Anastasia Zadeik On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer
/Writing can be wonderful. There will be days when creativity blooms and the words flow, when your characters reveal their own arcs and scenes come to you fully formed. There will be times you read your work and find yourself filled with joy and a sense of accomplishment.
Some writers and authors have a knack for using language that can really move people. Some writers and authors have been able to influence millions with their words alone. What does it take to become an effective and successful author or writer?
In this interview series, called “5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer” we are talking to successful authors and writers who can share lessons from their experience.
As part of this series I had the pleasure of interviewing Anastasia Zadeik. Anastasia Zadeik is the author of the debut novel BLURRED FATES (release date 8/2/22 from She Writes Press), “a tense, emotional thriller about betrayal and strength” (Foreword Reviews) called “A hypnotic page-turner ” by Kirkus. Anastasia serves as Director of Operations for the San Diego Writers Festival and as a performer, mentor, and board member for So Say We All, a literary nonprofit dedicated to helping people tell their stories — and tell them better. When she isn’t reading or writing, you’ll find her hiking, practicing yoga, or hanging out with her husband and their empty-nest rescue dog, Charlie.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I grew up in Mount Prospect, IL, a suburb of Chicago, the fourth of five children born in quick succession (my mother had five kids in seven years!). From the start, reading and storytelling were a huge part of my childhood. My paternal grandfather was known for his tall tales, we made weekly trips to the library, and every night at dinner, all five children were given three minutes to share “the most important or interesting thing that happened to you today,” making us all young experts at flash memoir. The truth is, all forms of creativity were high priorities, particularly for my sisters and me. Not only did all three of us have diaries (with locks, of course), but we also wrote stories, poems, and plays. We made our own greeting cards. Sang. Danced. My mom even created a gallery of our artwork on the stairs down to the basement, a gallery that remained until we’d all been gone for decades.
So, while I didn’t necessarily think I would write a book someday, I also didn’t rule it out. In college, one of my professors asked to keep a copy of a dystopic short story I wrote so she could “contribute it to the library archives when you become a famous author,” and I kept the story with her note as a kind of talisman. For years, I would pull it out to remind myself of what might be possible someday. And I kept writing. As I moved from college to a career in neuropsychological research to being a full-time mom and professional volunteer, I kept the equivalent of grown-up diaries in the form of black elastic-wrapped Moleskines.
Over time, I realized that the writing credo “write what you know” is not just about your life experiences but how those experiences shape your view of the world. As a voracious reader who’s lived a life full of happiness and tribulation, good fortune and terrible loss, wonder and trauma, there is a lot I know. And so, when my two children went off to college, I began to contemplate writing “something.” I took creative writing classes, found a writing coach/mentor, and began writing short stories, narrative nonfiction pieces, and the bones of a novel that would eventually become my debut, Blurred Fates. Aware that viewing the world from other perspectives helps people gain empathy, I decided to write from inside the head of a woman who behaved in unexpected ways because of the trauma she’d experienced as a child — my hope was to address the fact that everyone is struggling with something and to do this with a book that was engaging from prologue to epilogue.
Can you share the most interesting story that occurred to you in the course of your career?
One evening, when I was in the early stages of drafting a narrative nonfiction piece about the gerbil kingdom my family ended up with when I was a child, I explained to my husband that I had spoken with three of my four siblings, and all of them had a different take on “how things went down.” He made what turned out to be an excellent observation. “This isn’t a story about gerbils,” he said. “This is about how you all see the past so differently based on who you are, your birth order and age at the time, and a bunch of other things that make your family dynamics so interesting. That’s the story you should write.” So, I did, and after I read it aloud to two hundred people in a bar, people came up and said it was one of their favorite stories, that they wished they had my family, and that it was “meta.” I’m embarrassed to admit I had to look up meta (this was before Zuckerberg renamed Facebook), and I discovered that it was an accurate description: though on its face, the story was about gerbils, it was really a story about storytelling, memory, oral tradition, and family. If readers are interested in hearing it, they can check it out on my website, linked below.
What was the biggest challenge you faced in your journey to becoming a writer? How did you overcome it? Can you share a story about that that other aspiring writers can learn from?
For me, the biggest challenge has been an odd combination of perfectionism and imposter syndrome. From the start, I have been convinced that unless I did more and did it all perfectly, people would find out I was not good enough. Motivated by a fear of failure far more than a desire for success, I’ve been an overdoer since I was five. Over-reading, overstudying, overthinking, over worrying. When I first read the quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde, “This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon — I put it in again,” I thought, “I can relate.”
