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This week, Suzy chats with an award-winning author, speaker, and writing coach, April Dávila. She is the author of two books, her fiction debut, 142 Ostriches and her nonfiction book Sit. Write. Here.
They explore the mind/body connection and how it effects your writing life and journey, as well as her journey to writing this nonfiction guide.
Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)
74. Mindfulness and Writing with April Davila
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. Hi. Welcome to the show today, April Davila, who I was introduced to by our mutual friend and colleague, Candace Coley, who said, you’ve gotta have April on your show.
Your listeners are absolutely gonna love her message, and she was not wrong. I’m so glad that we were able to have April on the show. We had an amazing conversation all about writing April. Discovered quite a lot of techniques when she was writing her award-winning novel, 142 ostriches, which came out in 2020 and became a bestseller.
She was putting together this connection that she wasn’t really aware of at the time that she was meditating and using mindfulness and learning about that practice, and it was helping with her writing and now she coaches writers on how to do the same. April Davila is an award-winning novelist, writing coach and certified mindfulness instructor.
Her new book we talk about at length on the show, sit right here, six mindfulness [00:02:00] practices to help you write more and suffer less. Don’t we all want that? Is coming out with St. Martin’s Essentials in July of 2026, but she talks about all of the techniques in here. It offers a transformative path for writers seeking focus, ease, and consistency in their creative work.
She is speaking our language. It blends insight meditation with craft fundamentals, and April guides writers through six core mindfulness practices, which she talks about on today’s episode that help overcome resistance, deepen creativity, and sustain joy in the writing process. She also leads the sit right here, mindful writing community, where writers gather weekly to write with calm and clarity.
Let’s dive in with April. You are gonna learn a ton. Welcome to the show, April Davila. I am so excited to have you here today and to talk about mindfulness. Yes.
April D.: I’m so
Suzy Vadori: excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Okay, so we’re gonna dive right in. Sit [00:03:00] right here. And I wanna say this for the listeners because I, I had seen it written a few times and it wasn’t written The way that the actual title of this book is with periods between Sit.
And write in here, which, I mean, I’m an editor, so I love to geek out about these things, but yeah. Yeah. It has so many meetings. What a great title. How do you feel about the title and how did you come to it? What does it mean? Like the double or hundred?
April D.: I love it too, and I actually, I had a, when I originally pitched it, I pitched it as scribbling Buddha.
Because I like the idea of like a, you know, this little mindful person just scribbling away in their journal, but the publisher was worried that people would confuse it with like a, a drafting, but like an image creation drafting. And it’s definitely nothing to do with visual art. So they propo my company name is actually sit right here and I don’t even remember how I came up with it.
I think, I mean, those are the three ideas that sitting, of course is the meditation writing is. The writing. And here I have a community that I host that meets every day. And here to me has always been community. Like here [00:04:00] is where you find your writing people. Wow. So sit right here just kind of came together.
Suzy Vadori: Really cool. And for me, seeing it with the periods, that way you change the meaning in that here kind of meant presence. Yeah. Mindful and I mean, I’m, I am gonna di dive into this. I’ll let you talk about the mindfulness, but to me it just was sort of all encompassing. A great title is amazing. Thank you.
And they didn’t even say the subtitle, although I did in the introduction, which is Six mindful tips to help you write More and Suffer Less. Yes. And that’s what all our listeners are here for. We wanna write more. We wanna suffer less. And what I wanna do here and let you know how to do that, okay, so when I looked at sit right here, there’s this old Dodge that says, just sit your butt in your chair and write, and that’s how you do it.
How do you feel about that advice? ’cause I, I’m conflicted on it, but.
April D.: I think ultimately you do have to sit down and do the work, but I think, I think if you’re, if you get that advice on its own, it’s a little, it’s [00:05:00] not enough because, and this is one of the things that I’ve found in working with writers and bringing mindfulness into the practice, is that we can read all the craft books we all like, we learn as we go.
We know a lot of stuff, but it doesn’t, when you sit in front of your computer and you’re staring at a blank cursor and it’s just like teasing you, like all of that advice doesn’t mean anything if you. Freeze, right? And we freeze for all kinds of reasons. Or we suddenly remember we need to organize our closet, or we, oh, the kids need me.
I’ll go do something. You know, make a sandwich or, it’s so, it’s hard. It’s harder than people realize to simply just sit down and do the work. And if you don’t sit down, do the work on a semi-regular basis, like you’re not getting any work done.
Suzy Vadori: Absolutely, and I think you know that, that sit your butt in the chair and write the darn thing.
It kind of misses the point that there’s a lot of thoughtfulness behind and thinking and planning behind writing. And I like to share that when I was a business executive and I would write on Saturdays and sit at Starbucks for eight hours while my [00:06:00] husband brought the kiddos somewhere to do something.
And it was not my job to do that on the weekends because I was writing my book. And I appreciate that so much. I could write days that were 10,000 words. Right. And that’s crazy. Wow. That’s amazing. Please, if you’re listening, do not compare yourself. That was like once a month or once every six weeks, maybe even once every two months that I got to do that.
