thought that's it. The nothing's ever gonna happen with this.
Katherine Center: I had it all printed, I had it all ready. I had an actual physical manuscript, and I remember putting it in a drawer and closing the drawer and thinking, I'll never see you again. Bye-Bye. And then it was like, I guess a year and a half later that I actually got the book deal. So I wrote the novel before Thomas was born, but I didn't get the book deal until he was like a year and a half.
Katherine Center: And I ran into a neighbor in our, at the park who was at the park with her kids. And I was at the park with my kids and she happened to be a published novelist and she offered to show my stuff to her agent who offered to represent me. And I wound up getting. A book deal. But I remember the night that happened.
Katherine Center: I got a two book deal with a random house for my first book after two decades of failure. Suddenly, boom. The Cinderella story of suddenly having a book deal with this big publishing house. And I remember I. I couldn't sleep that night. I was so astonished and I had so much adrenaline from just the fact that it had happened.
Katherine Center: And I remember walking around my house, like my husband was asleep, the kids were asleep, and I was like, flipping lights on and off, just like trying to take it in wide awake, stepping over Legos, and I remember having this thought. I surveyed the living room full of toys and I thought my life is never gonna be the same.
Katherine Center: Then the very next morning when I was up at five 30 with the baby, I was like, oh, you know what, it's gonna be exactly the same. Nothing's gonna change.
Katherine Center: So that was the beginning of it. That was 2007 and it's been, I can't even keep track anymore many years, 16, 17 years. And that was the happy ending of all those years of struggling and not getting published.
Katherine Center: But it was also just the beginning of, once you get published, then you have to find people who are actually like willing to read. Your books, and that's a whole different set of challenges. I had this idea that we could do it like a telephone tree, where we're like, I would ask three people to buy it and ask them to ask three people to buy it and ask that they could each ask three people to buy.
Katherine Center: And before we knew it, we'd have the whole world blanketed. That is not how that works. It turns out nobody really wants to read your novel. Everybody's busy, they've got stuff going on. They already have their authors that they like. So it is very hard to talk people into reading your stuff and it is hard to build an audience.
Katherine Center: And I just decided to just take it slow and not pressure myself. I had kids to raise, I had laundry to fold, other things to do, so I think it was a good path looking back.
Maya Linnell: Yeah. And look, I know that I feel like I'm very slow to the party because I only came across you maybe two years ago and started devouring your backlist and going, oh my gosh, why have I not heard of Katherine's Center?
Maya Linnell: I love her stuff. I love the witty banter between the characters. I love the humor on the page. I feel really connected to the characters. So I guess there's that step of first building an audience within the states and then going internationally. Is that something that's completely different trying to save much an audience in Australia?
Katherine Center: That's a dream. I would love to do that. I, it's the US has been easy to reach because I can travel around, and so I go on a book tour every summer. This summer I'll be on book tour for three weeks and I'll go all over the country and but I, yeah, and so that makes it a little bit easier.
Katherine Center: , I have a huge number of readers in Texas because I'll just drive all over Texas, and go see people. It's very easy to make human connections. I was actually just at a library conference for Texas librarians and I taught a line dancing class for them, and so it was like 120 Texas librarians.
Katherine Center: In this big room, and we all were dancing and having so much fun together. And that's like a real human connection, which is a little bit harder to make when you're far away. But of course now that the pandemic is over, I'm desperate to go traveling. This has been like a whole thing with me. I just, I wanna go everywhere.
Katherine Center: I wanna see everything. I feel there, desperate wanderlust to get out into the world. So maybe I'll get a reason to come and visit.
Maya Linnell: Look let's hope that we can have a huge Australian crowd when you do come across and and visitors and do book tours and talk a little about your wonderful stories.
Maya Linnell: Now, touching back on that line dancing, there is, in the romcoms there is line dancing. Please tell me how did that come to be? Oh
Katherine Center: my gosh. Yeah. That's why I taught the class. It's because of the romcom. I, a couple of years ago when my oldest child left for college, I decided to have a midlife crisis and and I decided that part of that was going to be taking up line dancing, which is something I always had wanted to do, but I felt very shy about it.
