Show, don’t Tell Writing Podcast Show Notes & Links
- 📰 Sign up for the Inspired Writing Newsletter HERE
- 📝 Submit Your Page for our Show, don’t Tell Coaching Episodes
- 🌟 Leave a Review on Apple Podcasts (Thank you!)
- Intro and Outro Music is Daisy by Zight and used under a CC by 4.0 DEED Attribution 4.0 International license. For more music by Zight visit https://www.youtube.com/zight
In this milestone episode, Suzy celebrates reaching 50 years of life, and 50 podcast episodes by looking back at the choices that led her to living her writing dreams. Get ready to embrace taking creative leaps whether you are in your 20s, or 80s (or somewhere in between!) it’s never to late to get your story out into the world!
➡️Register now for the Free Inner Circle Open House on Friday June 20th at www.suzyvadori.com/openhouse
Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)
Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to Show don’t Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction nonfiction that are gonna wow your readers broken down step by step. We’re gonna explore writing techniques. I’m gonna show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers’ careers that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
And I’m also gonna coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you’re just starting out, you’re drafting your first book, you’re editing, or you’re currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show’s gonna help you unlock the writing skills that you didn’t even know you needed, but you definitely do.
I’m so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers, so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams, [00:01:00] and you’re gonna also have some fun doing it. Let’s dive in. Welcome. Welcome to the 50th episode of my podcast show and Tell Writing.
I can’t believe we’re here already, and as Kismet would have it, I am actually celebrating my 50th birthday this week as well. So I thought, what better way to embrace this milestone for the podcast and for my brain being alive on this earth? Then to talk about your second, third, sixth career. Whatever it is for you and how you can become a writer.
Most writers I work with have this big notion that they want to live the life of a writer and get their stories out there. Now, if you’re writing, you’re a writer, I’m talking about writing as a career. I. I celebrate that notion that you want to create this and become the primary focus of your life. I’ve actually dedicated my life and career to making that happen for other writers in the last 10 years, and they plan to keep doing that the next 50 years of my life.[00:02:00]
Growing up, I loved to write, and when I was a tween, a teen, I wrote a lot of half books, which just means I never finished them. There was lots of excuses back in that time. Why I didn’t finish a book. Mainly logistics. I wrote everything longhand in a book and we moved a lot, and so those books got lost or I ran out of paper or summer was over, or there was always a reason.
And then I kind of lose focus. And when I come back, I mean, you’re moving and changing a lot as a teen and a tween, and I would lose interest in that one story. Now at what point when I was 12 or 13, my dad worked at a university and we got one of the very first quote unquote laptops. Now. This wasn’t like the laptop that I am recording this on today.
It’s in fact it was more like a suitcase or a giant barbecue or something. It was heavy. It was huge. I don’t think it could have ever fit on my lap, but you could carry it around like a suitcase. And I thought I was so smart. I was writing this half book, which I was determined was actually going to be a full book, [00:03:00] and I was saving it along the way on my hard floppy disc.
Now this is a true story. The true thing that happened to this half book, it ended up being a half book. Spoiler alert, is that my laptop caught fire. I. And the bisk that I was diligently saving my eight chapters in of this boarding school novel I was writing, it was inside the laptop at the time. This was before the interweb, before the cloud, and this was how saving it, but this very physical, very vulnerable piece of whatever it’s made out of.
Plastic, melted, and so we gave out and life got busy. And life went on and I worked in the world of business and I eventually worked in banking. I worked in tech, I worked in manufacturing, and eventually I became a vice president operations and then a Chief operating officer at small products companies.
And I loved my job. I was really good at my [00:04:00] job, but I still always knew that I would write a book one day. And then when I was on maternity leave with my third child, and we knew that we weren’t going to have more children, so I was like, this is my last chance. I have this time off of work. I know I’m gonna write a book one day, just have to do it.
