00:00:03
Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
00:00:10
Speaker 2: This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today is going to be another longer episode as part of my ongoing series where once a week or so I talk with somebody fascinating about how they take their days from great to awesome. So today I am excited to welcome Camille Pagan to the program.
00:00:31
Speaker 1: Camille is a career novelist and.
00:00:34
Speaker 2: The author of such books as Everything Must Go and Life and Other Near Death Experiences, and as a highly productive author of ten novels, she also coaches other writers on how to achieve their goals.
00:00:47
Speaker 1: So Camille, welcome to the show.
00:00:49
Speaker 3: Thanks Laura, happy to be here.
00:00:51
Speaker 1: Yes, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
00:00:55
Speaker 3: So, as you said, I am a novelist. I have written ten works of fifth and about a dozen of other people's nonfiction books that my name is not on. So I used to ghost write nonfiction too. I'm a former health journalist and editor. I've written for The New York Times, Real Simple, where I was health editor, Oprah, basically any magazine you can think of, as well as a bunch of newspapers so I really love health and psychology research still a big part of my coaching practice. And then for the second half of my day, I work with primarily novelists, but some other authors, children's authors, nonfiction authors, memoirs, that sort of thing.
00:01:39
Speaker 2: So you've got a lot going on at Camille. I wonder if you know you could tell us a little bit about your morning routine, because this is a show.
00:01:46
Speaker 1: Called Before Breakfast, so lots of our.
00:01:48
Speaker 2: Listeners have elaborate morning routines. Let's hear about yours.
00:01:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, so full disclosure, I am a morning person. I work with a lot of people who are like, oh, I just don't like the morning. It's my favorite time of day. It's when I can get the most done. But I am also the parent of two teenagers right now, so my mornings are a little later than they used to be because my kids are just up so late. I'm up usually around six. I am the first person in my family generally out of bed, and I get up, make myself some coffee, always go to my computer. Used to be a notebook, but these days I go directly to my habit tracker and kind of look at my goals. What do I need to do today. I mark little things such as what time did I get up, what's on the list for the day, and really just get my priority straight before I then get my kids out of bed, feed them, get them out the door, and then I go to the gym. That's really almost every morning. I do that before I write, and it just sets the day up for me. Even if it's twenty minute workout. I feel better doing that. And then I sit down around nine with another cup of coffee and I begin writing How to be the Exception to the Rule.
00:03:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, how far is the gym from your house? I'm curious what that adds into.
00:03:06
Speaker 3: About a ten minute drive, so it's about twenty minutes round trip. I live in ann Arbor. Everything is about ten minutes away. It's a beautiful thing compared to when I was in the city in New York and everything was forty five minutes away.
00:03:17
Speaker 2: So yeah, so you got the gym, get yourself, your cup of coffee. You're sitting down to work around nine o'clock. But you have both writing work and other kinds of work you do, So how do you organize your days to make both of those happen?
00:03:32
Speaker 3: Well, I'm pretty I want to say strict about it in that from nine to noon that is my writing time. I don't schedule other things in that time unless it's really an exception. So this podcast would be an exception. But if there's a doctor's appointment and I can do it before that period or after that period, it goes there. And that is something that if you look on my digital calendar or my paper calendar, you'll see blocked off. And I've been doing that for about like thirteen years at this point. It really is something that I still put down because if it's on the calendar, I will do it. And it's a reminder to me, like, don't schedule your dunal cleaning at this time. So I do that really come rain or come shine. Unless I'm taking a deliberate break. Then I pause for lunch, and then I go into the kind of the coaching marketing half of my day.
00:04:23
Speaker 2: And when you have that nine to noon time blocked off for writing, I mean, are you actually really writing for all of it? I mean, I guess you have written a lot of books, but.
00:04:32
Speaker 3: Well, it's a good question. Yeah, So I don't believe in you know, powering through for three straight hours. We you know, the human attention span is about topping out. It around forty five minutes, So I will write for about forty five minutes, sometimes twenty five on five off, take a break, you know, go get some water, use the bathroom if I need to, and then come back. So it's broken up, and it really depends on where I'm at with a project. So sometimes I'm drafting. Sometimes that writing time is for editing or doing proofreads, a cold read, all of those kinds of things. And then I do have breaks between projects, and I will use that time, usually still for creative work, so to brainstorm the next project, to let myself just journal on what I see up ahead, that sort of thing.
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Speaker 2: What does that brainstorming look like? I mean, you know, I think a lot of people think, well, I should carve out time for brainstorming and thinking and deep work, But I mean, what are you actually doing when you're trying to come up with the next novel idea?
00:05:35
Speaker 1: If that's like an entry on your to do list?