And so I thought, you know, once I finally, my writing career took off. And I quit my day job and I was like, all right, well I can do that anytime I want. Right? Because I was doing it pretty consistently and I, I was like, yeah, I can write 10,000 words a day, but I couldn’t, ’cause I hadn’t done all that eight weeks of thinking and planning and sort of absorbing and you know, like you sit down and then you’re missing.
Yeah. Like you can’t just. Write it. I mean, some people pants it, but then you’ve gotta do a lot of editing work afterwards in the process. So yeah, it was an interesting and fumbling experience to try that, [00:07:00] um, because for sure. Okay, let’s dig in here. Why did you actually
April D.: write this book? That’s a great question.
So, because I’m a fiction writer, that’s, that’s my love and, and I’m actually excited to be getting back to my fiction now that I’ve done writing this nonfiction book. But I really struggled with my fiction for eight years. It took me to write my first book. I went around in circles. I was writing short stories that were getting rejected left and right, just nothing was working.
And then in 2016 something shifted and it, everything just kind of started happening, like figured out the novel. I found an agent, the book got published. I won an award. I, my short stories started getting published. I was nominated for a push cart. I was so excited about that. And so things, so when I looked back, like what changed in 2016, I realized that that was when I started meditating regularly.
And at first I dismissed it because. Correlation is not causation as we know. But the more I thought about it, the more I started to realize that there were some actual very concrete things that my meditation practice had brought into my life that had helped me be [00:08:00] a happier, more productive writer to write more and suffer less.
And so realizing that I actually, I doubled down. I went back to school. I got a two year mindfulness teacher certification program through uc, Berkeley, and then I started bringing it to my coaching clients and started seeing how they were benefiting from it. And I was like, okay, I need to share this more widely.
So I put together a proposal. I pitched it as a book, and St. Martin’s Press bought it, and it’s coming out in July.
Suzy Vadori: So exciting. July of 2026. So, but it is up for pre-order now. We’ll let you up to show how to get it. Yes, yes. Okay. So that sort of leads into my next set of questions, and I couldn’t wait to dig into this because you are a book coach and a writing coach, and as am I, and so listeners.
Of this podcast, there’s pretty familiar about what we do there. But you are also have this certified mindfulness instructor certification. So what people, let’s, let’s look at that for a second. What is that and what would people stand to gain [00:09:00] when working with a mindfulness instructor? Like, let’s separate it for a second and then we’ll talk about how the two of them work
April D.: together.
What is that exactly? Funny, no one’s ever asked me to talk about them separately. Okay. Um, yes. Yeah, so it’s interesting mindfulness practice in and of itself. I think one of the, it, I mean it has so many benefits in sciences discovering more and more all the time, but for me, one of the main benefits has been the pause.
And, um, people, if you practice meditation for any period of time, what you’ll start to notice is that when something happens, like a stimuli comes to you. Instead of just reacting, there’s this, and it is a fraction of a second, but you’re talking speed of neurons, right? So all it takes is a fraction of a second for you to be like, and instead of just reacting, being like, what’s what?
What’s like, okay, that really pissed me off. Like, what? What am I angry about? And just having that tiny little second of reflection. Changes everything. And like in my personal life is where I noticed at first, where like my husband and I would be talking and he would say something and I, where I [00:10:00] would have in the past flown off the handle and gotten really pissed off.
I’d be like, that really pissed me off. I, and then I could say like, you know, that really upset me. I don’t like the way you said that. Or like, or maybe like, I’m gonna own my part and my family history is like prompting me to respond in a way that I don’t really want to. So let’s talk about it. But none of that is possible without that tiniest little bit of a pause.
And it comes in, it’s bef, it keeps you from picking fights at the grocery when someone takes the last loaf of bagels or whatever. It like, it helps. It helps me be a better parent. That little pause is everything.
Suzy Vadori: Okay. And that’s the mindfulness piece. And that’s funny that nobody’s asked you to do that. I don’t wanna rush ahead.
Maybe this is the pause because part of what I love, yeah, right. It’s a little meta. Part of what I love bringing to this podcast and bringing to our listeners who are coming to writing from all different walks of life is a little bit of history of our guests. How did you get here and what are you interested in?[00:11:00]
And ’cause a lot of them are also exploring how does writing fit into my life? And also how can I fit more writing in or how can, like what are the other careers associated and all the things. So I thought that was really fascinating ’cause I hadn’t heard of a mindfulness instructor before and I think it’s really cool.
So here’s the question. So here I’ll be typical for a moment. I’ll be like every other podcast host that’s ever hosted you, how do you combine those two things together, the writing covers, and now that we actually under, because if we don’t understand it, how can we combine them? Right? Like you were studying mindfulness and finding it’s helping your writing and also meditation, and then you were helping your coaching clients and realize that you wanted to dig in and learn a little bit more so that you could do that in a mindful way.
Um, so now they’re combined, but how do you see them, how do they fit together in your write, writing, coaching practice?
April D.: That’s a great question too, how they fit together in the practice A couple of ways. The biggest way is that I run what I call my mindful writing community, and we [00:12:00] meet every morning at nine 30 Pacific and we meditate for 15 minutes, and then we write for an hour, and then we just kind of hang out and be writers together for a few minutes.