Katherine Center: But I also thought that I might be secretly amazing. I thought maybe I'll show up because of all the dancing that I've done in the kitchen while cooking dinner over all these years. I thought maybe I'll be incredible. That could happen. But then I did sign up for a class. I made my daughter who was home for the summer come with me.
Katherine Center: And we got there and I was terrible. I was astonishingly terrible. Everybody in the class felt so sorry for me. It was like a combination of like pity and horror at like how I could possibly be so bad. I couldn't remember anything. I was okay if I could see the instructor, but as soon as we had to turn to face another wall and I couldn't see her anymore.
Katherine Center: It, everything would just disappear and I would just be standing there like a lost lamb. It was it was very humiliating actually. And after maybe three classes or so, I said to my daughter, I'm quitting. This is crazy. Nobody can force you to humiliate yourself at this level in adult life.
Katherine Center: I'm out, I don't, I'm not gonna do this anymore. And she actually gave me a talking too. She was like. This is good for you. You're growing as a person. You can't just spend your life doing things that you're already good at. You need to let yourself learn about new things, and you wanna do this, you have to stick with it.
Katherine Center: So I did, and it's been a year and a half that I've been going every Tuesday night to this recreation center and doing line dancing, and I am, I'm still not great. I'm slightly less terrible after a year and a half. I'm never gonna win any prizes. They're not gonna send me to the Olympics. But as I was doing it, I think any humiliation is good, like fertile ground for comedy.
Katherine Center: And so I was writing the romcom as I was going through this whole process of trying to do these lessons and I decided to try and stick a lion dancing scene into the book. And, emma in the book is very much like me. She secretly thinks she's going to be amazing and then she gets there and she's terrible.
Katherine Center: And she is trying to prove to Charlie, the other writer in the story that line dancing is not romantic and that it's a ridiculous type of dancing to put into a romantic comedy. But then of course it winds up being accidentally romantic in all sorts of unexpected ways.
Katherine Center: It was a really fun scene to write is one of my very favorite scenes in the book, and so that's why we did the line dancing lesson together.
Katherine Center: Just to feel that sort of crazy joy that comes from doing, from dancing in general and also doing something as a group. I thought about this a lot during the pandemic. I read about this concept called Collective effervescence, which is basically the idea that Joy is great. But it's better when you experience it with other people.
Katherine Center: Joy is amplified when you are experiencing it in a group of other people. And so I thought about that a lot during the line dancing lessons. Whenever I would wanna quit or feel humiliated, I would think, no, this is collective effervescence, this is good for you. My joy is being amplified. So yeah, I wanted to put that in there and I wanted to give people a chance to experience it for themselves.
Katherine Center: I think especially post pandemic, it's really good for us to go out there and be together.
Maya Linnell: Yeah. And I think it's a really important thing. As a writer, you spend so much time and effort putting your heart and soul onto the page. You're alone a lot of the time at a keyboard. So getting out there and doing some things like that for me, it's a swimming group.
Maya Linnell: We go in the ocean, it's freezing cold. Some rain, hail will shine once a week. And that joy of sharing those moments with people that you haven't otherwise had much to do with, but you've got this collective purpose. And I'm gonna tell them all about collective effervescence. That's fantastic.
Katherine Center: Yeah, it's a helpful, it's a helpful framework for thinking about life.
Katherine Center: It's really, it's been very, it's been a good guide for me.
Maya Linnell: But I promised my daughter, we've listened to quite a few of the audio books together when we've been doing road trips. And my mom loves your books as well, so I've been slowly spreading the word here in Australia. And she was delighted to hear that I was interviewing you today and said, please make sure you ask Katherine about using her real life.
Maya Linnell: Experiences in stories. The particular one that she wanted to talk about was what you wish for, and there's that incident with the school shooting. Now I know that's not something we can't really cover in a short space of time, but is that something that you try and choose topical issues relevant to things that have impacted you personally?