00:05:38
Speaker 3: Well, I work with one hundreds, probably close to one thousand writers at this point, primarily fiction writers, and I know that the process is really different for everyone, but I do some of the things that research shows us fuels the creative fires. So sometimes it's walking right the thing where you can kind of just think you're on autopilot. For me, it's a lot of I have this big notebook and I just write stuff down in a very messy way. And then my little trick. And this is where a lot of people are like, I would never do this. I write the pitch for the book that I'm interested in writing, next to see if there's a there there. Yeah. So it's lots of different pieces.
00:06:19
Speaker 1: Lots of different pieces.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, And then tell me a little bit about the coaching part of your business.
00:06:24
Speaker 1: What does that look like?
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Speaker 3: I love that. I love that piece. People are like, how can you do two things? Well, kind of like what you implied, I could not write for eight hours a day. My brain just kind of turns off at a certain point. And then I turn on the more social, kind of collaborative part. And I will usually meet with clients on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Monday and Friday. Afternoons are more for putting lessons together, looking at the curriculum, doing some marketing, that sort of thing. Yeah, And so I'll meet with clients and there's little breaks in between. I send them notes, we come up with plans together, and it's just a nice way to be connected because writing is really a very solitary endeavor.
00:07:11
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah, when you say lesson plans, are you teaching classes?
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Speaker 3: Now? I do. I have a couple of groups, so I have a mastermind that I run and a membership and we'll have like a monthly lesson that we go over. So there is a pretty heavy teaching component to it. Yeah, excellent, All.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: Right, We're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back with more of Camille's productivity tips for writers and others. I am back talking with novelist Camille Pagan about all the ways that she does her creative time that she runs her business. So Camille, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the productivity tips you share with the creative people who work with you, things that you have found to be effective as people are trying to organize their lives and get more done.
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Speaker 3: So one of the big things I work on with clients when they first come to me is getting over this idea that so many of us have. The creativity is just when the muse appears on your shoulder, right that, especially with fiction, there's this thought that you should be inspired, But what research really shows us is that the work brings inspiration. So a big part of it is creating a routine, which goes against what a lot of people are thinking when they're approaching their fiction career. So some of the things I've already mentioned having that set time, so I really encourage people to do the same thing at the same time every day. Not only are you more likely to get it done, it really decreases the transition time because your brain is like, this is just what we do at this time. There's no oh, I'm going to go look on email or browse Reddit. No, it's nine o'clock. This is what we do. And it takes a while to establish that no surprise time. Anyone who knows habit research, you know, it can be a good six weeks before you're like, and this is just what I do at this time. But it's really important to do that.
00:09:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what about for people who are maybe beginning their writing careers and might be doing something else as a day job.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: How did they create that routine for writing?
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Speaker 3: So this was me right, I was a journalist. I needed to make money as a journalist. When I first started writing fiction, I had a newborn and I just wrote for an hour every night, even though I'm not a night person. It was the same sort of Okay, I just need to do this at this time, and that's how I got a book done, and it was about four months for that first draft. It kicked off my fiction career, and so now I'm like, you don't need to have three hours. If you don't have three hours, if you have half an hour, that can be enough to get started. It's more about what do you do eighty percent of the time. So that's the other piece that I work on a lot with clients. The particular writer who would hire a coach tends to be very ambitious, right. It's not a casual lookie loot, someone who's like, let's go, and there's often a lot of perfectionism built in, so they're thinking, well, if I don't show up from let's just say nine to ten every single day, five days a week, maybe I'm just going to go for the extra a plus and do it on Saturday too. Then they fall right off the wagon. And so one of the things that we really work on is aiming for eighty percent, which really that client is actually looking for ninety, but I'll say eighty just to get them down a little bit of like, Okay, life is going to happen. So I once heard I think it was Brian Tracy who said this. He said, every two to three months, just anticipate that something's going to fall apart. There's going to be some emergency. Unfortunately, most of those emergencies are minor. Sometimes they're major, but mostly minor stuff, but they'll do rail you. So I'm really thinking about if I can just show up even four days a week. If I've said aside five, I'm going to get much farther than I would if I was like, oh, it's got to be perfect.
00:11:04
Speaker 2: It's so funny that you said that though about perfect, because in that example of the person who wants to be perfect, they're still doing it only five days a week. Like people talk about their daily habits and they're not aiming for seven and well that's not daily. I mean, I mean, if you want to do something every single days, but you know, for whatever reason, we have this idea that we only do things on weekdays that count.
00:11:26
Speaker 1: I'm very curious. Do you do you write on.
00:11:27
Speaker 2: Weekends as well, or as that do you generally try to take those off.
00:11:30
Speaker 3: I recommend that people take at least one day a week off. I don't really care what it is, but this is the beauty of having done this. So I've been coaching for about five years and was doing like light consulting before that, and over time. This is not true data, but it's a pretty big subset. I have noticed that when people don't take breaks, their body takes a break for them, that person often is heading toward burnout. There's not a lot of time to have the space to think through the creative project. And for me personally, I will write on a Sunday sometimes I usually take Saturday off. Saturday is off and when i have the breakthrough for the book where I'm not actively working on it, I'm huntering in the yard, I'm hanging out with my kids, and I'll be like, oh, okay, I see how to fix it. So I am a fan of some time off in there.