I don’t lead every meeting. I lead three meetings a week. And then I have a couple other train, uh, writers who’ve been through the same mindfulness training program as I did. So we have, we have similar training, similar style, but we, together, we lead seven meetings a week. And that’s probably the biggest ’cause It really is like, show up, put your butt in a seat.
And then great thing about it’s that like, it doesn’t matter what’s going on in your life, you don’t have to be ready to write. You just have to get there, turn on the camera and be like, alright. And then the 15 minutes helps you go from whatever’s going on in your life to ready to write. And that’s the whole point of the way that we’ve set up the community.
So that’s on the day to day of how I bring mindfulness into the writing. But I also have. Courses. I have something I call path to publication, which has courses incorporated into it. And those are all I, I try to really make all of my class things, [00:13:00] all my teachings, 50% craft, 50% mindfulness. So, for instance, one of my favorite classes to teach, and there’s actually a chapter on this in the book, but it’s on writing sensory details.
And when I teach the class, depending on how long the class is. I’ll actually take the class outside and we will meditate with our eyes closed for a few minutes and listen to all the sounds and then we write, right, right, right, right. Like what are all the sounds that you heard? And then we talk about, okay, how do you make it?
You don’t wanna put that kind of. Extensive detail into actual prose. Like if you spend three paragraphs talking about the sounds, you’re gonna lose your readers. So then we talk about how do you take like just the perfect details and like put them into the writing. But we start with a little bit of meditation.
Then we do like an eating meditation, we’ll eat a strawberry and we just. Close your eyes and for three minutes try to just, just taste that strawberry and then Right, right, right, right, right. What does it taste like? What does it remind you of? And then again, how do you put that into the fiction? All of my classes are probably, I really aim for like a 50 50 writing craft and mindfulness in different ways.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. [00:14:00] That’s amazing. And I mean, you are on the show Don’t Tell Writing podcast right now. Yes. So talking about sensory detail is, is of course one piece of show. Don’t tell. And it’s of showing what your character’s experiences are, if you’re writing fiction or your own experiences were, if you are writing nonfiction.
But I, I love to, when I speak to, I, I teach a lot, uh, as well and I teach a lot of kids ’cause I do a lot of ah, fun residencies. And I like to tell them because they’re often taught that sort of sensory thing first. That’s what they’re working on in elementary school and junior high and in high school and middle school.
And I like to tell them that they get, use all the senses but taste, use it sparingly because we don’t wanna always enter a room and have everybody looking the floor to see what it tastes like and usually. That’s a good one. Yeah. But definitely a few times in a book we can taste something but we certainly can’t do it all the time.
April D.: It’s one of my favorite things whenever there’s a meal and a story I get, so I like will take myself, I will find that meal somewhere in Los [00:15:00] Angeles and I’ll go out and like have that meal and just take all these notes and you know, it’s one of one of my favorite things about being a writer. So you can call anything research.
Suzy Vadori: Absolutely. Or I used to be in a lot of book clubs, less so now I work on a hundred books myself a year, like with a different writers in some way, shape or form, whether that’s through a group program or editing. And so it’s hard to get pleasure reading in and I read like everything that I can in the craft that, especially anything that’s doing really well in a genre.
So it’s hard for me to actually keep up with a book class these days, but I used to be in three or four. And whenever it was my turn to host, I would go out of my way to be providing the food that was in the book. Nice. Get creative. I would get creative if there was no obvious choices in the book, I would try to be creative.
And they’re also like, how do you think of these things? I don’t, this is fun. I’m a writer. That’s what, that’s what we do. Right? So when you say, you know, we write right? Are write and then we have too much. [00:16:00] ’cause this is where people often. Find show, don’t tell. Really cheesy, they say, but Susie, you know, I don’t, I find it really cheesy.
It’s too much. I read this book, it was really boring because they included that three paragraphs of description. Yeah. So what rules, if any, do you teach that you can pair that down?
April D.: Do you have? Uh, I, I mean my, my, I just, I’m not big on rule rules. Yeah. Uh, big on guidelines and there are definitely things that tend to work, right?
They’re made to be broken. If I had an over, like an umbrella guideline, it would be less is more. And I think whenever I teach that writing in the census class, there’s always some, usually a guy. I don’t know why. Raises his hand and he is like, well, I’d much rather have a book that people can just read easily and not get bogged down in all the details.
And I’m like, yeah, me too. Like I think we’ve all read that book where you’re just like gonna skip three pages. ’cause it’s all about like the warp core drive or like the fabric of the dress or whatever it is. I’m like, I don’t care. Get back to the story. So for me, that’s my [00:17:00] guiding principle is less is more.
And they, when I do that exercise with them, well, I have them write and write and write and then we really do, what we look at is like read through it and what’s the one sentence that’s like, Ooh, like I’ve never heard it said quite like that before. This is, this is the good sentence. And then that’s the one you use in your story.
Suzy Vadori: And
April D.: so,
Suzy Vadori: absolutely. And sometimes it does more work, like maybe it Yes. Tells you who they are as a person or it Exactly. That’s something for the mystery later. Or pick the one thing that actually works hard, right?