When it came to my debut novel, I struggled to believe it was good enough. After hearing from my team that the book was ready, I found myself balanced precariously on a tightrope of “yes, believe them, send it out” while buffeted by the winds of “who do you think you are, writing a book?” and “if you just edit it one more time, maybe it will actually be good enough.” I figured people that told me it was good were just being nice. When I did take the risk to send it to a few agents and received requests for more, but no offers of representation, I was all-too-willing to believe it wasn’t ready after all. Rather than sending it to a hundred agents, I sent it to ten or so — and then put it in a drawer.
It wasn’t until a group of strangers at a writers’ conference applauded my reading of the first few pages of my “drawered” manuscript, and my son asked me why strangers would lie about whether it was any good that I pulled the manuscript out again.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I have a couple, but I’m guessing writers out there will relate to this one. Early on, I enrolled in an online query-writing class. The deal was one of the agents involved would provide feedback and, if they loved the project, might contact you about representation. Though I was aware of the abysmal statistics surrounding the agenting process, when, about three hours after I submitted my query, I received a phone call from an unknown number while driving, I thought, “oh my god, it’s the agent! She wants my manuscript.” My heart racing, I silenced my inner critic and hastily pulled to the side of the road just in time for the caller to hang up. Still hoping against hope it was the agent, I allowed myself to imagine the long calls we’d share, debating character arc and POV shifts, the decisions we’d have to make together about publishing houses and cover design. When I called back, however, it was clear the unknown call was a robocall. When I did receive the promised feedback from the agent (via email, not a call), she noted that “a fiction novel is redundant” and did not offer representation. Ah, but for those 120 seconds on the side of the road, I lived in a world of wild hope.
What I learned is that though it’s a tough business, wild hope is still a wonderful thing.
In your opinion, were you a “natural born writer” or did you develop that aptitude later on? Can you explain what you mean?
I was born a storyteller. As a child, I regularly exceeded my allotted three minutes when sharing my “most important or interesting thing that happened that day” at dinner. In fact, based on an extraordinarily detailed story I told at age eight about an elaborate game that involved dashing between colored lines in the gym, my siblings still ask me (decades later) whether what I am about to tell is a “red-line, green-line story.”
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
I am editing my second novel, a story about two young adults who escape from an inpatient psychiatric program to embark on an idealistic cross-country odyssey inspired by an Ansel Adams photograph — and their mothers, who take off after their kids in an attempt to find them before they lose themselves. I am also in the early stages of drafting a novel about a woman about to publish a tell-all memoir who finds herself in a coma after a car accident she doesn’t remember. Trapped in her head but able to hear everyone caring for her or visiting her, she tries to solve the mystery of who put her there and how to keep them from finishing the job they clearly set out to do.
Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what are the “5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer”? Please share a story or example for each.
(1) Curiosity
In my experience, most books are the result of authors asking questions like “what if . . .” or “why?” or “how did this . . .?” Curiosity leads to a desire to learn, read other books (which is perhaps the most important thing for a writer to do) and research things so you can “write what you know.” Curiosity can lead to exploring genres and forms of writing outside your comfort zone, which can bring hidden benefits (e.g., poetry can increase awareness of word choice and concision; playwriting can inform writing dialogue). Curiosity can lead to observing your world more carefully, creating new worlds, or reimagining the past. It can lead to pondering the factors that influence who and what we become, how our personal and collective histories have the power to illuminate the lives of others, and whether we can change our own lives going forward. And it can lead to leaving cookies from internet searches on your computer that would raise many an eyebrow if discovered without you around to explain — for my current book, I researched how to make a murder look like an accidental heroin overdose, how a body is sent back to the United States when an American citizen dies overseas, and the steps (in order) that are taken when removing someone from life support.
(2) Authenticity
Be yourself. Find your voice and use it! As the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limon, said, “Remember not to get too caught up in the idea that everything’s been written or said or explored before . . . Give yourself permission to explore it for yourself. You are a unique human being, put on this planet in this moment, and that can be enough.”