00:12:18
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:12:18
Speaker 2: Well, it's just an envisioning somebody who might have a job in a family and was trying to get started writing. I mean, even if they had thirty forty five minutes early in the morning, right, that could be part of their morning routine Monday through Friday. Maybe you know, their spouse could cover for them for two hours on a Saturday that they could go work in a coffee shop and then they take Sunday off. But that would still be creating, you know, six hours a week, yes, to work on fiction without it being or whatever other creative endever you're doing. But that would give them a reasonable amount of time.
00:12:48
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think it's all about the planning too. So I have one client who commutes two hours each way in La just has a very demanding job and weekends are when she writes, and so she's just looking at two to three hours Saturday, two to three hours Sunday. That's really a respite for her and she is getting it done. So you know, there, if you have the desire, there's a way to plan for it.
00:13:12
Speaker 1: Excellent.
00:13:12
Speaker 2: Well, I'm curious what is the timeline of a book. Let's say that you came up with an idea, I mean, what would happen then?
00:13:20
Speaker 3: Well, so there are lots of different ways to do it. And I don't teach a ton of craft, but I am a fan of pitching, so I have a resource on my coaching website, which is even beetter dot co. That's called pitch pro tells you how to do this all the way through. It's free, just writing kind of your quick pitch for the idea so you can see if there's something there. But some people are more like, I want to outline it. That's fine. I think that's an okay step too. But the big thing is just beginning. I cannot tell you how many people have come to me and they're like, I've been thinking about this idea for fourteen years, and I'm like, okay, let's start writing it. Like, let's start right now, super imperfectly. You're not going to know how to begin a boo. You're not going to know what to do with the messy middle, and that's okay. That's how you learn to do it.
00:14:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say, well, people probably get discouraged. I mean, I've started various books myself that don't go anywhere. Oh so, so I mean what would you say for people who are like, I'm carving out the time and all that, but then it's just it's not happening. It's you know, you're writing stuff, but it's not going anywhere.
00:14:22
Speaker 3: I mean sometimes The true answer is to try a different project, you know something. I don't think you need a complicated structure, but I will recommend doing literally one line for the middle, one line for the end, one line for the beginning, right, like just to react what is going to happen in the book? You can even break that into three other pieces. But the reason why people often get stuck it's either something that they don't really care about. A lot of people come to me they're like, I'm trying to write a romance stuff. I'm like, do you read romance? No? I hear it sells. I'm like, okay, let's work on something different. But the other piece is not knowing where to go. And if if you just take you know, half an hour to figure out where you are going first, that gets rid of that pressure of like, oh crap, what do I do now?
00:15:08
Speaker 2: Well, and you mentioned, you know what do people read like? They write what they like to read. I'm very curious how do you build reading into your life?
00:15:16
Speaker 3: So, Laura, as you know, because you've written a bunch of books too, I have a lot of blurb requests, so there's a lot of reading for work. And that's tricky because I'm getting better at saying no, but it's one of the ways that I support authors is blurbing for them. So I'm saying no a little more so that I can find more time for pleasure reading. And that is usually the evenings for me, and of course vacation, I bring a big stack of books.
00:15:41
Speaker 2: Well, you mentioned you were going to bed later with your older kids. Now, I mean, what does an evening look like for you?
00:15:47
Speaker 3: That is, oh gosh, that's a little more variable than my morning, which is something that I'm getting used to. It's like a type a person. I like everything kind of planned out, and with teenagers there's no planning. So one night we're up because you know, the sixteen year old has taken the car out to a volleyball game and we want to make sure she's home safe. But I do really believe in downtime, and one of the big changes I've made it really had clinical burnout earlier this year, just had some personal challenges, lost some very close to me, and so I know about like life kind of throwing stuff at you. And one of my big improvements talk about taking your day from good to amazing, was having a real off switch. I had just casually slid into work, going into my evening. Just check an email here, look over these pages, read a blurb book, and both my therapist and my coach were like, okay, let's stop at five. And so these days I stop work at five no matter what, even when I have something. Do you know the work gets done if you know that there's a stop on your day. If you know there's no stop, then it just slides into eleven o'clock.
00:16:56
Speaker 1: Well, what do you like to do in the evening?
00:16:58
Speaker 2: I mean, if you were going to say, a pleasant evening at home, you know what would that be?
00:17:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, great question. A lot of socializing. So I really love to go out for a drink with my husband or see our friends, or get together with other writers in the area. But that's maybe two or three days a week at most. And then the other evenings are reading, of course, hanging out with my kids, watching a show. I'm a big fan of TV. People are like, oh, you should only be reading no story, you can find it anywhere film TV, Like, there's excellent storytelling there. Yeah, And sometimes exercise, like more exercise if I've had a really rough day, doing some yoga, going for a run, like that is just the thing.