April D.: Well, yeah. And so the example I often give is like if you say the young man like ran outta the house and got in his car.
The missed opportunity is there is like what kind of car? Like a young man who gets in a beat up 98 Honda is a totally different young man that gets in a 2025 Tesla. And all you have to do is tell us what kind of car it is. And I you already in your head, you have two different young men in your head just from that.
Like what car is he driving? And so putting in little details like that can make such a difference to your [00:18:00] without bogging it down. Right. I didn’t spend a paragraph describing the car. I just told you what it was. Not even
Suzy Vadori: words. It’s not even, I mean in that case it might be a couple more words. It’s like two more words.
Yeah. Right. And it’s so worth the time. And thank you for going off on this tangent on show and tell I, I will take you there any time that I possibly can. Oh, that’s key stuff. I love it. Yeah. I, I like to tell this story in my second novel, the Westwoods. I had a moment and it was probably on one of those coffee shop days.
’cause I was still working full-time as a business executive when I wrote that book. And I hadn’t decided something right, like mm-hmm. And so I was writing my way into it because I hadn’t decided, I sat down, I’m trying to get my words in. And the character was going into a building that they’d never been in before on the campus of the boarding school that they go to.
And so I had not decided what, what the building looked like on the inside. So while I thought about it, I wrote her walking down the pathway and going up to the building and it [00:19:00] probably three pages, and then not even lying about her walking up to the building. And obviously that was just me stalling.
’cause I didn’t know I was gonna, she got excited, not going usually right. And I knew it was like excessive and terrible. And so when I went back through and before I sent it to the publisher, to my editor at the publisher, that cut it down to a paragraph. Yeah. And what was funny was this entire book of 75,000 word book, and he flagged that paragraph and he said.
I’ve been working with you a long time. This is the best paragraph you’ve ever written. Wow. I wanna know why. He’s like, what? What did you do? In some ways it was probably terrible because it stood out. Yeah. And in other ways he was like, that was like money. What did you do? And I’m like, oh look, I actually had three pages of crap.
And you brought it down and that’s what I did. Right. So sometimes we get stuck on word count or we get stuck on progress and we wanna keep everything but [00:20:00]
April D.: is what you
Suzy Vadori: said.
April D.: Yeah. I have a similar story in writing my first book of like, I really wanted the character steps out on the patio and once I wanted it to be the moment where she decides she’s staying.
And so it was sunrise and it had to be, it had to be really beautiful. And I actually went out to the desert and got an Airbnb and I woke up at Sunrise and I wrote, I wrote for like an hour over the whole course. I pages and pages, and I think it ended up being three, four sentences in the book. But I love that.
Those three or four sentences, I’m like, yes. They’re like,
Suzy Vadori: and it needed to. So like, it, it just needed to be so sharp, right? Yeah. That one, that one needed to get it, you know, any excuse to rent an Airbnb anywhere, right? Right. Everything’s research. Everything’s research. I, I mean, when you love to write, you love to write.
Um, okay, so back to sit right here. Yes. In the book you talk about six key practices, which are, I won’t put you on the spot, make you come up with them yourself. Thank you. [00:21:00] Get writing. Number two, embrace discomfort. Number three, keep going. Number four, explore emotions we’ve been talking about or a little bit.
Number five, engage reality. And number six, okay, you’re gonna have to correct me if I can’t pronounce this, but find equanimity. Did I do it? Yes, you’ve got it. Yes. So how did you come up with this framework and walk us through like how they all fit together. Why? Why do these six things.
April D.: So those were the six things that I really, when I looked back on, what had changed in my writing when I really like put some thought into those were the six things that rose up as being the things that I had changed with mindfulness and the order actually took me a while to settle on.
The first one was easy, the get writing part, because that’s what I do with my writing community every day. We do that meditation, uh, and it’s called insight meditation sometimes with ana. But the idea is that you just quiet your body and you choose an anchor. Usually the breath, sometimes the sound in the [00:22:00] room, whatever it is, it’s something to focus on.
And when you notice your mind wanders, you just let that thug go and come back to the anchor. And then the, the beauty of this is that you practice that for 5, 10, 15 minutes, whatever it. And then you switch to your writing and you start writing, you make the writing, your anchor thoughts still come.
Thoughts like, shouldn’t you go organize your closet? Or, this is pointless? What do, who do you think you are writing a book? Like whatever, that you just notice those thoughts and you say Thank you. Thoughts, you can go and you just keep writing. And it is a total game changer. It allows you to drop into the state of flow.
And people who come to my community are like, it’s so fun when they first come to be like, oh my God, I got so much writing done. I’m like, yep, welcome. Like, this is how we roll. And so that was, I knew that had to be the first chapter, and I knew the last chapter of finding equanimity. Because that chapter is really about kindness and being kind to ourselves and recognizing that this is a journey that’s gonna have a lot of nos, it’s gonna have a lot of hard feedback, rejections, and how do we weather that and like keep ourselves happy [00:23:00] and healthy?
So I knew that was gonna be the last chapter. And then the middle four, I kind of rearranged a few times. I couldn’t quite decide what order. But the second one, getting comfortable with discomfort. Once you started writing, what often happens is you’ll get to a point in your story where you have to write an emotion that as humans, we don’t like.