Katherine Center: I am so I live in Texas. We have far too many guns in Texas. Try as the Moms of Texas might, we can't seem to. Get rid of them. And I'm married to a school teacher, so I am grateful to say that I have not had any personal experience with any kind of school shooting, but I worry about it a lot.
Katherine Center: I worry, and I'm married to the type of school teacher who would definitely, you know. Sacrifice himself to help others in that kind of situation. It's something that's been a sort of a constant topic and worry. And yeah, it, I didn't put it in there exactly on purpose. It wasn't like, oh, here's an issue of the day that I wanna talk about, because I try to be careful not to be.
Katherine Center: I think things like that, those hot button issues can overwhelm a story. So I try to be, I try to tread very lightly with them. But that said. When you're married to a school teacher and my sister is also a teacher, she teaches French in at high school. When you're married to a teacher and you're in the teacher world, it's very much in your consciousness, and so when I decided to write about teachers, that was a logical, sensible. Topic to struggle with. And I, I always wanna have characters who have to struggle with something real. 'cause I very much believe that those struggles are where we find wisdom. And I love that about stories.
Katherine Center: And as I was thinking about these people and what their lives might really consist of, that was a very clear struggle, that. All teachers have to contend with in some way or another in the United States because it's just out there. So yeah, that, that became a thing that I wound up writing about.
Maya Linnell: Yeah. Sorry, that was quite the detail, wasn't it? From joy to something that's so very sad. But actually
Katherine Center: that's a good question because I really do think that like joy and heartache live side by side, right? And my stories are always. They have a lot of sadness in them, but they also have a lot of comedy.
Katherine Center: And when I first started, I think there was an idea that those two things couldn't exist in the same book. That there was somehow, like there were tragedies way over here and there were comedies on the other side. And those two things were not really related to each other. But for me, they very much are, sides of the same coin because.
Katherine Center: We use comedy as a coping mechanism at my house. That's how we get through the hard things is by cracking extra jokes, right? And lifting everybody else up by making the room laugh. And so I think comedy and tragedy lives, shoulder to shoulder. I think we invented comedy because of tragedy, because life is hard, because we're all trying to cheer ourselves up.
Katherine Center: And yeah I think it makes sense that those two things need to exist in the books and. Just like they exist in the world.
Maya Linnell: Yeah. We're all very pleased to hear that was not a directly personal experience, but I just, I love how you paint these different scenarios and that you put us in out with the character's shoes with the one with the fire, the things that you save in a fire.
Maya Linnell: That was another beautiful touching story. And the bodyguard and there are so many poignant moments throughout the book where you have me. Crying as I'm driving along and there'll be tears flooding. And I think it's a really special author that can do that for readers and consistently.
Maya Linnell: And your books resound resonate with so many different readers on so many levels. The bestsellers don't lie, but also views and the amount of wonderful fans that you have that are so keen. Can you please give us an Australian book recommendation, Katherine, before we let you go?
Katherine Center: I'm madly in love with Sally Hepworth.
Katherine Center: And she doesn't even write in my genre, and I don't actually tend to gravitate towards thrillers because I'm easily frightened. But she's such a great writer. They're such page turning stories. So I love her. I love Leanne Moriarty. I love, I just wrote a blurb before Rachel Johns, who wrote a book called The other Bridget, which is a love letter to romcoms.
Katherine Center: And then actually I wrote a book last year that I really love that was nonfiction by an author named Tabitha Carvin. Oh, yes. And she wrote a book called, this is Not a book about Benedict Cumberbatch. I loved that book. I just ate it up. I wanted to just rewind at the end and start over, and I did on audio.
Katherine Center: I wanted to listen to it again because it was very insightful about how important it is to just love things madly, just jump in and fall in love with all kinds of things in the world and how nourishing that is for us. So that was a surprise book that I. Absolutely adored.
Maya Linnell: Can you tell us about what an average day looks like when you are doing a first draft?