00:17:40
Speaker 1: All right.
00:17:40
Speaker 2: Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and we'll be more back with more of Camille's tips.
00:17:51
Speaker 1: Well, we are back.
00:17:52
Speaker 2: This is Before Breakfast, the longer interview series I am doing, and today we're talking with Camille Pagan, who is a career novel list and it has been sharing lots of tips for creative people on how to get things done and avoid burnout.
00:18:09
Speaker 1: So, Camille, I'm curious.
00:18:10
Speaker 2: You said you've made a couple of big changes recently, and that's great, But what's your current biggest time management challenge.
00:18:15
Speaker 3: Oh, that's a good question. So I think my biggest time management challenge right now is scope creep. Really being careful about not checking email on the weekend to catch up when you work closely with writers. So I only take about five one on one clients at a time, and they can email me at any point, but I have made it very clear with them that I'm only going to email them back in the afternoons Monday through Friday. So that's been one of the changes of like really addressing that scope creep. When you care deeply about your clients, you want to answer them right away. But that's not necessarily healthy for you. So that is one of the things I'm working on. And then just kind of like what I said earlier, the variability of my family schedule right now, when your kids are younger, you can kind of like lay everything out. You're like, Okay, we've got soccer on this night, we've got volleyball this night, We're going to have a picnic on this day. Teenagers are not like that. It's like, oh no, I'm going to go do this thing. I've got to do this thing. Can you bring me hair stuff? I need a homecoming dress. Like It's just quite a different schedule. So that has been interesting.
00:19:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, hopefully you get a little bit of notice on the homecoming dress.
00:19:29
Speaker 3: Yes, my children know me well enough to know that I need a little heads up, little.
00:19:36
Speaker 1: Heads up on that one. Yeah, exactly.
00:19:38
Speaker 2: So, Kamill, what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
00:19:46
Speaker 3: Oh? So, one of the things that I have really been enjoying lately is opening up my fridays for things like this some self care. I do therapy on Fridays, So I really love that I actually looked for to it. I will often do like a UI class, like just opening up this work day for all of the stuff that hadn't been happening. And part of my initial instinct was to think, oh, that's so indulgent, but it has made me look forward to the entire week. It's really been amazing to have this day. And I do do some work in the day, but just having all of those other things where you're like, I don't know where this is going to go, it's lovely. Of course this is available to us as people who are self employed. I know it's trickier to do when you're working for someone, but it's been great.
00:20:35
Speaker 2: Well, I generally do recommend that people try to leave fridays fairly open and not necessarily for things that are for you. But it's just that stuff comes up right and you need a place to put it. And if all your life is completely packed, then you're going to have to bump something else or keep showing things forward, and next week is going to have crises of its own, so you kind of don't want to borrow too much time.
00:20:58
Speaker 1: From the future. It's good to leave some open space.
00:21:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, well said I like that idea of like a place to put it. That's exactly what Friday is for me right now.
00:21:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm curious.
00:21:08
Speaker 2: When do you plan your time? I mean, are you more of a daily planner a weekly planner? I mean do you have a set time you do this?
00:21:14
Speaker 3: I do it on Sundays, so I sit down on Sundays sometimes Saturday because I'm just like, oh, let's go, and I do plan out the entire week. My appointments are fairly regular. I know that I see certain clients on certain days. I have a mastermind on a certain day. Those things are set, you know, months ahead usually, But the other pieces of like when are the kids doing certain things? When am I going to read the book that I have to blurb this week. I do all of that planning on Sunday so that I don't read Monday. On Monday, I have a sense of Okay, this is what I have to do, this is how it's going to get done. So that has really helped a lot of just getting rid of the Sunday skaries. Well.
00:21:53
Speaker 1: Also because you need to sit down Monday at nine am and write correct.
00:21:56
Speaker 3: That's right, it is not a time for planning. My Mondays are usually open too, and I love that that is not the place where I put things. It's the day where often I'm doing a deeper dive into a book, So if I want to read it first before I kind of add to it, I can have more of the day to do that.
00:22:14
Speaker 1: Awesome.
00:22:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, well this all sounds very good, Camille. Maybe you can let our listeners know where they can find you.
00:22:21
Speaker 3: So I am at Camille Pagan dot com. My coaching site is evenbetter dot co. That's dot co and I'm most active on Instagram, which is just at Camille Pagan.
00:22:31
Speaker 1: Awesome.
00:22:32
Speaker 2: Well, Camille, thank you so much for joining us and to my Before Breakfast listeners. Thank you so much for listening to this new interview series where we talk with fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome. Appreciate your sticking with me as I experiment with this and I welcome your feedback at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. And in the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com Before.