Like we don’t like being sad, we don’t like being afraid. We don’t like feeling lonely. And so often that’s where people without even realizing, they get up and go. Empty the dishwasher. It’s ’cause like, oh, that ugh.
Suzy Vadori: Or they skip or they, or they write around it. I skip it.
April D.: Do you see this or write around it?
Yes.
Suzy Vadori: Sometimes I see, you know, one of the tenets that I teach in show don’t tell writing is don’t skip the moment. Like, I don’t wanna hear about the guy, the clown that was walking down the street and slipped on the banana peel and you’re laughing so hard, you’re crying. And I’m like, I don’t get it. And you’re like, you have to be there.
Right? Hard moments. They include them in their books with two characters talking about what happened, and I’m like, yes, us there. Bring us there. Make us feel it.
April D.: Yes. I like to use the [00:24:00] example of a, if you’re, if you’re in a car accident on the way to work, when you get there, it’s gonna be like an hour long tail.
I was driving and there was rain and he cut me out of, it’s like this whole story, right? And you’re gonna tell like six times and everyone’s gonna, what happened if you jump forward two or three years? That whole thing is summarized like some jerk sideswipe me on the freeway. Done. Yeah. Like no emotion, nothing interesting about it.
It’s just a thing that happened. But yeah, that distance is such a, yeah. And writers. And the reason we skip over is because it’s hard.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. But you get, writers have more choice than they think, and it’s not always the first thing that they think of, which is what newer writers come to you easily. Right.
That’s what we end up with. Cliches. It’s not, because it’s said all the time, it’s not even because you’ve read it in books. ’cause published books don’t have that in them lots of times. But it’s the easiest way to write something that people do first. But if you were to take us into that car, it’s important for the story.
Now, I’ll caveat it only if it makes sense and it [00:25:00] it shows us something about the character and it it changes their life in some way that we’re actually tracking. Bring us into the car and be in the, have you feel like you hit your head and feel the stress of being late for work while you fill out the accident report?
Like all of those things might be. Important to the story and might change or show us something about the character that we get if we’re just gossiping at the office and telling this. Exactly. Yeah, that’s a good point. Distance is great. I mean show no tell is all about your zoom lens, right? Like you zoom in, then you’re showing and you zoom out.
Maybe it’s got sideswiped two years later, right?
April D.: But sometimes I think the reason people subconsciously avoid zooming in is that they are emotions that we don’t like to have.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah.
April D.: And so mindfulness a lot. And so one of the tricks I teach for this, and because mental discomfort is actually really closely wired neurologically to physical discomfort, I mean, it’s the reason that like if we remember a loved one or a heartbreak, we still feel it physically in [00:26:00] our bodies.
And so one of the things I do, you can train yourself, but to be comfortable with minor physical discomforts, and that trains you to be comfortable with minor mental discomforts and allows you to not even think twice about jumping into a really hard scene. And even subconsciously, it gives you more ability to write heartbreak and loneliness and fear and all of those things.
And that practice is really easy. It’s just about meditating without moving at all. We do a short meditation, just 10 minutes of like try not to move. And as soon as you do that, you almost instantly get like an itchy nose. Like, yeah, okay, but I just gotta move this one little thing like my foot. But when you can like train yourself to not move and be okay, like, oh yeah, that itch on my nose with uncomfortable.
Can I take one more breath and be with it? Can I take one more breath and be with and like just see if it will fade, if you can. If you can wait it out and it trains your mind to be comfortable with mental discomfort, which makes you a better writer.
Suzy Vadori: Well, that’s so interesting because we’re coming into this discussion with the word mindfulness, which talks [00:27:00] about the brain.
But many of the examples that you’re actually sharing are about your body. Oh yes. And the rest of your body. And it’s not just your brain. Right. And that’s possible because that’s a very
April D.: insightful,
Suzy Vadori: you’re connecting that like it’s all connected. Right? It’s all connected. And when we write, if our characters have that connectivity as well.
It, it feels more real and we don’t, we’re not always even aware of it in ourselves. And so being aware of. I had a brain scientist recently on the, uh, on the podcast, which is fascinating. I’m like, yes, it came through. That’s so great. And I was like, I am totally interviewing a brain scientist. Go check that out.
We’ll put it in the show notes, but it’s just fascinating to me because I, I want to read something that somebody who’s. Studies this brain and body connection because they’re gonna understand things about people’s human behavior that we don’t know that we do. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what being a writer is about, observing the world and capturing it in a way that’s like, oh my gosh, that feels so true.[00:28:00]
Yeah. I love it. Okay, so switching gears for a moment. Let’s talk about your fiction writing. Your debut novel, 142 Ostriches. It was published in 2020 and it did win some awards. And how those, these practices did you use when you were writing or how many of them came later and you wish you’d known you?
You talked about there was sort of an aha moment in 2016, but how many of these went into it and how many have sort of come about since as you’ve studied it and you wish you knew them all?
April D.: Yeah, it’s a little complicated because I started meditating in 2016. I didn’t realize until I looked back around 2019
Suzy Vadori: the
April D.: benefit that it had had, but I’d been struggling with the book for since 2010.