Maya Linnell: I think everybody
Katherine Center: has their own way of doing things, and I think it's really important to honor that, pay attention to it. I hear a lot of advice out there in the world that says this is a job, put your butt in the seat and work. But I never experienced. Writing as work in that way that we think of work.
Katherine Center: It requires a lot of concentration, it requires a lot of attention, but I really write for fun and for joy. And that's not to say that it's easy Exactly, but it's like I get into this kind of lovely state of flow where I'm just interested in what's happening in the story and all I wanna do is find the right words to make the story sound in other people's heads.
Katherine Center: The way it sounds in my head, and I wanna flash the pictures into other people's minds, the way that they're flashing in mine, right? I want them to see what I'm seeing and I want them to hear what I'm hearing. And so putting it down on the page is about that question of like, how do you make that happen?
Katherine Center: Like what are the best words for evoking the visuals and the sounds and then the emotions right of this moment. And so for me it's always just this really fun challenge. It. I've heard that quote. There's a quote about writers that says, writers don't like to write. They like to have written.
Katherine Center: Did I just do something to the thing? Did you see something happen? Balloons just popped up. That's lemme start over. I've seen this quote about writing around a lot that says writers don't like to write, they like to have written. And I'm not that person at all. I think the idea is the process is torture, but then when they're done they're happy when it's over 'cause they've got something that they like.
Katherine Center: That's not the case for me at all. I like the process. I like thinking about. Commas and m dashes and how, what to take out and what to add, where to blow the scene up and linger, where to shrink it down and get through faster. All the editing for me is just I don't think of editing as self-criticism.
Katherine Center: I think of it as making things better, and to have a job where you get to just make things better all day is a pretty great job actually. So I have worked very hard in my life to cultivate s like an art of self encouragement in my writing life where like I try to notice when I'm getting things right.
Katherine Center: I try to like enjoy, like when I'm reading back through something I've written, I'll underline stuff that needs to be fixed, but I also make sure to put check marks in the margins. If I've written something that's funny or something that's working or I've used some great word that I'm pleased with, like I try to notice both.
Katherine Center: You can't not notice when it's not working. That's part of your job. You have to, but I try to balance it out with okay, this is funny, or this is beautiful, or this is a great way to say this thing. So that's the way that I keep it balanced and I keep it fun and satisfying so I'm not just beating myself up, as I'm writing.
Katherine Center: And I think folks who do that are probably not gonna last too long because that's not a good feeling. Why would you sign up for that? You've gotta make it. Fun. You've gotta find the joy in it and the process. So I like the process of writing and as for the sort of specifics of what my sort of mechanics of it are the whole time I've been writing novels, I've had kids in the house and I have found that if my children are anywhere in like a hundred foot radius, I cannot concentrate on imaginary people.
Katherine Center: If the real people of the world need me, that's where my attention is. And even if they don't, so what I started doing is, leaving town, I would just leave the city. I would find someone who had a vacation home I could borrow or would just rent somewhere and go away. And there's an island on the coast of Texas called Galveston Island, and that's where I tend to go to right now.
Katherine Center: That's what it settled into. And I'll stay there for four or five days, just completely alone in total human isolation, which is maybe not. The healthiest way to live. But I get a lot done. If you can, like I can wake up in the morning, make a pot of coffee, sit down on the sofa with my laptop, start writing, and the next thing I know, it's dark outside and I've been writing all day and I've just been lost in the story.
Katherine Center: And you can't really get that same immersion if you're in your regular life, and people are emailing you and you have to go to the grocery store and the dog is barking. I tend to write in bursts. So I'll do, I'll go for four or five days and I'll write 60, 80, a hundred pages just depending on how well it's cooking.
Katherine Center: And then I'll come home and I don't think about the story at all for three weeks. I'll just be being a mom, just getting stuff done, making dinner. And then but it's never fully gone. It's just just cooking back there. But when the, when I come back to it after that break, I have these very fresh eyes for reading the story and I can step to the side and see it in a way that you can't when you're just right up next to it all the time.