00:23:21
Speaker 1: Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
00:00:10
Speaker 2: This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today is going to be another longer episode as part of my ongoing series where once a week or so I talk with somebody fascinating about how they take their days from great to awesome. So today I am excited to welcome Camille Pagan to the program.
00:00:31
Speaker 1: Camille is a career novelist and.
00:00:34
Speaker 2: The author of such books as Everything Must Go and Life and Other Near Death Experiences, and as a highly productive author of ten novels, she also coaches other writers on how to achieve their goals.
00:00:47
Speaker 1: So Camille, welcome to the show.
00:00:49
Speaker 3: Thanks Laura, happy to be here.
00:00:51
Speaker 1: Yes, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
00:00:55
Speaker 3: So, as you said, I am a novelist. I have written ten works of fifth and about a dozen of other people's nonfiction books that my name is not on. So I used to ghost write nonfiction too. I'm a former health journalist and editor. I've written for The New York Times, Real Simple, where I was health editor, Oprah, basically any magazine you can think of, as well as a bunch of newspapers so I really love health and psychology research still a big part of my coaching practice. And then for the second half of my day, I work with primarily novelists, but some other authors, children's authors, nonfiction authors, memoirs, that sort of thing.
00:01:39
Speaker 2: So you've got a lot going on at Camille. I wonder if you know you could tell us a little bit about your morning routine, because this is a show.
00:01:46
Speaker 1: Called Before Breakfast, so lots of our.
00:01:48
Speaker 2: Listeners have elaborate morning routines. Let's hear about yours.
00:01:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, so full disclosure, I am a morning person. I work with a lot of people who are like, oh, I just don't like the morning. It's my favorite time of day. It's when I can get the most done. But I am also the parent of two teenagers right now, so my mornings are a little later than they used to be because my kids are just up so late. I'm up usually around six. I am the first person in my family generally out of bed, and I get up, make myself some coffee, always go to my computer. Used to be a notebook, but these days I go directly to my habit tracker and kind of look at my goals. What do I need to do today. I mark little things such as what time did I get up, what's on the list for the day, and really just get my priority straight before I then get my kids out of bed, feed them, get them out the door, and then I go to the gym. That's really almost every morning. I do that before I write, and it just sets the day up for me. Even if it's twenty minute workout. I feel better doing that. And then I sit down around nine with another cup of coffee and I begin writing How to be the Exception to the Rule.
00:03:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, how far is the gym from your house? I'm curious what that adds into.
00:03:06
Speaker 3: About a ten minute drive, so it's about twenty minutes round trip. I live in ann Arbor. Everything is about ten minutes away. It's a beautiful thing compared to when I was in the city in New York and everything was forty five minutes away.
00:03:17
Speaker 2: So yeah, so you got the gym, get yourself, your cup of coffee. You're sitting down to work around nine o'clock. But you have both writing work and other kinds of work you do, So how do you organize your days to make both of those happen?
00:03:32
Speaker 3: Well, I'm pretty I want to say strict about it in that from nine to noon that is my writing time. I don't schedule other things in that time unless it's really an exception. So this podcast would be an exception. But if there's a doctor's appointment and I can do it before that period or after that period, it goes there. And that is something that if you look on my digital calendar or my paper calendar, you'll see blocked off. And I've been doing that for about like thirteen years at this point. It really is something that I still put down because if it's on the calendar, I will do it. And it's a reminder to me, like, don't schedule your dunal cleaning at this time. So I do that really come rain or come shine. Unless I'm taking a deliberate break. Then I pause for lunch, and then I go into the kind of the coaching marketing half of my day.
00:04:23
Speaker 2: And when you have that nine to noon time blocked off for writing, I mean, are you actually really writing for all of it? I mean, I guess you have written a lot of books, but.
00:04:32
Speaker 3: Well, it's a good question. Yeah, So I don't believe in you know, powering through for three straight hours. We you know, the human attention span is about topping out. It around forty five minutes, So I will write for about forty five minutes, sometimes twenty five on five off, take a break, you know, go get some water, use the bathroom if I need to, and then come back. So it's broken up, and it really depends on where I'm at with a project. So sometimes I'm drafting. Sometimes that writing time is for editing or doing proofreads, a cold read, all of those kinds of things. And then I do have breaks between projects, and I will use that time, usually still for creative work, so to brainstorm the next project, to let myself just journal on what I see up ahead, that sort of thing.
00:05:23
Speaker 2: What does that brainstorming look like? I mean, you know, I think a lot of people think, well, I should carve out time for brainstorming and thinking and deep work, But I mean, what are you actually doing when you're trying to come up with the next novel idea?
00:05:35
Speaker 1: If that's like an entry on your to do list?
