Episode Details

Memoirist Deepa Paul, essayist and cookbook author Gina Beach, and novelist Daisy Buchanan on building a writing practice one hour at a time, working through procrastination and self-doubt, and what changes when you write in community.
 

You'll learn

• Why an essay no editor wanted a decade ago turned out not to be an essay at all.
• How to break a book into tasks small enough to finish inside a single hour.
• The case for treating your own interior life as seriously as any grand subject.
• How a rabbit hole of personal research turned into a four-year book project.
• Why the hardest part of self-publishing has nothing to do with production.
• When procrastination is doing useful work, and when it's just filling the gaps.
• What changes in your writing once you stop trying to get it right.
• A reason to stop measuring a writing session by its word count.
• How sitting alongside other writers quietly rearranges your sense of your own work.
• The tidal metaphor that makes a bad writing day easier to let go of.

Resources & Links

• Writers' Hour
• Ask Me: A Memoir of Daring to Love Differently by Deepa Paul
• Deepa Paul
• 'The power of an hour' — Deepa Paul interviewed by the Women's Prize
• Nurture: Oil-Free, Plant-Based Cooking for Health by Regina Beach
• Regina Beach
• All Grown Up: A hilarious and heartwarming new novel inspired by Little Women by Daisy Buchanan
• Daisy Buchanan — Creative Confidence Clinic

About the Guests

Deepa Paul is a Filipina-Indian author living in Amsterdam. Her writing explores the balance between being a mother, wife, girlfriend, daughter, adventurer, and herself – all at the same time. Her debut, Ask Me: A Memoir of Daring to Love Differently, was longlisted for the Women's Prize.

Regina Beach is a disabled poet and essayist. Originally from the American midwest, she now calls the Welsh Valleys home. Her writing has appeared in Global Poemic, Boldly Mental, The Rail, Haiku by You, Five Minutes, Visual Verse, The Horror Tree, and Disoriented among others. She is the founder of the literary magazine Lesions | Art + Words, which features the work of people living with chronic health conditions. Her book is Nurture: Oil-Free, Plant-Based Cooking for Health.

Daisy Buchanan is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster and author of Insatiable (longlisted for the CWIP prize), Careering (as heard on BBC Sounds), Limelight and Pity Party, and the non-fiction t