Katherine Center: So that gives me a little bit of perspective. And I think, I mean that whole process. Evolved out of necessity, but I actually think that it's a good process for me because it that rhythm of getting in and obsessing over it and then pulling back and then getting back in seems to help. And that's what I do for the first draft.
Katherine Center: Once I have a first draft I don't have to go away anymore. It doesn't require that same level of intensity. I can happily, just. Hang out in the house, in the, at the kitchen table and edit. But the, yeah, the hardest part for me is always that very first draft, and I'm usually writing it January through May.
Katherine Center: I'm actually doing one right now. I'm almost done where I don't wanna lose the thread of it and I don't wanna go off in the wrong direction. And I wanna I feel urgently eager to get it down on the page, but I also don't wanna go too fast. Because if I go too fast, I might. Go the wrong way and then regret it and get confused.
Katherine Center: So I try to sort of balance how fast I'm going and then it's always a big relief when the basics are down on the page and then I have something to work with and I know that it's basically working and I can go back and play with it and make it even better. So that's my process.
Maya Linnell: And our main audience here on the Writes Women podcast is writers as well as readers, but mostly writers.
Maya Linnell: And I know there would be a lot of people that'd be interested to know, are you an over writer? Do you do 120,000 word draft or you're an underwriter, skeleton, draft, or 80,000 words, and then fill it in. Once you get those bare bones down, which way do you go?
Katherine Center: That's a really good question. I am I tend to write very tightly.
Katherine Center: I do not overwrite. If I ever am overriding, something has gone very wrong for me. I tend to write just the, yeah, the kinda the bare bones of what really needs to be there. And then once I know what the story is, that's when I go back in and I puff up the sections that really need to be lingered on and made very three dimensional, the sort of most emotionally resonant sections.
Katherine Center: But I actually was in conversation with Kristen Hannah a couple of years ago when she came to Texas. And I was asking her about her process and she was saying she really overwrites, she writes, much more than she needs. And then she goes and cuts it all back. But, I've never done it that way.
Katherine Center: I always just want to get, I don't want anything to be there that doesn't need to be there. Yeah. Everything has to, for me, especially in a first draft, everything needs to be there for a reason. Although sometimes I'll put things in thinking they might turn into something and then I get to the end and realize they're not turning into something and so then I'll go back later and take them out.
Katherine Center: 'cause they didn't really need to be there. But yeah, it's I'm very, I tend to be very spare. I grew up in the. Hemingway, Raymond Carver School of just keeping it as just as basic as possible. And not getting too off course if possible.
Maya Linnell: Fair enough. And what about advice for writers that are just starting out on their journey?
Maya Linnell: Back when you were first almost published, is there something that you wish that someone had told you, someone that had bestsellers to their names, who had their novels turned into movies like you've had?
Katherine Center: I have so much advice. How many hours do we have? Yeah I've had lots of years to think about all this.
Katherine Center: Two things I would say. I've already said, but I'll say them again. One is to really be kind to yourself as a writer. Really try to notice when you're getting things right and celebrate that with yourself, I think the art of self encouragement is so crucial for anybody who is doing anything creative or audience-based.
Katherine Center: You just have to have that, you have to be. Your own audience in some way. Of course, the real people also exist out there, but there needs to be this little cheering section that you've got that's just you, where you're like, yes, this is great. This is working because you have to encourage yourself or you're not gonna do it.
Katherine Center: So that's a big thing. The other the thing that's gotten me through all these years is doubling down on gratitude. Just even when things weren't working out the way that I wanted to, even when I wasn't getting things I thought I wanted to have. I've had many disappointments, so many more disappointments and failures than wins over the years, over all these years.
Katherine Center: And my way of navigating that and coping with it was just to say, I am grateful to get to be here at all. Just to get to I get to spend my life thinking about stories and writing stories like how lucky am I? And even if I can't get a book contract next year, and I have to give it all up, I will be grateful that I got to do it at all.