00:05:38
Speaker 3: Well, I work with one hundreds, probably close to one thousand writers at this point, primarily fiction writers, and I know that the process is really different for everyone, but I do some of the things that research shows us fuels the creative fires. So sometimes it's walking right the thing where you can kind of just think you're on autopilot. For me, it's a lot of I have this big notebook and I just write stuff down in a very messy way. And then my little trick. And this is where a lot of people are like, I would never do this. I write the pitch for the book that I'm interested in writing, next to see if there's a there there. Yeah. So it's lots of different pieces.
00:06:19
Speaker 1: Lots of different pieces.
00:06:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, And then tell me a little bit about the coaching part of your business.
00:06:24
Speaker 1: What does that look like?
00:06:27
Speaker 3: I love that. I love that piece. People are like, how can you do two things? Well, kind of like what you implied, I could not write for eight hours a day. My brain just kind of turns off at a certain point. And then I turn on the more social, kind of collaborative part. And I will usually meet with clients on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Monday and Friday. Afternoons are more for putting lessons together, looking at the curriculum, doing some marketing, that sort of thing. Yeah, And so I'll meet with clients and there's little breaks in between. I send them notes, we come up with plans together, and it's just a nice way to be connected because writing is really a very solitary endeavor.
00:07:11
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah, when you say lesson plans, are you teaching classes?
00:07:14
Speaker 3: Now? I do. I have a couple of groups, so I have a mastermind that I run and a membership and we'll have like a monthly lesson that we go over. So there is a pretty heavy teaching component to it. Yeah, excellent, All.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: Right, We're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back with more of Camille's productivity tips for writers and others. I am back talking with novelist Camille Pagan about all the ways that she does her creative time that she runs her business. So Camille, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the productivity tips you share with the creative people who work with you, things that you have found to be effective as people are trying to organize their lives and get more done.
00:08:05
Speaker 3: So one of the big things I work on with clients when they first come to me is getting over this idea that so many of us have. The creativity is just when the muse appears on your shoulder, right that, especially with fiction, there's this thought that you should be inspired, But what research really shows us is that the work brings inspiration. So a big part of it is creating a routine, which goes against what a lot of people are thinking when they're approaching their fiction career. So some of the things I've already mentioned having that set time, so I really encourage people to do the same thing at the same time every day. Not only are you more likely to get it done, it really decreases the transition time because your brain is like, this is just what we do at this time. There's no oh, I'm going to go look on email or browse Reddit. No, it's nine o'clock. This is what we do. And it takes a while to establish that no surprise time. Anyone who knows habit research, you know, it can be a good six weeks before you're like, and this is just what I do at this time. But it's really important to do that.
00:09:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what about for people who are maybe beginning their writing careers and might be doing something else as a day job.
00:09:17
Speaker 1: How did they create that routine for writing?
00:09:19
Speaker 3: So this was me right, I was a journalist. I needed to make money as a journalist. When I first started writing fiction, I had a newborn and I just wrote for an hour every night, even though I'm not a night person. It was the same sort of Okay, I just need to do this at this time, and that's how I got a book done, and it was about four months for that first draft. It kicked off my fiction career, and so now I'm like, you don't need to have three hours. If you don't have three hours, if you have half an hour, that can be enough to get started. It's more about what do you do eighty percent of the time. So that's the other piece that I work on a lot with clients. The particular writer who would hire a coach tends to be very ambitious, right. It's not a casual lookie loot, someone who's like, let's go, and there's often a lot of perfectionism built in, so they're thinking, well, if I don't show up from let's just say nine to ten every single day, five days a week, maybe I'm just going to go for the extra a plus and do it on Saturday too. Then they fall right off the wagon. And so one of the things that we really work on is aiming for eighty percent, which really that client is actually looking for ninety, but I'll say eighty just to get them down a little bit of like, Okay, life is going to happen. So I once heard I think it was Brian Tracy who said this. He said, every two to three months, just anticipate that something's going to fall apart. There's going to be some emergency. Unfortunately, most of those emergencies are minor. Sometimes they're major, but mostly minor stuff, but they'll do rail you. So I'm really thinking about if I can just show up even four days a week. If I've said aside five, I'm going to get much farther than I would if I was like, oh, it's got to be perfect.
00:11:04
Speaker 2: It's so funny that you said that though about perfect, because in that example of the person who wants to be perfect, they're still doing it only five days a week. Like people talk about their daily habits and they're not aiming for seven and well that's not daily. I mean, I mean, if you want to do something every single days, but you know, for whatever reason, we have this idea that we only do things on weekdays that count.
00:11:26
Speaker 1: I'm very curious. Do you do you write on.
00:11:27
Speaker 2: Weekends as well, or as that do you generally try to take those off.
00:11:30
Speaker 3: I recommend that people take at least one day a week off. I don't really care what it is, but this is the beauty of having done this. So I've been coaching for about five years and was doing like light consulting before that, and over time. This is not true data, but it's a pretty big subset. I have noticed that when people don't take breaks, their body takes a break for them, that person often is heading toward burnout. There's not a lot of time to have the space to think through the creative project. And for me personally, I will write on a Sunday sometimes I usually take Saturday off. Saturday is off and when i have the breakthrough for the book where I'm not actively working on it, I'm huntering in the yard, I'm hanging out with my kids, and I'll be like, oh, okay, I see how to fix it. So I am a fan of some time off in there.