In 2016, things started to come together. I finished in 2018. It was published in 2020, so I didn’t realize. All these things were at play as I, those last two years of finishing my book. But when I looked back on like, why [00:29:00] did I suddenly, like was I able to do these things that I had been trying to do for six years with no success?
And that was when I realized, oh, maybe the mindful and then, you know, and then I had to kind of piece together, was that really it? And. Um, it was a, you know, the whole journey began, but I was not aware of the fact that these things were benefiting me yet. They just kind of were quietly behind the scenes.
And then, yeah, and the, then the book came out in 2020 and I literally, a week before the lockdown was my launch party, and everyone was like talking about this weird virus thing that like, like, ah, it’ll blow over. And, um, so I didn’t, uh, so I didn’t get to do like the whole book tour thing, and so I just like, I just got back to writing.
I just kept at it. I knew I, I have so many books I wanna write. I did do a lot of virtual things. I did big campaign to zoom into book clubs, a lot of virtual book clubs ’cause you know, everyone was home and mm-hmm. It just kind of worked out. But it was weird. It was a weird
Suzy Vadori: time. I talked about my book clubs earlier and that’s when I quit all my book clubs.
I tried for the first like three or four months and then I [00:30:00] was like, you know, the last thing I wanna do from seven to 9:00 PM at night is sit is beyond Zoom again and talk about books. It feels like that’s do for a job, right? Yeah. Talk about books. So, yeah, and I was getting like zoom fatigue and zoom headaches and stuff, and so yeah, I miss my class.
I should go back now that they’re all, and actually some stayed online because What happened I like in
April D.: person.
Suzy Vadori: Oh, me too. This is so much better. And actually, some of my writing groups that I used to participate in and present at regularly stayed online, or at least, or a hybrid. And I, I, you could still go to the room.
With some people in person and then you’re looking at a screen because we picked up members remotely and they wanted to stay remote, or they were not from, they weren’t local. And so yeah, a lot of things changed and I prefer in person as well, for sure. Okay. I also noticed that you talk a lot about writer’s Block on your site and you’ve got some forces and some programs around Writer’s block.
Can you say [00:31:00] more about Writer’s Block? ’cause this is something that I hear a lot from writers, and so if you’ve ever experienced it, what, what do you, what do you say it is? And there’s different things out there. Um, yeah, they’re all right. But, but what’s your experience with Writer’s Block, and how do you get through that with writers?
April D.: Yeah, and I think this is chapter three, the keep going chapter, the, because we all get stuck sometimes, and for me. I, I mean, I, I don’t believe in writer’s block. I think writer’s block is a term that neither. Okay. And that’s always a little sensitive sometimes.
Suzy Vadori: No, but when you work with hundreds of writers, you rec, you start to recognize, you start to
April D.: recognize, yeah.
That it’s not, it’s like a catchall phrase that people use when they’re not sure what’s keeping them from writing. And so my whole take on writer’s block is like, let’s figure out what’s keeping you from writing. There is something, or else you would be writing. And it’s not some magical thing. You’re not cursed.
It’s not, you know, there is something, and I, I actually, if, if, uh, folks go to my website, there’s a little banner at the top for a free writer’s block lecture that I give, uh, I think it’s like 10, 15 [00:32:00] minutes. But I pretty much, I list off all the things that I’ve ever in working with my clients seen manifest as quote unquote writer’s block.
And then how do you handle it? So it could be, it could be simply like burnout. Like you, I worked on my first novel while I was working full-time and had two little kids and there were, there was a point where I opened my laptop to, I went to the coffee shop, like my husband took the kids and I opened my laptop.
So excited to like get so much work done and I. Almost threw up. It was like, morning sickness. I like, it was the weirdest thing. I got so nauseous, I just need a nap or something. Oh. I just was like, I couldn’t even look at it. I was so, whoa, look at this again.
Suzy Vadori: It’s not, it’s your brain and your body. Like, your body’s like, okay, dang, you might be excited, but I just can’t.
Right.
April D.: Just can’t. And that was actually the day I started outlining my second book because I was like, okay, brain, we set aside this day to write. I don’t wanna waste it. And I get that. I like message receive. You don’t wanna work on that right now. I, I knew I couldn’t quit. I was too far into it at that point to quit, but I, that I just switched and I started outlining book two.
I just had fun for a day [00:33:00] and that kind of soothed that burnout sensation and allowed me to come back to, it was refreshed, like whatever the next time was. I had to write. I don’t remember exactly, but yeah.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, there’s so many
April D.: things.
Suzy Vadori: It’s true. I mean, we think of writing as a cerebral event, but I, there’s a lot of things.
I’m, I’m a very intense writer. I still binge write because I do so many other things, and so I set aside, you know, one week and I write my own stuff or whatever. That is nice, and, and it’s intense and it is very physical, whether you think it is or not. I have experienced twice now carpal tunnel while editing, because I just keep hitting the down key in my own books.
Mm-hmm. Not other people’s books, but my own books. Because you’re just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. And so I’ve got like systems now, like I always have a touch screen. I can scroll on my touch screen, like I have other ways around it to prevent. Physical harm from writing too intensely. Right? Like this is a, yeah, this is a thing.