(3) Trust
Trust your process. Do you write best in the morning? Evening? 4:00 AM? Do you prefer working in a coffee shop or at your kitchen table? Do you edit-as-you-go or a let-it-all-flow? According to How to Write a Mystery, Lee Child never outlines, and Jeffery Deaver always does. Gillian Flynn writes in a space in her basement that she and her husband refer to as a “hell pit.” One writer I know nearly always starts with a draft written from 30,000 feet before flying low and adding the meaning behind the words. Don’t worry about the friend that writes every day from 9–5 or freak out when you hear that Frank O’Hara once wrote a finished poem in five minutes as a friend waited for him to go to dinner. Remember this; your process is your process. Once you have found what works for you, trust it.
And trust your team, which assumes you have one, which is because you really should. Find your support system. Your tribe. The people who will ask the hard questions, like “What’s this really about?” The people that will tell you when you are on the right track — and when you’ve lost your way. Your person that checks your facts and corrects your use of M-dashes or pet phrases. Use them as a resource. My read and critique group have become like family: they fix my typos, help me go deeper, comfort me when I’m down, and remind me to celebrate every little victory. And my editor? Let’s just say, though I am an editor myself, she found things in my final draft I could no longer see.
(4) Persistence
Writing can be wonderful. There will be days when creativity blooms and the words flow, when your characters reveal their own arcs and scenes come to you fully formed. There will be times you read your work and find yourself filled with joy and a sense of accomplishment.
But there will also be times when the victories seem few and far between. You will have days when you must do the impossible: fill the empty page when inspiration has failed you; distill your 330-page novel into a one-page synopsis; pick yourself up after a rejection letter. And this is when you must dig deep and persist. We’ve all heard the stories about how often J.K. Rowlings’s manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected. Yet she persisted. We’ve heard the discouraging back-of-the-envelope math about how hard it is to make money as a writer. Yet any visit to your library or local bookstore provides evidence that thousands of writers continue to put out work. Work that we, as readers, get to enjoy.
(5) Which brings me to my last necessary quality for writers — The Ability to Let Go
My writing coach (and dear friend), Marni Freedman, once told me, “Once your work is out in the world, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to your reader.” Learning to accept that it will be loved by some, appreciated by some, and disliked by others — this is key. I have been in book clubs for decades, and there have been award-winning books by incredibly talented writers that members have not cared for, for a variety of reasons. A book may remind a reader of a painful unresolved event in their own life or strike a chord they’d rather not have struck. Perhaps they wanted a happy ending or a redemptive act of retribution. Sometimes they are simply “over” a genre. I once heard the words, “I’m just tired of World War II books,” about Anthony Doerr’s masterpiece All the Light We Cannot See, which totally floored me. The point is your book in their hands is their book, and you need to let it go.
What is the one habit you believe contributed the most to you becoming a great writer? (i.e. perseverance, discipline, play, craft study). Can you share a story or example?
Volunteering. For the last several years, I have been involved in three local nonprofits that promote storytelling in my community: So Say We All, the San Diego Memoir Showcase, and the San Diego Writers Festival (SDWF). The first two have provided the opportunity to participate as a writer and performer AND as a coach, editor, and producer. Both involve submitting your work for review/selection by an anonymous jury, critiquing your work with other selected authors, working with a writing and/or performance coach, and polishing a written form of your story. I have learned an incredible amount as a writer/performer. However, I have learned even more as a coach, editor, and producer. Working with other writers has given me objectivity towards the process that is invaluable, and passing along what I have learned to others has reinforced the lessons in my own work. As for the SDWF, I have volunteered for the last three years as Director of Operations. Assisting with all aspects of running a writing festival has opened my eyes to the business side of writing (e.g., publicity, marketing, sales), but it has also shown me the importance of community. I am a firm believer that “writing builds community, and communities build writers.”
Which literature do you draw inspiration from? Why?
I draw inspiration from writers like Anthony Doerr, Amor Towles, and Ann Patchett, who write beautiful stories with beautiful prose that can simultaneously resonate deep within me and lift me out of my world.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
One of my mother’s favorite quotes was, “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.” One of the kindest people, she was known to everyone in our town: the grocery store clerks would call to her as she entered the store; the parents of children who’d attended her nursery school sent her letters long after their kids were grown. She always told us to give someone a compliment or an unexpected thank you every day, especially (if appropriate) strangers we met in our daily life. Simple things: I like the color of your tie. Your dog is adorable. Thank you for being patient. Thank you for being here so early to make coffee for us.
No matter how often I do this, I continue to be surprised at how much it can change the energy around me.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Please visit my website, www.anastasiazadeik.com, or follow me on Instagram, Facebook, or Goodreads @anastasiazadeik.
Thank you so much for this. This was very inspiring!