00:12:18
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:12:18
Speaker 2: Well, it's just an envisioning somebody who might have a job in a family and was trying to get started writing. I mean, even if they had thirty forty five minutes early in the morning, right, that could be part of their morning routine Monday through Friday. Maybe you know, their spouse could cover for them for two hours on a Saturday that they could go work in a coffee shop and then they take Sunday off. But that would still be creating, you know, six hours a week, yes, to work on fiction without it being or whatever other creative endever you're doing. But that would give them a reasonable amount of time.
00:12:48
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think it's all about the planning too. So I have one client who commutes two hours each way in La just has a very demanding job and weekends are when she writes, and so she's just looking at two to three hours Saturday, two to three hours Sunday. That's really a respite for her and she is getting it done. So you know, there, if you have the desire, there's a way to plan for it.
00:13:12
Speaker 1: Excellent.
00:13:12
Speaker 2: Well, I'm curious what is the timeline of a book. Let's say that you came up with an idea, I mean, what would happen then?
00:13:20
Speaker 3: Well, so there are lots of different ways to do it. And I don't teach a ton of craft, but I am a fan of pitching, so I have a resource on my coaching website, which is even beetter dot co. That's called pitch pro tells you how to do this all the way through. It's free, just writing kind of your quick pitch for the idea so you can see if there's something there. But some people are more like, I want to outline it. That's fine. I think that's an okay step too. But the big thing is just beginning. I cannot tell you how many people have come to me and they're like, I've been thinking about this idea for fourteen years, and I'm like, okay, let's start writing it. Like, let's start right now, super imperfectly. You're not going to know how to begin a boo. You're not going to know what to do with the messy middle, and that's okay. That's how you learn to do it.
00:14:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say, well, people probably get discouraged. I mean, I've started various books myself that don't go anywhere. Oh so, so I mean what would you say for people who are like, I'm carving out the time and all that, but then it's just it's not happening. It's you know, you're writing stuff, but it's not going anywhere.
00:14:22
Speaker 3: I mean sometimes The true answer is to try a different project, you know something. I don't think you need a complicated structure, but I will recommend doing literally one line for the middle, one line for the end, one line for the beginning, right, like just to react what is going to happen in the book? You can even break that into three other pieces. But the reason why people often get stuck it's either something that they don't really care about. A lot of people come to me they're like, I'm trying to write a romance stuff. I'm like, do you read romance? No? I hear it sells. I'm like, okay, let's work on something different. But the other piece is not knowing where to go. And if if you just take you know, half an hour to figure out where you are going first, that gets rid of that pressure of like, oh crap, what do I do now?
00:15:08
Speaker 2: Well, and you mentioned, you know what do people read like? They write what they like to read. I'm very curious how do you build reading into your life?
00:15:16
Speaker 3: So, Laura, as you know, because you've written a bunch of books too, I have a lot of blurb requests, so there's a lot of reading for work. And that's tricky because I'm getting better at saying no, but it's one of the ways that I support authors is blurbing for them. So I'm saying no a little more so that I can find more time for pleasure reading. And that is usually the evenings for me, and of course vacation, I bring a big stack of books.
00:15:41
Speaker 2: Well, you mentioned you were going to bed later with your older kids. Now, I mean, what does an evening look like for you?
00:15:47
Speaker 3: That is, oh gosh, that's a little more variable than my morning, which is something that I'm getting used to. It's like a type a person. I like everything kind of planned out, and with teenagers there's no planning. So one night we're up because you know, the sixteen year old has taken the car out to a volleyball game and we want to make sure she's home safe. But I do really believe in downtime, and one of the big changes I've made it really had clinical burnout earlier this year, just had some personal challenges, lost some very close to me, and so I know about like life kind of throwing stuff at you. And one of my big improvements talk about taking your day from good to amazing, was having a real off switch. I had just casually slid into work, going into my evening. Just check an email here, look over these pages, read a blurb book, and both my therapist and my coach were like, okay, let's stop at five. And so these days I stop work at five no matter what, even when I have something. Do you know the work gets done if you know that there's a stop on your day. If you know there's no stop, then it just slides into eleven o'clock.
00:16:56
Speaker 1: Well, what do you like to do in the evening?
00:16:58
Speaker 2: I mean, if you were going to say, a pleasant evening at home, you know what would that be?
00:17:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, great question. A lot of socializing. So I really love to go out for a drink with my husband or see our friends, or get together with other writers in the area. But that's maybe two or three days a week at most. And then the other evenings are reading, of course, hanging out with my kids, watching a show. I'm a big fan of TV. People are like, oh, you should only be reading no story, you can find it anywhere film TV, Like, there's excellent storytelling there. Yeah, And sometimes exercise, like more exercise if I've had a really rough day, doing some yoga, going for a run, like that is just the thing.