And I also suffer from eye strain as an editor. [00:34:00] Yeah. These are all real things. And so it’s interesting that your body told you that day. Yeah. Yes. Loud and clear. Your bodies guys don’t ignore those signs. Yeah. Set your environment. And listen to it, right? Take care of yourself as you.
April D.: And then the other thing is that like so close related to burnout, sometimes it’s just tired.
I mean, burnout and tired are closely related, but I feel like tired can be like if you’re a new parent. I’ve talked to so many new parents who are like, well, I just, I feel like I should be writing more. I like, I’m not at work, I’m not doing anything. I’m like, are you kidding? Like you created a whole other human and now that a little human is not letting you sleep.
And it needs constant care. And sometimes you just have to lower the bar and be like, okay, once a week, a hundred words. Like just to kind of keep touching into it while you go through a challenging time. ’cause sometimes writers block and manifest as like, not so much like the physical burnout, but just that like you just don’t have the time.
You’re taking care of things that are important. And there will be periods where you have to just do less and be okay with it. And then there’ll be [00:35:00] periods where you can do more, where you can take a week and write 40,000 words and like, ah, that’s amazing. Yeah. But
Suzy Vadori: you have to plan for that. You can’t just do it.
Yeah.
April D.: All right.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, there’s, there’s so much I wanna say on that, but yeah. Um, okay. So at what stage, like what stage of writer, if you’re a listener out there, what stage is your book appropriate for this? Sit right here.
April D.: Oh, it’s really appropriate for any stage writer. New writers will find ways to get focused and actually get words on the page and lessen self-doubt, lessen intimidation or imposter syndrome, or those things that can tend to choke us up as new writers.
But then also, it doesn’t really matter how long you’ve been writing, you’re gonna get rejections, right? You’re gonna have periods where you don’t feel like writing. You’re gonna have periods where you’re like not sure how to explore the emotional landscape of a scene or, so there’s. I also feel like it’s a book that people may come, I hope people would circle back to as they evolve as writers, because I think depending on where you’re at in your writing journey there, there will be [00:36:00] different things that rise up in terms of what the lesson is in each chapter.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. Okay. Awesome. We are at the quickfire portion of the podcast, and so, all right, so I’ve got a couple of questions for you and some of them we touched on, but I like to put them all in the same place because I want to remind writers that everybody’s journey is completely different. You ready? Yes.
Ready? Okay. So how long did it take you? You did answer this one, but I, I want, need a reminder. How long did it take you from Idea? I’m gonna write a book to publishing that first debut novel. Um.
April D.: I did answer it, it took me eight years to write it, but from the idea of the book till when it came out was 11 years.
Suzy Vadori: Okay. And that’s why I re-ask it. Yeah. Um, yeah, 11 years. And so a lot of that thinking time. Yes. And I’ve kind of gone into it and, and when you, there’s not a lot you can do to make it, I mean, you can make it faster than 11 years. But there’s not a lot you can do to compress it down, um, when you have a [00:37:00] really complex, really amazing story to tell.
And how long did it take you to write? Sit right here.
April D.: Not as long. It took me, it took me about six months to write the first draft and then that’s when I put together the proposal because nonfiction you, as you know, you have to like go out and sell it as a proposal. But I did go ahead and write it ’cause I wanted to know what the book was gonna be and I kind of figured I would just self-publish it anyway if, if I couldn’t sell it traditionally.
So I wrote it in about six months, then I sold it, and then I dug in on revising, which probably was another six months.
Suzy Vadori: Amazing. And that does happen. You know, people think it’s because you learned how to write the book, but there’s so much more, there are so many more reasons why it’s
April D.: faster. Um, well, and I also just felt like nonfiction is just, I dunno, my, my bias is to fiction.
’cause I love to dig in and explore all the pathways and the emotional arcs and nonfiction. It almost felt like a school assignment. I was like, here’s the outline I just got. I mean, I’ve written so many, here’s both that book.
Suzy Vadori: Well,
April D.: no, but it’s true. It’s
Suzy Vadori: a good book, I promise.
April D.: It it is. It’s not a school [00:38:00] assignment, I swear, but, but the experience.
Yeah, it is a d it’s a different process.
Suzy Vadori: Same where I do both. And so I can totally relate. It’s a very different, and right now I’m also working on a non-fiction book, and so when I dream about going back to fiction soon, um, yeah, it almost feels indulgent. It’s very different. Um, it’s very different.
April D.: Well, and the thing about the non-fiction, one of the reasons it didn’t take me long is I have been writing about this as a coach, as a teacher, as a blogger.
I mean, been blogging about this stuff for 12 years. So I ki so much of the, I say it took me six months to write it. It was six months to like compile all my blog posts and my lectures and my things I had already written and make them work as one big piece.
Suzy Vadori: Okay, so here’s a different question then, from the moment that you made the connection between mindfulness and your writing productivity.
Yeah. How long was that until the book came out? Because that’s when you started writing it. That’s, that’s when you had the, that is an interesting question. Oh my gosh. These things are connected. Yes. And started the [00:39:00] process of putting that. Framework together. You did? Started writing about
April D.: it. Started coaching it.