I think I just have to do it, but I did Now, it wasn’t an overnight success. I had to learn a ton. But it made me the strong writer that I am today. Those books, which ended up being the Fountain Series, which is a boarding school novel, by the way, has hints of that book that I wrote in my tweens that got melted on the laptop because it never went away.
Of course, all these things can stay with us for a very, very long time. Actually has nothing in common with that book. The kids are different. The setting is different. The only thing that’s the same. Was that it sat at a boarding school [00:05:00] that they throw pebbles of stones at each other’s windows and sneak around the campus at night, which was the coolest thing, and stayed with me all those years.
As I mentioned recently, I celebrated my 50th birthday and it was kind of creeping along. My husband’s about six months older than me, so he always turns these milestones first, can kind of try it on, you know, tease him about being an old guy before I have to do it myself. At first, the 50th felt really daunting, but then I decided to embrace it to be loud and proud about my age because.
It brings something to this career and contributes to my success as a writer. All the things that I did before. So if you haven’t come to be a writer immediately, that might be a good thing because you’re gonna bring a ton of things to your writing world that you wouldn’t have otherwise had. Because truthfully, if I’d become a writer straight out of university, maybe I would still be doing it at [00:06:00] 50, but maybe not, but it’d be a very different writer.
We wouldn’t have all these business skills that have helped me help so many other writers in this career, because while I was growing up and the message seemed loud and clear that writing wasn’t a job. I looked around at all the jobs that I wanted when I was very, very young. Okay. I can’t be a writer.
That’s stupid. People told me it wasn’t gonna happen. Okay. I, I heard you. I heard you, and I don’t believe that, by the way now, but this is what I believed when I was younger. So I looked around and I, you know, had a great interaction with this cashier. I remember she was wearing a red vest. She had big hair.
She was super nice. She seemed to be having a lot of fun at the grocery store, ringing out our groceries. And I turned to my dad. And then we went to the bank and I was like a banker, a waitress, all these things. And I turned to my dad and I was like, wish dad, there’s so many jobs out there. How will I possibly choose whether I wanna be a cashier or a banker, or a waitress?
And he kind of laughed and he said to me, [00:07:00] you’re gonna get a chance. The world is changing. You don’t have to pick one job, Susie. You don’t have to pick one job. You are gonna get a chance to do all the jobs in your life that you want to do. And if you pick one and you don’t like it, you could pick another.
That was like revolutionary for a young mind. And my dad is actually a business professor. He was a dean in his career. He is retired now, but he was studying how jobs were changing. In his day, you picked a job and you stuck with it. But he saw how that was changing and I, I gotta tell you, you know, my part-time job throughout while I was getting my business degree and everything else, I was a cashier and I was a banker, and I was never a waitress because, well, I don’t like touching other people’s dirty plates.
I’ll do it for fun. It’s kind of a thing. It wasn’t my thing. And I also can’t stay up very late. And so waiter was never on my radar. But I did get a chance to try many, many jobs, figure out what I liked, what I didn’t like [00:08:00] before. Landing as a Chief operating officer, which is really a jack of all trades if you think about it.
Chief Operating Officer kind of runs all the departments in a company, and it gave me a chance for my brain to sort of grow and stretch and figure things out, which was amazing. I was very interested in how things work, and so even though people think it’s like. Recently at my 50th, I saw people that I hadn’t seen in a long time, and they were like, I can’t believe you’re a writer.
The thing is, is it’s not that different. Writing actually gives my brain lots of, lots of things to do. I. To figure out how the book structure works, how everything works together to pay attention to what’s gonna affect my reader. All of those things, why find fascinating? And I know I’m gonna find fascinating for the next 50 years.
So I don’t think I need to change jobs again. My 40th birthday came and went and we hadn’t published my book. I was working on it. [00:09:00] I hadn’t published my book and in fact, my publishing contract, my very first publishing contract was my traditional publisher. A small press year in Canada came shortly after my 40th birthday, but I had a big party on my 40th anyway, because I wanted to celebrate.