00:17:40
Speaker 1: All right.
00:17:40
Speaker 2: Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and we'll be more back with more of Camille's tips.
00:17:51
Speaker 1: Well, we are back.
00:17:52
Speaker 2: This is Before Breakfast, the longer interview series I am doing, and today we're talking with Camille Pagan, who is a career novel list and it has been sharing lots of tips for creative people on how to get things done and avoid burnout.
00:18:09
Speaker 1: So, Camille, I'm curious.
00:18:10
Speaker 2: You said you've made a couple of big changes recently, and that's great, But what's your current biggest time management challenge.
00:18:15
Speaker 3: Oh, that's a good question. So I think my biggest time management challenge right now is scope creep. Really being careful about not checking email on the weekend to catch up when you work closely with writers. So I only take about five one on one clients at a time, and they can email me at any point, but I have made it very clear with them that I'm only going to email them back in the afternoons Monday through Friday. So that's been one of the changes of like really addressing that scope creep. When you care deeply about your clients, you want to answer them right away. But that's not necessarily healthy for you. So that is one of the things I'm working on. And then just kind of like what I said earlier, the variability of my family schedule right now, when your kids are younger, you can kind of like lay everything out. You're like, Okay, we've got soccer on this night, we've got volleyball this night, We're going to have a picnic on this day. Teenagers are not like that. It's like, oh no, I'm going to go do this thing. I've got to do this thing. Can you bring me hair stuff? I need a homecoming dress. Like It's just quite a different schedule. So that has been interesting.
00:19:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, hopefully you get a little bit of notice on the homecoming dress.
00:19:29
Speaker 3: Yes, my children know me well enough to know that I need a little heads up, little.
00:19:36
Speaker 1: Heads up on that one. Yeah, exactly.
00:19:38
Speaker 2: So, Kamill, what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
00:19:46
Speaker 3: Oh? So, one of the things that I have really been enjoying lately is opening up my fridays for things like this some self care. I do therapy on Fridays, So I really love that I actually looked for to it. I will often do like a UI class, like just opening up this work day for all of the stuff that hadn't been happening. And part of my initial instinct was to think, oh, that's so indulgent, but it has made me look forward to the entire week. It's really been amazing to have this day. And I do do some work in the day, but just having all of those other things where you're like, I don't know where this is going to go, it's lovely. Of course this is available to us as people who are self employed. I know it's trickier to do when you're working for someone, but it's been great.
00:20:35
Speaker 2: Well, I generally do recommend that people try to leave fridays fairly open and not necessarily for things that are for you. But it's just that stuff comes up right and you need a place to put it. And if all your life is completely packed, then you're going to have to bump something else or keep showing things forward, and next week is going to have crises of its own, so you kind of don't want to borrow too much time.
00:20:58
Speaker 1: From the future. It's good to leave some open space.
00:21:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, well said I like that idea of like a place to put it. That's exactly what Friday is for me right now.
00:21:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm curious.
00:21:08
Speaker 2: When do you plan your time? I mean, are you more of a daily planner a weekly planner? I mean do you have a set time you do this?
00:21:14
Speaker 3: I do it on Sundays, so I sit down on Sundays sometimes Saturday because I'm just like, oh, let's go, and I do plan out the entire week. My appointments are fairly regular. I know that I see certain clients on certain days. I have a mastermind on a certain day. Those things are set, you know, months ahead usually, But the other pieces of like when are the kids doing certain things? When am I going to read the book that I have to blurb this week. I do all of that planning on Sunday so that I don't read Monday. On Monday, I have a sense of Okay, this is what I have to do, this is how it's going to get done. So that has really helped a lot of just getting rid of the Sunday skaries. Well.
00:21:53
Speaker 1: Also because you need to sit down Monday at nine am and write correct.
00:21:56
Speaker 3: That's right, it is not a time for planning. My Mondays are usually open too, and I love that that is not the place where I put things. It's the day where often I'm doing a deeper dive into a book, So if I want to read it first before I kind of add to it, I can have more of the day to do that.
00:22:14
Speaker 1: Awesome.
00:22:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, well this all sounds very good, Camille. Maybe you can let our listeners know where they can find you.
00:22:21
Speaker 3: So I am at Camille Pagan dot com. My coaching site is evenbetter dot co. That's dot co and I'm most active on Instagram, which is just at Camille Pagan.
00:22:31
Speaker 1: Awesome.
00:22:32
Speaker 2: Well, Camille, thank you so much for joining us and to my Before Breakfast listeners. Thank you so much for listening to this new interview series where we talk with fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome. Appreciate your sticking with me as I experiment with this and I welcome your feedback at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. And in the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com Before.
00:23:21
Speaker 1: Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