Katherine Center: That's not an easy emotional place to dwell in, but that's where I've tried to be. I've worked really hard to just be grateful that this is my life. So those are my two big things. I would also say try as much as you can to not pay attention to what's going on with other writers around you. I know that sounds weird but you can, there's a, there are.
Katherine Center: It's just, it's a job where the ground is always shifting under your feet. Other people get things you thought you wanted. There's a lot of stuff like that and it can make you really miserable. And so you just need to focus on your, do your thing. There's actually a great Tina Faye quote, and it's Do your thing.
Katherine Center: Don't care if they like it. Which I love. But yeah, just do your thing. Do your thing and cheer for other people. Just be excited for other people and just be excited to be you and get to do your thing. That's, these are very hard things to do. They're easy to say and hard to do, but I think those are the things that insulate you from a lot of the misery that could come in a job where there's really no stability.
Katherine Center: It's not like you're a. You go to law school and you get your degree and then you're a lawyer. Done, writing any kind of creative job, you're always moving towards a disappearing finishing line. You never really know when you've made it. You never know when you're done.
Katherine Center: And so you have to learn to be happy with where you are. And just grateful to be where you are.
Maya Linnell: And I really agree with that celebrating other authors as well, comparison is the thief of joy. And if you can cheer everyone on a rising tide lifts all boats.
Maya Linnell: So I feel if we can cheer on other authors, I think that's such a wonderful thing to do. And you do a great job of it too. I've seen so many different people on your socials their books are found through following your socials and it's a lovely, beautiful circle, isn't it? That
Katherine Center: yeah.
Katherine Center: It's good for you and it's fun and it's good for the world.
Maya Linnell: Wonderful. Now, I always like to finish on a very important question that Pamela asks all of her guests on the Women Rights for Women podcast, and that is Katherine's Center. Can you please tell us what is at the heart of your writing?
Katherine Center: I think it's hope. I think it's hope. I think that. I am always trying to write stories that authentically let us all feel hopeful, about the world and humanity and our own selves. You know that there is, I think I'm always trying to write about characters who find some way. Despite all the hardships and griefs and sorrows of life to become the best versions of themselves, right?
Katherine Center: And to do the right thing and to be brave and to be kind. And I need that. I personally need that. That's why I keep going back to these stories. I really, I, I just don't have any interest in stories about serial killers. I just don't, because I so badly am looking for stories that are.
Katherine Center: Uplifting and generative and hopeful. And so that's, I think that's the heart of everything I'm doing. I'm trying to create hope for myself and anybody else who wants to come along. I'm trying to, lift us all up and help us all feel better and give us things to look forward to and make us laugh and make us swoon and all of those, every single thing that I know how to do in terms of creating a really immersive, really three-dimensional page turning story, it is all there to help us all feel more hopeful.
Katherine Center: I think that's ultimately what it's, I've never been asked that question before, but I think that's where I'm gonna land on that. I think that's what that is.
Maya Linnell: I think that's a perfect place to end our interview today, Katherine, I'm so very grateful for your time. Thank you for coming in and working out with the time zones and the differences to be able to make this chat happen.
Maya Linnell: I absolutely loved the romcoms and I hope that all of the listeners for the Rights Women Podcast rush out and go find themselves a copy on the shelves. We've been very lucky to speak with you today, Katherine. People can find you on social media. You've got a website as well, and a newsletter. I hear I need to sign up for that one.
Katherine Center: Yeah, I do have a newsletter. I take it very seriously.
Maya Linnell: Fantastic. I look forward to staying in touch that way. Thanks very much to Pamela Cook for letting us do this takeover on the Rights of Women Podcast. So many great episodes and interviews with other authors that you can find on there. Thank you very much to everyone for tuning in today and listening.
Maya Linnell: Whether you are watching it on YouTube or whether you are listening to the podcast while you're out exercising or walking the dog wishing you many happy books and lots of great more books coming from you. Hopefully Katherine, we look forward to them.
Katherine Center: Thank you so much. That was such a joy. All right.
Katherine Center: I had so much fun talking with you.