I was transitioning, I was morphing, I was changing. I was becoming more aware of what I wanted to do in this world. I was tired of building other people’s businesses for them. I wanted to build something that was for me and my writing career, lift other writers up along the way as I went, because that was lifting me up as well.
And when I published my very first book, the Fountain, it was so exciting. It launched into the world and I was proud. I still saw it as a side project. I still had my job as a Chief operating officer. Writing was my super creative hobby, something I was really proud of, but something separate from real work.
Then I wrote and released my second book, the Westwoods, and the [00:10:00] response from readers grew. They started to find me rather than me going out and trying to find them, and opportunities started showing up that I had a plan for. I was being asked to do school visits and tour. I was doing speaking engagements and writing workshops, and people are actually reading what I wrote and asking me to help them with their writing.
I started saying yes, even though I had a very busy job and a young family to raise before I knew it, the thing I was doing on the side, this writing thing. Just started to take over. And not in a bad way. It was very, very exciting, but it got to the point where I had to make a choice. And there was a week in April, several years ago now, my husband and I both used to travel.
At the time I was managing factories in China and traveling to China pretty often. And my husband also traveled for his job. And we had three young kids and we were always comparing schedules. And I, I looked at him, I said, okay, here’s the thing. We’re gonna take seven vacation days [00:11:00] off this April. Go and do all their stuff.
One excited it. He just looked at me with a horrified look on his face and he said, what do you mean you’re gonna take our family vacation days and go and work a second job? I mean, something’s gotta give. And I’m saying, day job. Day job gives day, job gives. And he is like, no, not day job. Because, you know, we, we counted on that money to live.
And then eventually he realized this thing wasn’t going away. And I really wanted to do these seven days in April, and I was getting paid for these days. It wasn’t like I was volunteering. And by the way, when you become an author, please don’t just give away your time because there are people like myself who rely on that time and those payments when you appear.
And you are worth it, by the way, for a living. And so if you are out there giving away your time for free. Then you’re cannibalizing that work for authors who do it as a career. So just keep that in mind. But he was like, okay honey, if you wanna go and be a starving artist, we are going to adjust. We’re [00:12:00] gonna make it work.
And he had a whole plan. I just laughed. I had no intention of being a starving artist. ’cause I could see already what wasn’t looking for these opportunities. They were looking for me and writing was opening doors. And if I just was saying yes, I. This was gonna work. Now, I took the leap at that point in my career, but when I say I took the leap, I did quit my day job, but I also took on some contract work a couple of days a week to tide me over.
And eventually, about six months in, I had so much work that I was able to let go one of those days and a few months later I was able to let go of the other. And then I wasn’t contracting anymore. I was doing just writing, just all things writing, and mostly as a public speaker. The coaching and the editing came a little later because people were asking me, and also because I wasn’t able to do as many events post pandemic, and so I really leaned into the online component.
And I leaned into the one-on-one coaching and my business [00:13:00] became what you see it is today. And then when all those events came back online, when people started to gather in person again, I really don’t have time to do as many. I do quite a few, but I don’t do as many as I did before because I am not changing my business model.
I just love supporting all of you. So that’s sort of how it came about. But I’m here to tell you, it’s not only possible to make writing your job, but it can be incredibly fulfilling and you don’t have to start at 22 with a writing degree and a dream. As I said, if I’d done that, I think I’d be a very different writer today.
In fact, you bring so many skills from other places in your life and no matter what age you are, I have worked with writers in every decade of their lives from working with kids and making sure that they hear the message. That if you love writing, it’s possible to make it into a job. You might need to get creative, but it’s possible right up to writers in their eighties and nineties who always knew that they would write a book one day and wanna make sure that they get it out [00:14:00] there before they’ve missed their opportunity.
And if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably wondering if you can make this leap. Even if you’ve published already, maybe you’re still doing this on the side and you haven’t really dumped in to the point where you could say that you’re making a decent living, but you deserve to make a living from this.