Yeah. That was 2019 when I realized it. And that was when I started the meditation teacher training program. And then, uh, to graduate that I had to teach a class, which I taught as a mindful writing class, so I had to put together the class notes for all of that. So 2019 Till book comes out 2026, so seven years.
Suzy Vadori: Amazing. Okay. What was your first big break along the way where you were like, oh my gosh, I’m going to be writer. It stopped being a dream and you’re like, this is real. What was your first big break that came your way?
April D.: Finding my agent was kind of a, a whirl. It was a whirlwind. So I met the man who had become my agent for the first book.
He came to lecture when I was in grad school and I got his card. And then eight years later when I finished the book, I emailed him and I said, you won’t remember me, but eight years ago you said that when my book was done, I could email you the first few pages and here they are. [00:40:00] And he, the si like an hour later was like, yeah, these are good.
Send the book. I wanna read it. And then two days later wanted to, he’s like, I wanna rep it. Let’s go. So Wow.
Suzy Vadori: So it was totally untraditional and, and my ex Yeah. My experience with my agent was similar, but it’s, it’s like you didn’t even go through the query trenches, right? Yeah, I was ready. I
April D.: had like a list of agents.
I had done all the research. I was ready to spend like a year querying agents, and it happened in one week and I, I was like floating on air. It was amazing. Yeah. That is a
Suzy Vadori: big break. Thank you for sharing that with us. Okay. What is your best advice for writers who are just starting out?
April D.: Oh, that’s such a good question.
Writers who are just starting out, be kind to yourself. I think that’s probably one of the most important things, like know that it really does not have to be perfect or even good when it first hits the page. You can edit a big old pile of poo into beautiful prose, but if you don’t get it on the page, you got nothing to edit.
So. Just put aside that perfectionism put aside any, I [00:41:00] mean, I always tell my writers like, password protected if you need to. Like, no one gets to see it until you’re ready. Just let it pour out and then you can go back and make it good later and just keep learning as you go. I think all writers, and I’m sure you back me up on the Susie of like, we’re always learning, we’re always practicing our craft.
We’re always reading craft books and attending workshops and like I, I have a whole shelf of writing books. I love ’em. Absolutely. And I’m always learning new stuff.
Suzy Vadori: And it’s interesting you say that ’cause I often get questions about like, you went from working on, you know, wall Street to writing and I don’t understand that.
And the thing is, um, you don’t, number one, you don’t have to understand it. Thank you for your comment. But number two, yeah, it’s because we are always learning and changing and in the first 20 years of my business executive career, I moved and, and shook and did all the things and, and changed. Careers or change jobs like all the time because I was always looking for a new challenge [00:42:00] and I’ve been doing this a long time and I can’t imagine that I’m ever going to get bored.
’cause we are always learning. I find it super fascinating. It’s the reason that I have this podcast to bring to other people and it’s the reason when we were introduced, I was like, yes, come on the podcast. I need to talk to you because you’ve been doing. Some really deep thinking about what really helps writers, and that’s what Yeah.
This, this whole thing is all about is, is there’s no one right way to write. And you’ve gotta figure out so much more about your body and your mind and your intentions and things that people don’t realize. It’s a whole, yeah, it’s a whole thing to write a book
April D.: and everyone is a new challenge. I’m with you.
Like I love that. I think some people would find that frustrating, that like, oh, I wish there was a formula. But I love that there’s not, every time I have a new idea, I’m like, Ooh. What’s this one gonna be like? Like what’s the structure? What’s the POV? What’s the, exactly
Suzy Vadori: as [00:43:00] you said, there are guidelines and I, I try to break down complex things and, and put together, but you don’t have to follow all of them.
Do a few of them. ’em, yeah. You can’t do everything. Do a few of them. And your book is gonna be special because it’s from you. Yeah. Um, polish a few things that you resonate with and do those techniques really well. And the rest are, you know, the rest are gonna work out. Yeah, this has been amazing. If we wanna be part of your world, where can we find you and your book?
April D.: Yes. Uh, so I’m very findable. It’s april davila.com. Every, that’s my home base for everything. I am on social. I have, I mentioned to you, but I have this freebie that I do like to offer. It’s called Seven Mindset Hacks for Big Writing Results. And it’s a lot about like what we’re talking about today. It’s the mindfulness part of it.
So if folks go to seven mindset hacks.com and that actually forwards to my website so people can find it there. But we’ll also, we’ll put it in the show notes.
Suzy Vadori: Awesome and amazing. Yes. Go grab that guide because even if you, maybe, especially if you’ve [00:44:00] never thought about this before, the connection between your state of mind and, and your intention and all of those things that go into being mindful, taking that pause that we talked about at the beginning of the show, especially if you’ve never thought about it, it might really just connect and take your writing in a whole new direction and, and make it really fun.
So thanks so much, April. It’s been awesome having you on the show. Come back anytime. Thank you, Susie. All success on your launch.
Thanks for tuning in to show. No, tell Writing with me, Susie Vadori I’ll 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 vidori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you’ll stay inspired and be the first to [00:45:00] know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community.
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