You know that there are more readers out there, more stories than you, more to do, more to do, to be your best self, to be that person that you have sort of in your mind’s eye, this, this writer, whatever that is. It’s different from everybody by the way. It’s different for everybody, but if you take the leap and follow your heart, the rest is going to come and I’m gonna be here to cheer you on because I have a lot more to do in the next 50 years of my life.
But this job, doing all things writing is by far the longest. I’ve stayed in any job anywhere, and it is also the most rewarding. I kind of thought at 50 I was like gonna be reevaluating and figuring out what my next steps were for my life. And I’m like, no, I’m doing it. This is it. [00:15:00] Love this. And it, it’s different every day because of all of you.
It’s different every day because of all of your dreams. And so I’m able to support you and help you and here you want along the way as you succeed. I’ve supported thousands of writers during this past decade helping them to get their stories on the page at any age and from any background. In fact, writers I’ve worked with have come from teaching, from business, from psychology, from house flipping, you name it.
I’ve worked with a writer that has done it, and that brings particular skills, flexibility, project management, marketing, you know, it brings all kinds of different things to your writing. And also to how you’re able to manage your writing life and how you’re able to create a writing life that suits you best.
People I’ve worked with have launched podcasts. They’ve launched speaking careers, they’ve signed six figure deals, they’ve hit bestseller lists and been published in multiple [00:16:00] languages. If you, dear listener, dear writer, feel this call. Whatever age you are, your right time. Might just be right now. Laura Ingles Wilder.
Didn’t publish her first little house on the Prairie Book until she was 65. Frank McCort was 66 when Angela’s Ashes was published. And recently Virginia Miller Reeves published her book Once in the Blue Moon in her eighties. But every one of them and all the writers I’ve worked with have had something in common one day.
That dream, that that feeling I’ll, I’ll write a book one day. Something shifted for them. That book that they always wanted to write, they gave it the time and the space to percolate and make it a reality. You are doing that right now just by listening to this podcast. By the way, you’re giving your brain the time and the space that book that you know that you’re gonna write one day, or that book that you already written, you’ve already published, but you haven’t done much with.
You’re gonna make that a [00:17:00] reality. These writers, they learn the skills to get their story onto the page in a way that readers would love and connect to. They teach that in all kinds of different ways. If you’re ready to find your voice and get your stories out there, I’m here to cheer you on. Whether you’re just getting started or you’ve got books out there already and ready to claim your place in the writing world in a big way, I’m here ’cause the world needs your story.
Only you can write it, and there are good and real skills that you can learn to make your story really pop on the page. Putting your voice into the world in the form of a book is going to open doors for you, writer that you haven’t even thought of yet. If you’d have told me a decade ago at my 40th birthday that 10 years later I would be doing this, I was already writing mind you, but I wasn’t supporting writers in this way.
I wasn’t so in tuned with what readers are looking for. I wasn’t [00:18:00] living my best life. I was still doing this on the side. I was still working as an executive, which I was good at by the way. I was good at it, brought home a paycheck, but I was building business. That I didn’t love. Building your own writing career can be something that you love.
There is a reason that that voice in your head is telling you that you’re gonna write a book one day, and I have no doubt that you’re gonna do it. Absolutely no doubt in my mind that you are going to write a book, or if you already have a book out there, that you are going to find a way to find more readers to build your community, to build that read of writing life that you crave.
I can’t wait to see you at one of my events or program soon. Whether you are in your twenties, in your eighties, or somewhere in between. What are you waiting for?
Thanks for tuning in to [00:19:00] show. No, tell Writing With me, Susie Vadori. Help me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening. Also visit susie Vadori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you’ll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community.
If you’re feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page. If you’re writing that isn’t quite where you want it to be, yet for our show to tell page review. Episodes. Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven’t even thought of yet, and I can’t wait to help you make it the absolute best you’re feeling called to write that book.
Keep going and I’m gonna be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.